Tony Fadell: Absolutely. Design, not just of the product itself, but design of the marketing, design ultimately of the retail stores. All of the different customer touch points, I was able to watch that and learn. At General Magic we learned how to do products.
At Apple, you learned how to really build experiences, design experiences. Even the opening, the ceremony of opening a box and taking the products out and learning and using them for the first time. Because they just spent their hard-earned money on these things.
What is it gonna give to them? What kind of pleasure is it gonna give to them, and convenience and those kinds of things? So we strive for that, that experience. What then? As we start to speed toward central London to catch the afternoon Eurostar to Paris, he entertains the chauffeur and me with the penis-pitch story. Turning philosophical, Fadell puts on his shades against the bright sun streaming through the backseat sunroof.
It was geeks. He has moved to Paris. To hear Fadell tell it, he certainly has reason to. Fadell, a computer engineering major at the University of Michigan, has already tasted entrepreneurial success with a little education-software company called Constructive Instruments that he founded in his dorm room, but he wants more.
Then, when news broke that a handful of Apple alumni—including the hero-programmer behind the Mac, Andy Hertzfeld—had escaped the mothership and banded together to form a new company, General Magic, Fadell saw his future. He eventually found some people to pester—people who had clearly been there all night, hacking away. Leave us alone , kid. I have to be working here. The young Fadell had persistence, and it paid off: By the end of he had a job offer from General Magic.
At General Magic, Fadell joined a small team that was trying to build something the company had labeled a personal communicator. It had downloadable apps. It had shopping. It had animations and graphics and games. Then Apple called. This was just after Jobs had returned to the company he founded and was struggling to save it from oblivion. Jobs was looking for a way out of a no-win battle with Microsoft and, like Fadell, had hit upon the idea of a portable MP3 player.
But Apple needed someone who knew the tech forward and backward to build out a prototype. Executives asked him to come in to discuss something—they were cagey about exactly what. Fadell assumed Apple needed some help designing a next-gen Newton and took the meeting.
It was only after he signed the nondisclosure agreements that he discovered that the company wanted him to design a portable MP3 player—the future iPod. In effect, Apple was asking Fadell for help in competing with himself. Yet if Fuse were to have any chance of survival, Fadell had to take the consulting gig at Apple, because Fuse needed another infusion of cash. The traditional sources of funding had shut down because the dotcom crash was already under way. Fadell put Fuse on autopilot and designed the iPod prototype for Apple in six short weeks.
After he demonstrated how the iPod could be built—which components, which interfaces, and at what price—Jobs put Fadell into a double bind. He asked him to abandon the Fuse MP3 player designs and develop his idea inside Apple, which would mean killing his own company. It was agonizing for the young entrepreneur. How am I going to do this? What am I doing? The odds of Fuse succeeding on its own were not good. So he put his own dreams in a box and went to work for Apple as the head of the iPod project.
The first iPod was not perfect, but it was still way better than the competition—and as it was refined, it grew into a monster hit. Steve Wozniak, who watched it all happen from the inside, credits the iPod with turning the entire company around. The iPod was a hit, and Fadell was a hero inside Apple.
When Jobs announced that he had cancer in , Fadell was on every list of potential successors. He even reminded people of the mercurial Apple founder, both in his ability to get things done and in the way he operated. The phone project started in earnest at the end of By that time, Fadell and his team had prototyped iPods that could also make phone calls. But there was another team inside Apple with a bigger idea—the all-touch screen.
He is a very hard-working person and is the rightful owner of this net-worth. Tony Fadell is an American- Lebanese engineer who has worked with many major companies such as Apple, Philips, and many more. He has always brought success to the company he worked in and has also attained the highest post in the respective companies.
He is currently a principal in Future Shape and has helped many young men and women to achieve their dreams. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Sign in. Log into your account. Password recovery. Forgot your password? Get help. AZ: Yeah, which I want to get into in a minute. AZ: But first I want to slide back to Detroit. AZ: You were basically a child of the seventies.
You moved around a lot. What kind of family did you grow up in? I mean, you and your brother are highly creative people. Where did that come from? Wherever we lived we lived a little bit beyond our means. So we were always kind of the lesser kids out of all of it. Which was great. Which was great, because you got to see two different ways of being. His father taught him how to work with his hands, so we would fix everything—fix lawnmowers, we would build soapbox derby racers.
Just every weekend, even after school, we were always in the shop doing something. And we were doing it from the age of 3, 4, right? At the same time, then I had my mom, who cared about the aesthetics of everything.
TF: Right. Yeah, what do you mean? It looks fine. AZ: Of function and aesthetics. And then there was my love of music, which then informed a whole other area. And so just blending all of that. AZ: And technology. I mean, you were also coming into the world as computers were coming into the world. The Apple II became my world. TF: So I traded a hammer for a computer.
