Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:17:08 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:17:08] S0: It's a stepchild. No, no. It was- [00:17:10] S1: Yeah. [00:17:10] S0: 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 efforts. They were probably like, "Who wanted to do this? Who's excited by it?" Nobody was probably excited, and they just said, "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've been a critical piece of the next generation AI assistant in your home. [00:17:42] S1: I want to hear more about that. And just on the smoke alarm point, my favorite feature, I was at an Airbnb once, and it just started... Instead of just straight to beeping, it was just like, "I'm about to make a loud noise," just warning you that it's going to get- [00:17:56] S0: Heads up. [00:17:57] S1: It's going to- [00:17:57] S0: We call it heads up. [00:17:58] S1: Just like it's going to... I love that feature so much. It's like it's about to get very loud. [00:18:02] S0: Thank you for telling me. [00:18:05] S1: So good. [00:18:07] S0: As soon as 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 when we... because people are supposed to test or are supposed to test it. So like, "Everyone, stay calm. It's going to be good, children. We've got to do this one thing, and we'll get through it. Don't worry."
00:18:07 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:18:07] S0: As soon as 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 when we... because people are supposed to test or are supposed to test it. So like, "Everyone, stay calm. It's going to be good, children. We've got to do this one thing, and we'll get through it. Don't worry." [00:18:28] S1: That's so good. I was like, "Thank you so much for telling me." [00:18:30] S0: There was a lot of love and care poured in that thing. [00:18:32] S1: So I was going to ask specifically about the Nest. The Nest thermostat is still the best thermostat out there. I use it everywhere I go. It's just the best. The app hasn't evolved. Nothing's changed for a long time. Is it the same reason you just described, as just not a priority? Stab in the heart.
00:18:32 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[00:18:32] S1: So I was going to ask specifically about the Nest. The Nest thermostat is still the best thermostat out there. I use it everywhere I go. It's just the best. The app hasn't evolved. Nothing's changed for a long time. Is it the same reason you just described, as just not a priority? Stab in the heart. [00:18:46] S0: Yeah. The whole organization was a stepchild for whatever reason. There was cultural mismatch. There was probably a business mismatch. I think if Nest was around and alive today like it was, it would have a whole different thing when like Google and Gemini and Google IO was what yesterday or the day before. 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 give 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 give AI's context so that you can have a anywhere assistant that really knows what's going on. [00:19:48] S1: Is there a space for someone to launch the new Nest, do you think?
00:19:51 · Tony Fadell
[00:19:51] S0: Oh, for sure. For sure. People keep asking me, "Are we going to get it?" It's like, no, absolutely. Now's the time if this isn't already happening. 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 build it? This is like Nest 2.0." So they're trying to do stuff like that at Ring. I don't think very... 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 [inaudible 00:20:22]." 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, and people would have bought it. And so we knew what AI was, right. So, since 2010, 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 we were able to do, but it was much, obviously, not LLMs, but smaller stuff. And we said, "Okay, we can see this world growing in this AI assistant." Then voice assistance 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 one, but we could see this kind of blossoming, and 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... We pitched it that way. We were just too early.
00:21:24 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[00:21:24] S1: Let me follow this thread around how to know what to build and how you come up with ideas. So I emailed a bunch of people that know you, I asked them what to ask you. One of your colleagues, Hermann Hauser, Hermann? [00:21:36] S0: Uh-huh. Oh, Hermann Hauser. Yeah. [00:21:37] S1: Hermann Hauser. So his question he wanted me to ask you said, "Ask him how he decides what is worth building."
00:21:43 · Tony Fadell
[00:21:43] S0: Okay. Well, Hermann's great. I've known Hermann since 1987, probably before most of your listeners were even born. But Hermann... Just for context, Hermann was the creator of Acorn 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 RISC... So ARM means Acorn RISC Machine from Acorn Computer. And so he was one of... one of the founders of ARM. And so I was talking about processor. Anyway, so that's... so how do... so Hermann 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. Some people start from other directions. I always start from pain. That's what I learned is what are people's pain right 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... it evolved, but it never revolutionized itself. And so it just evolved, and that same pain kind of was it, but it gave you enough of a painkiller for the other problem that having this new pain was worth it. 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 you're 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 weren't innovative, but they weren't used." 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 arcane. It was- ... give you rebates for it, but no one knew how to use it because it was RK and it was programming a VCR. And so what I said was, "Oh, wait a second, what if it could learn your patterns?" And that was AI.