[PragmaticPulp]

> My thoughts: 1. Lots of Steve Jobs talk. There's a whole chapter on the distinction between real assholes, and assholes that just really care about the product quality / customer. The distinction drawn was in motivation - but I wonder if it might just be a winner-writes-the-history situation.

He's been doing a lot of history rewriting.

Don't get me wrong: Building and shipping Nest was a great accomplishment. However, he was a famously terrible leader in many regards and drove a number of great employees away.

When Nest acquired Dropcam, a large number of the Dropcam employees left. Tony Fadell then went on to publicly disparage the Dropcam employees as being "not as good as we hoped" saying "unfortunately it wasn't a very experienceded team" ( https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-ceo-tony-fadell-has-dro... ) Predictably, that's a great way to drive away the rest of your knowledgeable employees and make the company toxic for hiring.

Nest didn't go on to revolutionize the space after Tony Fadell arrived with his hard-hitting management styles. Nest cameras haven't really evolved much and the Nest security system was abandoned.

I don't doubt that there are some lessons to be learned in his book, but in practice Tony Fadell hasn't been a great leader in the past decade. I'd take his book with a grain of salt.

[throwaway_nest]

> When Nest acquired Dropcam, a large number of the Dropcam employees left. Tony Fadell then went on to publicly disparage the Dropcam employees as being "not as good as we hoped" saying "unfortunately it wasn't a very experienceded team" ( https://www.businessinsider.com/nest-ceo-tony-fadell-has-dro... ) Predictably, that's a great way to drive away the rest of your knowledgeable employees and make the company toxic for hiring.

^^ This.

Aamir Virani, who was the co-founder of Dropcam, has his take on this here: https://aamusings.substack.com/p/who-lives-who-dies-who-tell... (also https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1522280960984707072.html)