YouSaid · the spoken record

Tony Fadell

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115
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2026-06-07
most recent
2026-06-07
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1
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podcast

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  1. “For why, how it might affect market, how you do it, and make sure the team understands it now, if the team is just fully against it, well, then maybe it has to be in kind. But hopefully if you've done a good job and you really have an informed gut and you can articulate that, you can get everybody moving in the same direction, even if it is, and it's going to be risky. You're right. You got to know that you got to take risk because most people in those other functions, they don't want to take any risks. And so there's someone who's got to be the target, right? And today, you know, in many contexts, people go and hire consultants.”

    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

  2. “Product, all of these different things for them to actually come up with an opin What they like and what they don't like, and being able to critique it. And if you're doing a 1.0 and the world hasn't seen, you're not going to get that from consumers ever. You have to ship it and you have to build the entire kind of ecosystem so those consumers see it in the fullness so that when they do the evaluation and they spend their own money, then you're getting real feedback. When it comes to consumer atoms-based products with services or not, whatever it is, you have to build the entire thing and visualize the entire thing to be able to make those opinion-based decisions. And so you need a small team who's looking at the marketing angles, the engineering angles, the sales angles, all those different things to go, okay, that's the way we're going. And there's only so many ways you can do it because the rest of the team doesn't see this either. And so you have to be very articulate about how what that opinion-based decision is made.”

    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

  3. “How to get an opinion based decision to happen, and that means you have to have, you know, for lack of a better word, tastemakers. This is what we are doing. We are the person or the team who is going to make those opinion-based decisions. Of course, some people aren't going to like it. And it's me like, I'm sorry, this is a benevolent dictatorship. This is what's going to happen. And this is the vision. And we don't know what we don't know until we ship it and we get opinions from the, you know, the users. Now it's very different when you do this in a B2B context versus a B2C context. And so the hardest environment to work with it when you have these opinion-based decisions is an a B2C context because you have to see these decisions in the full light and you don't, consumer does. They have to see it from the marketing, from how they discover it in the marketing that key feature sets, the ability to use the”

    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

  4. “When you're doing a 1.0 of anything, when you're doing, if you're doing anything that matters and it's a 1.0 and it's a new category or it's a new device the world hasn't seen before, you have very few analogs that you can use to make data driven decisions. And so if most of your decisions are going to be opinion-based decisions for a 1.0, you have to have one or two or a very, very small set of people who are charged with making the opinion-based decisions and can actually get you from point A to from a white paper blank sheet of white paper or whiteboard to an actual 1.0 spec. Because if you try to do data-driven decisions all the way along, you're either not doing a differentiated product because you're taking data from another thing or you're just getting just bullshit data, right? So you're going to have to figure out.”

    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

  5. “And Steve said, We are going this way. Enough other people kind of said, yeah, that seems like that's the right thing to do. We're going to get close enough to get there. And then other people were like, no, my opinion is this. And guess who wins at the end of the day? Steve Jobs' opinion does. And he was like, if you're not going to get on board, get out of this room and you can go work on another project, but you're not going to work on this one.”

    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

  6. “Were we as good as a hardware keyboard? No. But were we good enough? Yes. And then other people came to that conclusion. But at the same time, there were other people who were adamant that the hardware keyboard has to be there. And they were unrelenting. And so it came down to, so this was a classic, like I say in Bill, data versus opinion-based decisions. And if you think about it, you had data that said there were pros and cons on both sides. What happened was the data was not clear that we should choose one over the other.”

    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

  7. “Okay, how fast can I type this text? How can I, how fast can I do this on a hardware keyboard? And then, how can we do this on the virtual one with multitouch? And it was a hardware software integration challenge of how we could get this to work. So we were going back and forth and back and forth. Oh, that doesn't quite work in the software. Oh, we need to change this in the hardware. And so this was over a set of months would, okay, the hardware keywords here, you know, and depends on how much you've been using it, but there's this margin error and we could really understand it. This over time was started way down here and it started to get it, you know, and it got a little faster and a little faster and a little faster. And how many errors, not just how fast, but how many errors and how do you correct the errors and all of those things. And at the end of the day, I was able to convince myself it wasn't going to be a hardware issue. And I was convinced at some point that we were good enough.”

    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

  8. “Basically, head to head competition between a display keyboard or a virtual keyboard and a physical keyboard. I had been doing virtual keyboards for a while since General Magic and then in the 90s. And I knew what handwriting was and keyboards were like on these touch screens. But I was only doing it on a, and I was writing software and calibrating them and trying to make them work with a single touch display, resistive or what have you. And so I knew what the limitations were of those kinds of things. So I was like, this is really going to be difficult. And we hadn't, you know, multi-touch was just, you know, was on a big ping pong table. It hadn't been scaled down. So it wasn't like something in a consumptive form where you could really do user tests with it. And so we set out a set of tests.”

    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

  9. “It was the most heated conversation and it dragged out the longest. There was one way of looking at the Blackberry, which was that is the market we want to go after or we want to win. And then there's the other side, the flip side of that argument, which is only 1% or 2% of mobile phone users at the time had a Blackberry, knew what a Blackberry was. So what about the other 98% of the people? What would they want? What would they need? Why are we going to go after winning this very loyal and incredibly passionate user base and try to pull them away from something? And so there was 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

  10. “Many times when we're technology led, we talk about the what, we don't talk about the why. The why is storytelling. When I watched Steve, he was honing the story of the iPhone every day. And so when you saw him come on stage, it was just because he had done it a hundred thousand times.”

    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

  11. “The technology's in service of the customer. Not we're going to jam the technology down the customer's throat. A customer only sees what they see through the lens of 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

  12. “The iPod wasn't big enough. It took three generations to the iPod before it became successful. You got to fail a few times till you find your way.”

    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

  13. “I always start from pain. Are there new technologies to solve that pain? Bring innovation in, revolution in, and redefine the space.”

    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

  14. “Today, in the AI world, I can just make a prompt and all of a sudden it gets spit out. You're building on a really crusty foundation. You're getting short-term gain for very, very long-term loss. If you're going to build a real company, can't be 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

  15. “You still need humans in the loop. Don't surrender to the machine. We can use the machines, but don't cognitively surrender.”

    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