YouSaid · the spoken record

Tony Fadell

lines on the record: 115
first: 2026-06-07
most recent: 2026-06-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Know in these more limited scoped things, yeah, you can make that work. And I think that's the way we have to consider how we use these tools in a product management category as well. To just say it's all abstract away, it's all going to be better. And when you ask specific pointed questions, you want this thing fixed in your marketing thing or whatever you're going to like, well, the AI should just figure that out too. It's like you have given up so much. To me, sure, you can write code, but there's going to be the difference between, you know, it's like the difference between H&M and a luxury brand. You could go get certain things that look like that and copies that and like, but it doesn't last more than one washing or one season. And it's this and you throw it away and it's cheap and blah, blah, blah. Or you go to the luxury thing and you pay more and it's crafted. It's handcrafted. And you know it's going to be around for a while. Like there is this dichotomy of like fast and throwaway.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you're a product manager and you type this in and you get some result, but you don't have a really good marketer, a really good marketing communications person, a really good salesperson, a real good channel salesperson, a really good architect, a really good manufacturing manager, all these different things in this thing that you're getting. You're not going to be able, you might be able to make the first one, but when you go to version five, six, how does that work? You're building on a really crusty foundation. And people think, well, my AI is going to be smarter. It's not proven to do that. What's proven is if you properly architect it and have claude code go into certain sub-segments or have Claude help you build the architecture, you modify, refine it, lock it in, and say, just work on these few things.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think of software code with AI. And when you look at AI, and if it's not architecting things and it's not segmenting things and looking at each of those things, like I was saying, you know, like there's software architects and then there's software optimizers. And then there's just general coders. And then there's security reviews. And if you don't have those different mixture of experts around the code structuring it so that subsequent generations can get better and better and it just kind of Devolves into this mass of things you don't know, you're getting short term game for very, very long-term laws. And that's, you know, that's called software debt, right? Technical debt. Everybody hates technical debt.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, this stuff is brittle. Engineers were looking at it like this should be layered in four or five, you know, actually 12 or 15 different subfunctions. This is the main loop of Anthropics Claude, the main loop, not just something off in the main loop. And people are like, how can you do this? This looks brittle. It's unreadable. It's and they're like, well, the AI knows it. But when you think about it and you have to maintain it, you can have an agent make code for you and it could work and it could test, but is it secure? Is it maintainable There's something going wrong. Can you roll things back and understand what's going on? Like there's so many other aspects to writing code and delivering a product thing that you still need humans in the loop. And so when I think of product design”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then at the time, and maybe they changed it, maybe they didn't, but at the time Dario was saying, you know, 90 to 100% of all our codes written by Claude. And we just monitor it and watch it. And we're like, oh, well, that's really interesting. And then the code leaks. And then if you looked at the code, anybody who looked at the code who's a real software architect and engineer. They were like, it made what?”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we're saying, and you know, is oh, I can just today in the AI world, I can just make a prompt and all of a sudden it gets spit out and you don't know what all those little functions are. If you are not aware of each of those functions, even in the AI world of what those things are, they are very clear definitions of certain points of view for the customer and you have to consider them. And to say that they're going to get washed away and an AI is going to come up with it. It reminds me a lot of how software coding is getting done with like something like Claude today. Know, I don't know, maybe it was a month ago when the claud source code leaked Right cloud source code leak, and everybody's like, Oh my God, it”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the discipline of product management. Sits between all of these functional roles, okay, whether that's marketing, sales, distribution, sometimes a manufacturing depends on what the product is, engineering, obviously. customer support. So when you sit between all of these things, you know, maybe those roles shift or change, especially depending on what it is you're building and that kind of thing. But you have to interpret what's going on between all of them and stitch them all together to make this thing sing.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made the iPhone 15 years too early, and that was a classic case where we were just making the things that were really cool, but nobody needed it.