Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:17:13 · Tony Fadell
[01:17:13] S0: I've been doing this AI plus hardware thing now, not just at Nest, but in many of the startup companies that we funded at Build. And so company like Simbe Robotics, it's Simbe Robotics. We were doing robotics way back, and now it's not a humanoid, but it does inventory of retail stores. And we've been at it, I don't know, eight years now, seven years, and now it's just taking off, and it does have AI, and it has a robotic platform, and it really solves real pain points for the retailers of inventory. And the workers hate doing inventory, counting everything on every shelf, and all that stuff. So it really works, and I love seeing that stuff. We're doing the same thing at Greyparrot with AI and recycling. It's literally figuring out what things should go in this recycling bin versus that and doing it really fast with cameras and all this stuff. And we've been at that for a few years, and we have AI plus textiles. Most textiles have weaving errors, and color errors, and defects, and things like that. And so people still make all of these products, but then they have to incinerate them because they're not perfect at the end because they don't catch the quality problems early enough in the product. And we're doing AI plus cameras to spot all this stuff. And again, another thing. We've been doing AI and drug design now for 10 years at Orionis, and that's taking off. So I'm really interested in not just these frontier models, and this whole other thing is really good AI that you can trust, scoped correctly with this, solving real problems every day as opposed to pipe dream AGI, okay, you can go solve that. I'm going to go and build all these businesses that really matter right now. And we're finally getting traction because people are like what AI and oh, more robotics and now, all of a sudden, we're in vogue, and we've been here really working on our product-market fit, working on our marketing, working on version 3.0 the device and everything, and people are adopting them. And that's what's wonderful to see. And so I'm excited by all that. We have another one like AI Infusion and doing that, or finally doing tons of software with chemical reactions, and now we have a clean agricultural fuel and oils company that is cleaning up farms all around Central America, and we're almost all atoms plus software in some way.
01:19:46 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
And so it's just nice to be sitting here and knowing that we made these bets a long time ago and we're doing it. Now we're not necessarily... I was early on in Groq, and it was cheap then, and it was like, "Yeah, that's the right way to go." And my friends were in Cerebras, and I got into that, and then it's like, but these are long-term plays, and they're finally coming to fruition, but we did invested in it not when it was hyped, and it's... We were doing it back when unicorns valuations were billions of dollars. Today, if you don't have a $5 billion round raised, you're not anything. It's like, okay, well, that doesn't work from a venture perspective. You never get their venture returns. You can't invest in things when the valuations are already nine digits or 10 digits, and you think you're got a small portfolio that's got like... Uh-uh, that's not the kind of game I want to play. So I'm glad that we are well positioned in all these companies that have real good product-market fit, that came in the right valuations, that we can really help and make big change and deliver painkillers, and we'll let everybody else over there play. So that's what's exciting to me. [01:21:03] S1: Oh man, there's this quote that I used the other day on a different podcast that I think applies to you. It's a quote from the Bible that you were made for a time like this. Feels like all the things are converging around the things that you have been doing for so long, and the technology is finally getting exactly as described to actually something amazing.
01:21:03 · Lenny Rachitsky, Tony Fadell
[01:21:03] S1: Oh man, there's this quote that I used the other day on a different podcast that I think applies to you. It's a quote from the Bible that you were made for a time like this. Feels like all the things are converging around the things that you have been doing for so long, and the technology is finally getting exactly as described to actually something amazing. [01:21:23] S0: Same thing happened to General Magic, right? General Magic iPhone too early, and then I just kept adding and adding and adding, then doing the iPhone. So you stick with it. There's too many people who chase their tail and chase whatever the hottest thing is. When it's already hot, it's already too late to be in it. [01:21:39] S1: For people that don't know what you do these days, you talked about all these companies you work with, help people understand what it is you spend your time on, in case they may want to try to work with you on this stuff.
