Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:00:49 · Tony Fadell
So I watched how he would sell Levi's and I would watch and he would be like, and he wasn't always selling to sell. Sometimes he was convincing them not to buy something because that wasn't the best product they had. "Buy this one instead. And actually go to my competitor down the street," because he was building a relationship in storytelling because these people loved what it was. So it sometimes is not just setting expectations and telling a story, but it's also saying, "Hey, maybe I'm not for you." And that's truth. That's also truth. And so like Steve always said, "The best marketing just tells the truth." Now might put nice words around it, nice creative and everything, but it's telling the truth. And so when I watched Steve prepare for, and like I said, when we did the two and a half years with the iPhone, he was honing the story of the iPhone every day. He didn't give it to marketing. He knew what that thing was and what those key features were like we talked about and micromanage those features because he knew those were the things the world's going to take notice to. And he would refine the story and then tell other people who were unwashed by it, like friends who were really smart and say, "I'm going to give you the pitch and give you the pitch." And he would refine, refine, refine. And so when you saw him come on stage, it was just because he had done it 100,000 times or at least 10,000 times, right? And he knew it like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, it just came off. And so I watched and I learned from that and that's what we did for like the Nest Learning Thermostat. That's what we did for each of those things. It was just that same storytelling over and over, why does it matter? Why does it matter? And because too many times when we're technology led, we talk about the what. We don't talk about the why. And the why is where the storytelling is because you want to take a journey of why it matters to you. If you're talking about the what, you're just talking to another geek. Love geeks, no problem. I'm one of them. And we can relate on that level, but general, most people who are not in the technology world, they want a story and they want something that touches them in some way.
01:03:14 · Lenny Rachitsky
[01:03:14] S1: One lesson I'm hearing from what you just described is telling the story over and over and over and refining it over time is where the best stuff comes from, not just here, I just came up with this and it's going to be amazing.
01:03:25 · Tony Fadell
[01:03:25] S0: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. And telling it to other people to see if it resonates. I remember the number of times I told the Nest story before Nest came out because I was like, "This is crazy, this thermostat thing." I'm like, "Okay, let me set up the virus of doubt, which was, do you know how much you spend on your energy bill every year for your heating and cooling? Don't you hate your thing?" Now, there's another way to look at the storytelling and this is, and I put this in the book. Oh, no, I didn't put this in the book. We all have seen infomercials, right? Those ones that drag on for a half an hour, an hour at late night TV on some random, on every channel now, right, and they just sit there and they tell you the story from all the different directions. They give you the virus of doubt. They're like, "Oh, here's this cheese grater. And you know when you have this bad cheese grater here and your knuckles bleed," and whatever and it's hard to clean. And they over exaggerate everything. And they show you all the pain points of it and then they show how wonderful, easy it is to use in this whatever they're selling and then it's easy to buy, and then it's easy to return, and it's overly dramatic. And we all know it's like wrestling, it's all an act and whatever. There's probably no realness there, but it is storytelling in a way. And not that you should do that because they over-hype the expectations, but look at the techniques that are used, the psychological techniques, the emotional techniques to get there and then dial it back and go, "Okay, I'm going to do that but with truth." And that's when things start to go pop, pop, pop, pop, or at least that's what I've seen. And so I always use that as another metric. And it's not just telling the story over and over, it's what story you are telling. And so I try to think of that as well, but not obviously clowny and cheesy and everything else, but it is a caricature of doing good marketing.
01:05:26 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[01:05:26] S1: I feel like this is a really interesting lens into the press release first or working backwards idea, is create the infomercial first and just go extreme. [01:05:35] S0: Sure, you could. [01:05:35] S1: Oh my God. I just kept up with a whole new- [01:05:36] S0: Know what you don't want to do for sure. [01:05:39] S1: But it's like a cool lens to go really far and then kind of pull back the best parts and make it honest. I think we just came up with a really good idea here. I want to come back to the iPhone. So I think it- [01:05:39] S0: Okay. [01:05:51] S1: Came out 20 years ago almost at this point, right? It launched 27, 2007. Something like that. [01:05:51] S0: Yeah, 2007. [01:05:57] S1: So what's crazy is people are still trying to build the next iPhone, especially with AI. Everyone's just like, "We've had this thing forever. What the hell? Why has nothing changed?" I'm curious, I imagine people ask you this question. I'm curious just what you think the next iPhone may look like with AI. What's the device that you think emerges over time? Do you have vision?