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, or oh no, we're going to cut these two features and ship it. It's like, well, wait a second, we cut out two of our three key tentpole features. How are we going to sell that anymore? So it's a holistic design. It's not, you know, like because we think the technology. The technology is in service of the customer. We're going to jam the technology down the customer's throat, and they're going to figure out how to use it. There's too much noise. You've got to make it frictionless and you got to fit it in their world and see from their point of view, go, oh, that's what I need. General magic was the perfect story for that. You know, I don't know your viewers should definitely watch the movie General Magic because.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you live in that world and you live in the customer, because you're coming from a customer point of view. So you have to see the lens and the customer only sees what they see through the lens of marketing and sales, right? And so you have to be in their shoes and you go, okay, like when I do the press release, I can only have three or four key features. After that, it becomes gobbledygook for a customer. So you're like, okay, what are those three or four things? Okay, what is that? That's what we're going to focus on. And so, no, we're not going to add five more features. That's not going to make it sell better.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Weird thing is, it's working backwards. See, the thing saying working backwards, would a movie be created that way? Is it called working backwards when you say, I'm going to make a script and I'm making a treatment and I'm going to really know what it is? I know what my characters are and how I do character development. Like, is that really working backwards? It sounds like it's backwards. It's like, no, that's the way you do it. It's just because it's so technology led and technologists, and this is what I thought when I was 20. I was like, yeah, now it sounds backwards. Like, come on, let's really think through this.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sales pieces, the distribution pieces, the product definition, the messaging, the target markets early on. You can't leave it till later and then get it and then back calculate in. And that's why I say you should really make the press release before you more or less start the project.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And man, all of a sudden, it evaporated. Like, well, what do I use the net for? Like, I got the tool to get onto it, but what do I use it for daily? And it had to develop. And so OpenAI is now shifting like, oh, we got to get product teams and we got to start about product marketing. So, you know, that is to me, that's it's marketing, but if you start, if you are already thinking about the marketing, you're already going to start thinking about the product. And that's the thing is when you're just thinking about the product, you're like, and it was really just a technology demo that went, you know, viral. And they're like, oh, yeah. And they still keep winning on that. They never put product in till it was too late. Now Anthropics where they are and valued more and higher revenue and all the other stuff. So, you know, it just, even if it's a software-only product, yes, there's lots of hardware and servers and all other stuff. You need to think holistically and you need to think about the entire customer journey, the marketing.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. And the thing is, I think we're starting to see that, the cracks of it. It might be more than cracks now with OpenAI. What is it? It's like, oh, it's your answer machine, whatever. Like, well, what does it do for me? And now I got to keep paying you. Like, it was fun as a down one. But what am I using it for every day? And like, oh, Claude, it does Claude code and it does, you know, and then what happens OpenAI is like, oh, we have codecs now. But then they were Sora and they were, you know, this and they were that. We're going to do sex chat. We're going to like, what are you? And so it's like, oh, yeah, you're the great first, you know, like Netscape. Everyone went out and bought Netscape Explorer or whatever it was called Netscape Navigator.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was like, that's genius. Now, how long that happened? How what was behind the scenes? We were just a tiny teen, you know, and we were getting this done in 10 months. So everybody was just running for it, right? Versus iPhone, which was we had discussions of it. Should we call it the iPod phone or should we call it the iPhone because Cisco had the iPhone back in the day and there was copyright issues and trademark issues? So we were into that because it was also a two and a half year development and we were in so many and it was betting the farm and we were going to cannibalize iPod, right? So there was a lot more discussions. But in those early days of thousand songs, it was everybody running in literally not less than nine. It was really five to six months everything got done because we really started it in April and it shipped in end of October.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back in the day, And I think it's still maybe it's changed now. But back in the Steve days There was the different functions of Apple. And because they were all lean, because the company was only 4,000, 5,000 people. And it was already doing max and everything. Each function was kind of very, very functional. And so the marketing didn't get into the engineering and the design folks. It was like separate. Like Steve was the hub and he was in each of them putting them together. Like I said, you know, opinion-based decision maker. And so when we heard the tagline for the first time.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Many products can go global right away, but marketing, you still got to tell a story. And you got to, you know, so it just reminds me that even though we've maybe compressed the time for some pieces of the adoption puzzle, you know, because we can distribute faster doesn't mean we can the awareness can get accelerated and that we can get people to intelligently understand what this product faster, faster if we just say the words of somebody who might have known about the product for three years.