That was a major shift—a shift that my grandfather never did; he never touched a computer. So he had one of those Grid laptops. Right, and he would have a TI Silent , which was a paper terminal with a modem that you put a regular phone in.
TF: I liked a few subjects, but in general I did not like school. No, I was thrown out of school a lot. AZ: And how did you make it to the Valley? TF: How did I make it to the Valley? AZ: Skipping over the adolescent moment. TF: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I had a startup company in college, and I was going to the Valley every few weeks to work with a software distributor and publisher who was taking what we were doing in Michigan and publishing it—it was educational software.
In one of the articles, the Mac team had gone off to do this company called General Magic. So I literally went over to the offices and banged on the door at 8 a.
I was just blown away. Blown away. What is General Magic? TF: General Magic was the Mac team minus Steve [Wozniak] , and the goal was to create a personal intelligent communicator. Literally the iPhone fifteen years earlier than the iPhone shipped. So it was this platform that was created, what would be beyond the Mac, and many, many of the concepts that we developed there were then ultimately moved on to the iPhone. We were just too early. AZ: Too early, and timing is everything in technology.
We were very, very ambitious, but we saw it working, and we had learned so much from that, but yet we were still too ahead of our time. AZ: How heartbreaking was the end of it? TF: Well, for me, I was devastated. I was for about two, three weeks literally catatonic. Because I had put my heart and soul for four years—this was my first real thing working for a team that I incredibly respected.
Eighty, hundred, hundred-and-twenty-hour weeks for four years. AZ: Yeah, you famously had a bed in your office. Maybe we sold four to five thousand devices in the whole world after a half a billion to three quarters of a billion dollars spent on designing and building it.
It was a wake-up call. TF: Yeah. Not just me, a few of us had beds in our offices, because we just loved what we were doing with the team that we were working with. And we thought we were going to change the world and everybody convinced us, all the press was telling us we were going to change the world.
And so, at 21, 22, it became my whole world. I shunned everything. I got rid of everything. And then to have it not work—maybe we sold four to five thousand devices in the whole world after a half a billion to three quarters of a billion dollars spent on designing and building it. AZ: You were sort of taken down by your parent, in a way. I mean, what was it like when the [Apple] Newton was announced? It was hard to see.
Hard to watch. But, at the same time, the Newton failed, too. We were all trying to do the same thing. But there were so many lessons learned. So many bad mistakes. TF : Be it I was 24, 25 by the end of it. AZ: Yeah, some of the guys experienced this in their late forties.
TF: Right, exactly, they just kind of go along their path. So it was really wonderful to actually have that because you got to do something that really mattered, but at the same time then you learned all the things about business and consumers and how to try to communicate with them and try to convince them. And when you learn those in such a dramatic fashion—. TF: Publically. Those stick with you.
Stick with me today. Let me tell you why timing matters. And remember, this was all pre-internet, right? General Magic was also a victim of the internet. The internet came and we were doing everything kind of like more in late eighties fashion of doing computing and missed the whole internet wave, at General Magic.
AZ: Yeah, you had your heads down. TF: Yeah, we were totally down. Because, the project, when I started, was supposed to only be a year to a year and a half when we were going to ship. It took four years. AZ: Yeah, because the aspirations were extraordinary. TF: Exactly, and the team, the Mac team, always wished that they would have done one more thing on the Mac, and one more thing.
You need to ship in some period of time. The way you learn is by shipping and then iterating. AZ: Exactly. Which you did eighteen times? With the iPod? TF: Yeah, eighteen different generations on the iPod. AZ: So you leave General Magic. Do I go back to Michigan do I stay here? What do I do? We gotta save this company—we gotta save all this work we did. So I went to the various partners of General Magic, Philips being one of them, and pitched them the idea.
And I had a person from the inside of Philips, who got to know me, so she and I went out and pitched Phillips, and be careful what you wish for because you just might get it. AZ: With very little leadership skills and….
But it happened. What did I just sign up for? TF: Now I gotta do it. And wow, that was a whole other learning experience. But I was panicked for a while. I had never been in a big company like that. At that point they had , people in this company.
But I just threw myself in it and had to do a lot of personal learning, a lot of learning about myself, learning about how to be a leader in a company, building a device and a team from scratch. And we did it. AZ: And also trying to be a year-old. TF: And trying to be a year-old, yeah. AZ: And then you finally, somehow, get to Apple. TF: The story, the Apple story.
So after Philips I went to go start my own company, trying to reinvent consumer electronics. So, everything at that point in the mid-nineties, late nineties was all analog—there were CDs still, but everything else was analog, it was components, it was no flatscreens yet.
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