Tony Fadell

I didn't understand exactly what this is.

The other thing that we haven't talked about at all, we've talked about where this comes from, but the actual legacy of this is that for most of the run of this company when it mattered, Tony Fadell and Andy Rubin sat six feet from each other.

yeah so like tony fidel uh is the guy who designed the original ipod came up with the wheel metaphor famously led the early iphone teams um andy rubin is the is the father of android android

yeah

People did learn lessons from what happened at General Magic.

One of the young magicians was Tony Fadell.

When General Magic had started up, he'd phoned them every day begging for a job until finally they let him in.

When it fell apart, he was devastated, but he learned.

The combination of the two might allow a digital music player that could make portable cassette and CD players obsolete.

The answer to the second question, it's January 2001, and we're gonna ship something by Christmas.

The company that Tony Fadell had joined was Apple, and the product that he shepherded to market on time just a few weeks before Christmas was the iPod.

It was a device that did one thing beautifully, and a huge success.

Like, Apple keynotes are political in this specific way.

The best example I can give you of this is famously, uh, Steve Jobs signaled that he was gonna fire Tony Fadell by deleting his name from the contacts list in the very first iPhone keynote.

Like, this was, like, a coded mafia message.

And if you, uh, if you read Mark Gurman who's, who constantly is talking about the, the palace intrigue of Apple, who they feature in the keynotes, it actually reflects the politics of the organization in a way that, like, I don't even think Google knows what's gonna happen in the keynote until 20 minutes before they start.

Yeah, there was a lot of managing upwards with Jobs.

In fact, there's a ton of anecdotes about that, like Tony Fadell presenting the first iPod.

They had a trick.

They were all coached that you've got to show Jobs three versions of whatever of whatever you're working on.

And rough Steve defined as, like...

Or Tony Fadell.

I mean, this guy goes out and he talks about, like, how he was the next CEO and all this stuff.

He was never looked at for that, but maybe back in the day.

And I, I saw that all over the place where I was interviewing top practitioners.

Like, one guy, Tony Fadell-

Yeah

... kind of a legendary designer-