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As we were doing in the US in Europe. And the thing is, it didn't resonate with the early adopters. It didn't resonate with the later adopters because we didn't have the same messages. We were going for a different set of people. And we're like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Sales aren't working. We got to change the marketing. We got to meet those Europeans where they're at because they're slower to adopt technology versus it starts with the coast and goes inward in the US, right? And so we're like, oh, we got to change things up. And so, you know, sometimes it's when you get to new areas, you have to rethink your marketing for that area and remember to meet them where they're at and where the, if it doesn't have an installed base for word of mouth, you're going to have to get that word of mouth started. So work with those people to get that going. Now it's different with all software products and all these things and many, many.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back in 2001, two, three, still, when Apple had no presence outside of the US, Apple was really, it was selling in the US, some Canada and some in Japan. But that was it. And that was the max. So we were selling iPods into those areas. And so we had kind of the early adapter, and then we had some other language. And then by the third, fourth version of iPod, we had some really refined language for those kind of late adopters. So then we said we're going to go back and get a push into Europe. We're going to get because iPod hadn't taken off in Europe, so we're going to push iPod into Europe. And so we're on, I think, the fourth generation or something like that. And so what did we do in Europe? We ran the same marketing.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I should take notice of that, right? And so what you want to do is make sure you understand the gestation of your customer and where they are and where they are in the thing and who you're trying to, I also updated across the chasm, you know, crossing the chasm graphic in the book saying how we go about this in your product developments because you really have to think about who your target user set is and your target marketing based on the version of product you're in and how you're going to get those higher and higher volumes and you and it really means about Story that it was so emblazoned in my mind.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is word of mouth, right? By other early adopters. But you got to do the same thing for the early, you know, not me, not the earliest early adopters, but the early adopters who other people trust to talk to because a lot of other people who are late adopters, they know, oh, that's that, that's wacky George. He tries everything. And then like, no, no, no. But if so-and-so's tried it.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I want to listen to these more. And this is before they ever got the product. You need to get them to convert in some way. And they need to hear that you've already thought about their issues or you know and you're living in their shoes and they're like, yes, yes, yes, more of that. Is this an emotional point? Is this a rational point? And you're weaving this tapestry to get them to come to some kind of trial or purchase or conversion or something of the product. And the best way to do that.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you have to also remember that these people don't live in, they live in the context, but they're not aware of your product in their context. And so you have to bring it home to them and meet them where they are. And so you're marketing, your website, your Instagram ads, your whatever, your earned, owned and earned and owned media that you do, you really need to put that your product in their context and make the visuals and make the words and everything sing to them. And if not, they're not going to get it, right? And so too many times we just say, well, if we just make the perfect product, no, you have to put for a consumer thing specifically. And it's also really good for a B2B product as well, is make sure you understand your customer. And they go, you know, and when you say the right word, they go, oh, they get me.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we build products, we define products when we build them, we have a good sense of the context when we are defining those things. We're living in that world, okay? And so we're like, oh, we're like this and these are our issues and this is who we are. And, you know, maybe you put on personas. You know, we would strip out and figure out who our target customers were with their personas. single mom with kids or is it a dual income no kid family or is it senior citizens or whatever and we would come up with these personas and we would kind of live inside them as we're thinking about the product”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, very close. Remember, there was no retail back then, Apple retailers, none of that stuff. You know, most people don't know how on the ropes Apple was back in 2001.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mantra was Steve. You know, if we don't have Windows connectivity, the iPod doesn't cost $349. It costs $3,000 because you've got to buy a Mac and you got to move all your digital life over to it and everything else. People are not about to take a risk on this company that's almost bankrupt for $3,000. So how are we going to do that? Like, okay, let's make sure it is only $349 and that they can try it. And once they try the brand, they go, oh, that's pretty interesting. Maybe I should try other products from this company and give them a shot because that was just such a sublime experience. And that's how it all changed and that's how iPhone was able to be created. Because without the iPod, I'm pretty sure there would have been no iPhone. There would have probably been no Apple because it was close to bankruptcy.