01:06:16 · Tony Fadell
[01:06:16] S0: Okay. There's the what it could look like long-term and there's what it could look like soon. And so a lot of people are like, okay, there's the long-term thing and when we can trust the models, and when they have memory, and when they do this stuff, then we're still going to need a display because, sorry people, unless we're plugging it into our brain like a BCI brain computer or there's some laser thing going into our retina, we're going to need a display. So barring those kinds of technologies, we're going to need a display. And so the best display that we have is a smartphone-like thing. Okay. Not going to be this tiny thing. We saw what happened with Humane, all that other stuff. So you're going to have some kind of, because the best way to visualize visual information is with a display, right? So we're going to have some kind of small slab, maybe it's foldable like we see today, whatever, so that you can access it. Maybe many things you don't need a display for, but a lot of things you still do, right? Because you might not be tapping, and swiping, and all that stuff. So I am of the opinion that long term, if you look at how a device is layered today, and this is many, many devices, and iPhone specifically started this, which was tapping and swiping, right? That was the first thing, is use your finger. Then after that was keyboard and then after that, the tertiary thing was a voice input. We need to flip it. We need to absolutely flip it and we have to say, and this is what I always wanted to do with Nest, which is I want to remove displays and we need to have voice as the number one primary feature and you build around voice. Then we have keyboard if necessary and then we have tapping and swiping. Okay. It should go exactly the opposite. And the problem why most of us don't go around talking to our phones and everything, and we saw this also happen with cars. There was tactile buttons, and then there was the touchscreens, and then they also added the voice in, but nobody really uses voice in the car unless it's some accessibility thing, right, because voice was always added at the end because it was always like, well, it sort of works and it's a gizmo, but it's like Alexa was for version 1.0 or Siri was [inaudible 01:08:55].
01:08:43 · Tony Fadell
But when we actually have really good voice input with not just understand it's like whisper flow or something because that's great. And what I'm saying is the intelligence behind it with memory and everything else. So then we can start to say and we can start to use that much more specifically and then deprecate those other things, but we've always have to have them there as a crutch for voice because voice has never been able to deliver. So that's the long-term thing. So it'll have some kind of display, but it's going to be much more voice primary and then you're going to have the other things as secondary and tertiary. In the middle now or sometimes soon, it's going to look much, much like the smartphone is because we're not going to get away from the all app interface anytime soon. We're going to remove some things, but we don't trust it yet. It's going to take a while till we trust it. And we are literally turning over a lot to this trusted thing, right? Because tapping and swiping, we know what that is, for the most part. We know that we can trust ourselves when we're tapping and keyboarding or whatever. This other thing, we don't know. And so it's going to take a lot of time, reminds me of kind of general magic in a way, for us to be able to get en masse to trust it. And we're already seeing this with coding agents and everything else, "Oh, they deleted my source code." And again, I'm not trying to be an old guy who's saying it's not going to work. Sure, it's going to work in certain things. I'm saying for consumers every day and the things they want, and it's cheap enough so it doesn't cost them a lot, right? Today people are like, "Yeah, I'm going to try ChatGPT or whatever. It's $20 a month or $200 a month." That is unsustainable if you think consumers are going to pay that. There's just no way unless it's incredible, but they're not going to... You know what I mean? They tried it and now they're getting kind of their Siri, a lot of them are getting their Siri 1.0 with this. "I paid for it, but it's really not all that yet." And it's like full self-driving. I paid for full self-driving, it's 15 years later, I'm still waiting for full self-driving.