Fireside Chat with Tony Fadell, Inventor Of The iPhone

We’re very happy to have Tony here. Tony wrote a book recently called Build. Bill is sharing a lot of his insights around how do you build these like life-changing industry changing products.

All right. So, Tony, my quickfire questions for you. So, just some warm-up ones just to get to know each other a little bit.

Besides running and yoga, what are some of your daily habits? I intermittent fast. I do not drink alcohol and I haven’t for 15 years.

I’m a vegetarian for over 27 years now. I don’t drink caffeine. I don’t I haven’t touched a coffee maybe more than four cups of coffee in my entire life.

Don’t smoke. What else? Daily habits.

I I read voraciously. I ingest probably a thousand headlines a day. What else?

Yeah, that’s that’s my daily habits. Who are the product designers today that you really admire? I really like what’s what’s been going on at Microsoft.

They actually introduced a bunch of stuff just today. That’s been really cool. I like all the stuff that’s happening in mobility.

So the mobility space, E, not just four-wheel EVs, but two wheels and three wheels. I I really like all of the stuff that’s going on there. So just the amount of evolution and revolution that’s happening and it’s going to change our way we we we we move ourselves and while fixing the planet.

So to me that’s really that’s really really cool stuff and we’re going to reboot the way we move around the planet over the next 10 to 15 years. And so I like like the Hyundai iconic fives. Hyundai is doing a great job.

Kia is doing a great job. Polestar is doing a freaking amazing job. Just a lot of different brands are doing a really interesting work.

And what’s your product critique of the Facebook VR headset? I think you’re saying kidding me. It’s a piece of Tell me more.

Like why? What? What’s the new the VR headset that came out yesterday?

Yeah. It’s overpriced. It’s underpowered.

It doesn’t have enough battery life. It is a toy in search of an application and a painkiller. VR and AR are great when you’re actually solving pain.

When you’re talking about stupid meta worlds or whatever horizon worlds, it’s just Like, why do you want to live in that crap? Like, it’s better to like we could have a better interaction this way because I can see your eyes and I can see your your facial expressions. You go you go blank in those things.

Like, you can’t look into other people and make a human connection. That’s the problem we have today in in in all of this extra layers between each person’s face is that we put so many digital layers between them. We don’t make that connection or we make them anonymous and we can get toxicity that grows in just textonly chats or or Instagram or Twitter or whatever it is.

You think the toxicity is going to go away in virtual worlds? No way. I’ve watched this since I’ve been in VR since 1989 at the University of Michigan making my own gloves and goggles and all this.

The same human connection problems are still exist even with better graphics or better headsets. Horizon’s world and meta is dead in the water. Do you see 20 years from now VR happening?

I see VR happening right now in really great ways. I have a company called Gravity Sketch. They do an amazing job of doing collaborative 3D design in a whole new way of making cars, furniture, virtual characters, whatever.

But you can do collaborative design in VR. But it’s just a that’s a killer application. But it doesn’t mean you live in the you know we already tried this experiment again with Second Life.

Second Life was a disaster 10 years ago. I know the guy who actually started it. I watched it.

It turned into a toxic mess. It’s just bull. This stuff.

Don’t spend your valuable days and time on this planet creating that just creates more. Start fixing problems like a climate crisis. Start fixing the things of health and societal issues.

Stoping around with stupid graphics and and gaming stuff just because Mark Zuckerberg the robot wants you to. He’s it’s he he has zero EQ. And you mentioned a lot of topics just then about a lot of like different areas.

I think you were learning a lot about food science and amongst a lot of other things as you’re as you’re exploring how to impact the world. So as you’re working and learning and reading voraciously, when do you know it’s time to reach out to a mentor? What’s your internal barometer for that?

Look, you should always have a mentor. Look, my mentor, actually, my mentor, my professor from the University of Michigan is coming out here in my apartment literally minutes later, like after we get done with this, he’s going to be here. I’ve been friends with him and we he mentored me back when I was in college and we’ve been friends and I’m mentoring him on his the businesses created.

So, sometimes you become the mentor to the the mentee and vice versa. So, you know, I’ve had this relationship with him for 35 years and we’ve still been great friends. So you should always have mentors at every stage of life.

They might change of course and at some point you become a mentor to other people because if you do are successful the only reason why I’m speaking to you is because people help me. Now I’m speaking to you because I have to give back, right? And so it’s a full circle kind of thing.

But you should always have a mentor. And this is not a life coach and oh, you know, this is about people who can really help you separate the wheat from the chaff on how to build businesses, understand the human nature of businesses. They might not understand your business that well.