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We all were wrong at certain times, but it's when you hit those big, when you get the right ones, they overshadow all the other stuff, but that's how you have to try and iterate. You know, Jeff Bezos says the same thing. I believe in the same thing. You got to fail a few times till you get your way. But you only fail if you stop You keep iterating, keep going, well, then that's not failure. That's called learning.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had to hang in there with two generations of the smoke detector and a few generations of the thermostat before we made the business work, right? Not just make the product work.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fix the business so you have there's no I've never seen anyone get it all right the first time like you want you would like to but you get close but make the product fix the product after you get customer feedback and then make the business which means make the margins like on the first iPods we weren't making any money first iPhones we weren't making any money right the second iPhone or SAN second iPod okay we started getting a little bit better numbers but we got more or less the features sort of dialed. Third one was like, okay, Windows, we got the margins. We're getting up the volume. We got all the right. And like, go, right? Reliability, whatever else it had to be. So you need to stick with your idea, even if it's not necessarily going the first time, unless there's something really severely brain damaged about whatever it was. You have to restart. But sometimes you have to hang in there. And same thing with Nest.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we had to, like I said, the iPhone wasn't a hit right away. It was kind of like, oh, yeah, I worked on ATOT and it was two and a halfG and it was this and that. And it only worked in the US. So we had to get multiple versions till we got out. And that's in my book, I have the three, I think it's three generations. Everything needs three generations. Yes, Bill. There it is. Three generations. I've learned you make the product, you fix the product, then you...”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The iPhone or the iPad. He never wanted it. He's like, the finger is good enough. When we can't do it with the finger, it's like, and I'm like, but we're going to have a B2B context and we're going to have form spilling and people are going to write. And he's like, I don't care. That means we're going to get to like Windows Pen because he thought it was going to be like Windows Pen, which was you had to use the pen for everything as opposed to using your finger. So it was like, I want it instead of pen dominant. I want it finger dominant. But that's what he was saying. But then when we added the stylus, which was another skunk works project, all of a sudden it came out and was like, well, we had to have stylus, right? And now it's a big feature of the product. Not everyone uses it, but it is a big feature for certain professionals who really want that and artists and hobbyists and stuff. And so sometimes you have to have those skunk works things that even if the opinion”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did it actually start? And we had the iTunes Music Store, did it actually start to take off? So sometimes you have to say we're on the right thing, but we need to make some changes to get this market going. And that was a real opinion-based decision to, you know, we, the team that I was running, we were really clear that we had to have Windows connectivity out of the gate, or not out of the gate, but just after the first iPod shipped. And Steve said, over my dead body, no way. This is going to help us sell more Macs. And then, you know, we're like, okay, we're making the second one. Oh, we're going to keep it with Mac only. We just got to fix a few of these things. And then all of a sudden, it'll take off. And it was like, it didn't take off. So then it was a long story about how that, about how we finally got Windows connectivity. But there was always this skunk works thing project behind the scenes doing that. I did the same thing with stylus. Steve never wanted a stylus on.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, the iPod wasn't big enough. It took three generations of the iPod before it became successful. Everyone, you know, well, anyone who knows, you know, if they remember iPod before iPhone because iPhone swallowed everything, it's like the black hole of everything. But iPod, the first generation was only successful with the Mac geeks. And the Mac geeks were less than 1% of the market. And then the second generation was also that way. So when we'd sell everything, we'd sell everything we could for the most part in the first quarter and then it would die because it was just the MAC aficionado, the loyalists who'd come and buy everything. And it wasn't until the third generation where we made it work on Windows.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then on the iPhone, it was multi-touch, but it wasn't just that, it was also the fact that now we had Wi-Fi everywhere and we knew that 3G was coming because it was only two and a halfG when that was and that was very slow, but we had Wi-Fi. So it was, and we had cameras, right? Digital cameras. We had the digital camera. We had digital video, which we had YouTube at the time. So it was all of those things just on the verge to say this is what's going to be very different than what just came before it, like a Blackberry, which was really just a texting machine and nothing else.