01:21:48 · Tony Fadell
[01:21:48] S0: I think the first thing to know is that we invest in deep technology. So that could be hardware, it could be software, software plus hardware, it could be chemical, it could be all kinds of different stuff. But remember, we talked earlier about what's the pain and is there new technology that comes out to solve that pain in a new way? And so what we do is I've learned that I invest in the deep technologies that are going to unseat the incumbents because it's going to change the market or the product in such a dramatic way that customers will choose this. So we're not just competing on features or better marketing or whatever. We're fundamentally a different product. Now it might take longer to get the market to shift to it, but it's fundamentally different, just like I brought up Groq and Cerebras and these kinds of things. It's fundamentally different. And so at Build, what we do is we invest in those technology companies that can be that seed that can unseat things, and maybe they go the distance, or maybe they are the key enabling tech that allows another startup to go to the distance, that kind of stuff. And so that's what we invest in, and we do it in the environment, in societal benefits, and health benefits. That's where we focus, and at times we've had a portfolio of over 200 companies, and we do that, but we don't just invest. When we get involved, many of the companies we advise and that we come in help them with product management, operations, we help them with financing, we help them with org development, just all kinds of different ways that... A lot of times in marketing and communications, right? Because we talked about storytelling, storytelling is really important, and a lot of deep technology people, they're incredible engineers, scientists, researchers, what have you. They have a really good idea, but they don't necessarily know how to form the product around it, or form the marketing around the product they're building, or help the marketing to inform the product and vice versa. And so we try to encapsulate that and really bring that to bear so they don't hit it on the fourth version. They try to get very close to the first or second version so they can get on that three version cycle to get to a great company, and so that's what we do. So we get to have a lot of fun.
01:24:18 · Tony Fadell, Lenny Rachitsky
We get to word play in all these different spaces: health, medicine, drugs, robotics, chips, these kinds of things. So that's just what's wonderful to us, and we get to just be kids in the candy store and work with all these incredible, smart entrepreneurs and everything. So that's one thing I do. The other thing I do is I'm a designer at residence at MIT. So I just finished up my first year there with the MIT Media Lab in architecture and design, and help to give lectures and work with students, amazing, amazing, smart students with the great technology, but help them with the customer journey. Try to make sure that they see this stuff early on in their career, not after 10 years, and then they finally understand, oh, wait a second, what am I really building? Who is it for? Not just what is it am I building, but why am I building it, and for who? And so, trying to get that into some of the later undergraduate and graduate students so we can watch them change the world more quickly. [01:25:23] S1: Incredible. I love just all the levels of ways you are helping people. There's the investing, there's this book, there's MIT, there's these conversations. [01:25:32] S0: It's fun. It's just so much fun. [01:25:35] S1: I love how much fun you're having. Is there anything else you wanted to share that we didn't cover?
01:25:39 · Tony Fadell
[01:25:39] S0: We should really just talk about ethics and morals and your point of view on that. And as a product manager, as a product designer, you need to really consider these things. I understand we have lots of big questions about AI and is it going to be a disaster for the next generation and for societies and all the other stuff? But I think that you really need to be well grounded and have real principles when you're designing something, and don't let those things go astray, just like you wouldn't go astray with a bad user interface or something like that. Make sure you're not trying to addict your users. And if anybody is, there's always other jobs, and there's always other better companies, and don't chase the money for tearing apart what it is the fabric of this society that we built. Obviously, there's going to be innovation, and there's going to be change, but when you're really doing it, and you can see that you're doing it, and you're trying to get people hooked, or you're like, "Oh, I give more dopamine or what have you." That's when you have to start really looking at things. And a lot of times, people are young, and they think, "Oh, that's great. That's what I want." But when you start to have kids, and you start to have families, and you start to see the... And you're not just about you; you're not trying to just get out of your family when you were growing up. I'm an individual, and I want what I want. You really need to start thinking systemically about the benefit that you're bringing to this society as a whole, not just to the business that you're in and trying to bring in whatever revenue you're trying to do because at the end of the day, users will feel that and then I think and will reward that as we see with Apple with privacy and people say, "Oh, they're behind because they're so private and there's this." But it's a double-edged sword. I remember when we had a very pointed discussion when the iTunes music store and when it was turning into video was being specified and what we were thinking about it, and everyone's like, "Oh, this is going to be great. We're going to do movies. We're going to do TV shows. That's going to all be great. We're going to make a lot of money with this in the studios. Everybody's behind it." And then somebody goes, "Yeah, and we should have porn, of course." Steve was like, "What?