You know, the best mentor that I ever had was also Steve Jobs mentor and Larry and Sergey’s mentor at Google and stuff. His name was Bill Campbell. There’s a book written about him called The Trillion Dollar Coach.

And Bill didn’t object about technology. He knew everything about human nature. And that’s the thing with mentors.

It’s not about what you do in the, you know, CTO kind of stuff like is that no, that’s your job. It’s about understanding how to take the technologies and the things that you can innovate and understand how to communicate them and get teams motivated. And it’s all human nature.

I don’t care where you are in the world. You need to have a mentor who can help you see through and and understand how to get the best out of yourself and out of people through through their eyes. I don’t have any bosses.

I’ve created every job since my very first job for myself. Now’s the time to be the you know, you know, empower yourself to take those risks and move on and and leapfrog everyone else. And yeah, sure, you’re like, "Oh, I want to, you know, have fun." Well, guess what?

Now’s the time to work. Because then you could have fun lots and lots of years and like I’ve had I’m traveling all the world having all this great stuff you know and and and seeing great people and and and doing the best work of my life but it because I put invested those times back in the early days and that first 10 years it was a utter failure man I was working hard and they were failures for 10 years straight but I was learning the whole way getting my PhD that’s why you were able to ship the iPod at 31 in 10 in 10 months because of that those that 10 years of failure I think that built up to that that point what advice should they ignore people telling you what to do limiting you people who are limiting saying don’t take that risk it’s too risky now you have to take risk mitigated decisions but you you can’t just say oh you know my mom was like why don’t you go work for a nice big company like Microsoft you know and I was like I’m going to work for this little startup no go there it’s going to be safe and you’re going to have healthcare and this and this like No, now’s the time to go and take the risk. So too many people, the biggest limiting thing that you have in your life, the the biggest limitations you have in your life is your environment or yourself.

So you surround people surround yourself by people who don’t take risks and so they project their their fears onto you and you have your own risks and you have your own fears that stifle you. The biggest and what I’ve always seen from real high achievers is that the biggest limitation to themselves is themselves or the environment they’re in. So get out of the goddamn environment you’re in.

Get around more people taking more risks and start challenging yourself. Challenge yourself. You know, the biggest thing that I learned was I jumped out a plane.

I jumped out a plane last weekend. I jumped on a plane multiple times. When you overcome that fear and you’re like, "Oh, I can actually do this." and you jump out of the plane, you’re like, I can do just about anything because the things that I do every day and the things that everyone out in the audience is going to do every day, they’re not life, they’re not life-threatening.

Did you ever feel like giving up? If so, what motivated you and and just shop around, see what you see see if you have anything interesting kind of like in the in these in these questions that people are uploading. Sure, of course you you you feel like giving up.

There was times, you know, after General Magic where it was an absolute disaster. But again, you know, after you wake up from the trauma that is, you know, the failure, whatever, and you go, no, this was the right thing. It was what did I what did we do wrong and learn from it and then you say, I’m going to keep going because I know this needs to exist.

So, it was really the understanding that this is important. Like, if we would have given up, if all the people at General Magic gave up, we wouldn’t have Android. Android came out of General Magic.

IPhone came out of General Magic. If we would have all given up, then we wouldn’t have had those things. So, we found it inside of ourselves to do that because we knew that this was the future.

We just got some stuff wrong, which was timing, technology, all kinds of stuff, and we kept moving through it. So, so that’s the biggest thing. How do you deal with imposttor syndrome?

Yes, I have it all the time, tell you the truth. And you know what? So do the people around you.

And you just have to assume it’s that because the only way you get to where you want to be, I’m not talking about fake it till you make it. I’m not talking about, you know, what’s her name from Theronos and all that stuff. No her.

I got a whole story about that. But we don’t want imposters. You don’t want to, you want to make sure you’re doing it.

And you’re like, I’m 22. Why should I be the one to be able to do this? I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

Guess what? Nobody knows what the hell they’re doing when it comes to innovation. They don’t know.

When you’re innovating at the the razor’s edge, nobody knows. So it to tell if there was an expert, they would have already done it. So there’s expertise, not experts when you’re innovating.

So you just have to understand that everybody has imposter syndrome. If they don’t, they’re probably schizophrenic or psychotic or sociopathic. All right?

So it’s okay. Just embrace it. It’s going to be okay.

Get through it. Make sure you have good people around you. You have a mentor who can keep you on the straight and narrow.

And you have other good people you can test your ideas with that are not just geeks.