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, exactly. It could be because of multitouch. That's really what it was. And then we were just on the verge of having fast enough processors, right? And we were just on the verge. So it wasn't, you know, if you look at the iPhone or you look nest, iPhone or iPod, you can see where all these technologies were just coming to light. So in the iPod, it was just now mass storage that was portable and battery operated. That was really what it was. And it was also MP3s or digital music, right? Those were kind of, and we also had high density, we were the first products to have lithium ion or lithium prismatic polymer cells. So it was new battery technology, new mass storage, portable mass storage, and this new generation of digital music. And we had ARM processors, right? And so, and it really, really low power. So all of those things had to come together to do that.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Technology bonded with that to then bring innovation and revolution in and then redefine the space in a way, which is what we did, which is not with just the product, but how you installed it. It was always installed by third party installers as opposed to yourself, how you bought it, which was you bought it through the installer. You didn't buy it in Best Buy or somewhere else. So we had to reinvent many different pieces of the puzzle to get Nest to be the nest. It wasn't just the product. It was all the other things. Just like the iPod wasn't the iPod or the smartphone wasn't the iPhone wasn't the iPhone. It was the iPhone Plus the App Store, iTunes Plus iTunes, iPod Plus iTunes, and then the iTunes Music Store. So you have to think about the full thing you're trying to build, not just the one piece even.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We weren't innovative, but they weren't used. Like everyone, a lot of them had it because the energy company would give you rebates for it, but no one knew how to use it because it was RK and it was programming of ECR. And so what I said was, oh, wait a second. What if it could learn your patterns? And that was AI. And so now let's put that together in a much cooler looking, attractive package that cost five to six times more than the things that you're buying today. That was the crazy opinion-based decision was, okay, yes, it's going to cost $249, but it's going to save you $800 to $1,200 a year. So it could pay for itself literally within a year or two. So that was the kind of, that was the big idea. And AI was brought to bear on that old problem and hopefully solve it in a new way. So it starts with the pain, long time pain, maybe habituated away pain that you have to discover.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I always kind of start with okay, where's our current pain? And are there new technologies to solve that pain? And like in the thermostat case, NEST was we could use AI to learn so it can learn when you're there, when you're away, what temperatures are you like so you don't have to program it so you can save energy? So the big pain was being either comfortable or saving money because 50% of your energy bill was in this heating and cooling unit that you hated the interface. You didn't know what it was. You just paid the bill. And so it started from that pain and said, okay, well, programmable thermostats.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, or you can see it on the horizon, they're going to have pain and not too far away. But how do you solve for that pain? And typically. Those pains were because when those products were created, either it was unintentional consequence or it was a limitation of the technology at the time it was created. And it kind of just”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay. Well, Herman's. I've known Herman since 1987, probably before any most of your listeners were even born. But Herman, just for context, Herman was the creator of a court computer, which was the Apple II of the UK back in the 70s. And then he created with his team the ARM processor. So Acorn means Acorn Risk Machine from Acorn computer. And so he was the founder, one of the founders of ARM. And so I was talking about process. Anyway, so that's, so how do Herman and I go way, way back. So the thing is how do you solve or figure out what is worthy to be built and what's not? So the first thing is I start from pain. You know, some people start from other directions. I always start from pain. That's what I learned is what are people's pain right?”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were able to do, but it was much, you know, obviously not LLMs, but smaller stuff. And we said, okay, we can see this world growing and this AI assistant, then voice assistants came. Then there was Alexa and all that stuff that happened later on in 2013, 14, 15. It's like, okay, and that was Gen 1, but we could see this kind of blossoming. And, you know, unfortunately, in the fullness of time, it takes 15 years more from the time Nest launched for that vision to come to fruition. But it is there now. And if Nest was, if we pitched it that way, we were just too early.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For sure. People keep asking me what are we going to get? It's like, no, absolutely. Now's the time. I'm actually getting business plans of people who are like, hey, is this interesting to you? Want to invest in it? You want to come and help us, you know, build it? This is like Nest 2.0. So, you know, they're trying to do stuff like that at Ring, I don't think very, you know, not very privacy focused, but that's what they're trying to do. That was our vision in the beginning, to tell you the truth. That's how we were like, you're going to need lots of context because we remember the Nest Learning Thermostat wasn't the Nest AI thermostat. It could have been called that, but we couldn't call it that in 2011 because people would have freaked out. Now you would have called it the Nest AI thermostat, right? And people would have bought it. And so we knew what AI was, right? So since 2010, that was one of the foundational pieces of the company was AI. And so that's how we were able to do a lot of the things.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you know, the whole organization was a stepchild for whatever reason. You know, there was cultural mismatch. There was, you know, probably a business mismatch. I think if nests was around and alive today like it was, it would have a whole different thing when Google and Gemini and Google I.O. was what yesterday or the day before You know it would have been one of, I think some of the centerpieces of what you could do because AI needs context. AI needs a lot of context. And in a home, you want to make everything very seamless. And the way you get best context is by having sensors properly placed around the home that don't necessarily invade privacy, but allow you to pick up a lot of comings and goings and who's who in the room and your voice and these kinds of things. Audio, I should say not voice, to be able to”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it says you don't get PTSD every time because you know when a smoke alarm well, you're like, okay, everyone calm, we're going to do this now, especially when we're doing tests and stuff. We're like, you know, when we're because people are supposed to test or are supposed to test self. Like, you know, like everyone stay calm. It's going to be good, children. We got to do this one thing. You know, we'll get through it. Don't worry.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Google is a stepchild. No, no, yeah, it was a stepchild. You really had to pour a lot of love, a lot of attention, a lot of love to make something that was that crystalline. And it had to be well formed. And nobody really wanted to put in the effort. So they probably like, who want to do this? Who's excited by it? Nobody was probably excited. And they just said, yeah, okay, we'll just, it's not that big a deal in the end of the day where if it was invested in, I think it would have been a critical piece of the next generation AI assistant in your home.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to stab me in the heart ago. That was one of the toughest products I and our team and Nest and other people who were on the team have ever made their life because it's so hard to make something like that that there's so many constraints. Like that's an ultimate constraint kind of product to actually innovate in. So yes, it unfortunately is discontinued, but it was the best product in the space for a decade and no one changed it. No one invested in it. It is so crazy. It's like pains me and it pains everyone. People like they're expiring around me. What do I do? And I'm like, I wish I could tell you there's something better. No one replaced it with something better. It's mind-boggling that the number one product with revenue and everything, you're just going to toss it away.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Opinion based decis And so So it's the micro specification and delivery of those certain data pieces that you need. And maybe it's also to get out of a crisis or maybe it's a system level thing where you have to worry about this thing at the low level changing up here and here. And like we could do that, but only if they do this. And it's like, okay, guys, we're going to fix all of those things at once. And you have to micromanage it because everybody wants to find excuses why they can't do that or they can't do that. So you have to ask why a lot. So it just, but it's all in service of some really key detail that needs to get delivered or some innovation that needs to be delivered. Just like I said.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've heard the term sweat the details. It's micromanagement of certain details. And then there's the kind of hands off of other details. You have to really understand the blend of which things really matter, which things don't. When I was early on my career, I thought everything mattered. And I drove everybody nuts, drove myself nuts, the people who hated like, you know, and it became like everybody's got to do it the way I would do it. It's like, no, no, no, no. There's only a few key things mostly for the customer or maybe some certain things for manufacturing or cost or something where it needs to really be very clear or a long-term vision. But then you can delegate other things. But certain pieces of it, you really need to, and when I mean micromanage, it means micromanage the decision, not necessarily the operations of doing it, making sure you're getting the data like we did with the keyboard on the iPhone to make sure we're getting the right data to help us get the informed gut to make that.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But again, a lot of informed judgment from all the experts around asking questions, refining, prototyping, these kinds of things to then make a decision. So it's not just like I woke up one morning and this is, you know, now we're going this direction. No, there's a lot of work to get there.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They go and hire, okay, we're going to do a user study, or we're going to do all this, and they don't have the user studies and have the full context like I was just describing. They don't go buy the product and they don't, what have you. And then they get data. And that's because the leader or whoever's in there, bored maybe, it's like, we need data to make sure this 1.0 is going to be a success. And I saw this so many times at all these major corporations. So they're just kind of covering their ass with bullshit data and not really doing the hard work of saying, I'm going to make this decision and we are going to select this. And yes, I might be wrong or we as the opinion-based decision makers are wrong and we will correct it later and we'll take the heat for that. So that's the great product manager, a great person who's leading this thing has to understand that that's what they have to do if they're really doing something innovative.”
2026-06-07 · Lenny's Podcast · Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source