Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making―Personal Journey from Product Designer to Mentor

"Many times you just need someone to confirm your gut feeling and give you the confidence to follow it." - this quote from Tony's Acknowledgements chapter summarises my feeling throughout the entire book. When you are starting out your career, there is so much "wisdom/crap" that you need to parse through and figure out whether you believe in or not. It is so refreshing to read such a no-nonsense, detailed description of what matters and what doesn't from someone who has real battle scars and victories.Starting out my career in Silicon Valley in the late 90s, I was never fortunate enough to meet Tony, and when moving back to Norway I met a start-up world that was 20 years behind Silicon Valley. This was right around the time Tony got the call from Apple to work on the iPod. I would have loved coming along for that ride!For every single decision you need to make to build a great product, a great company, a great team, you have to also decide who am I? what do I believe in? what kind of values are important to me? what kind of culture is a great product culture that I will thrive in and want to work in? And many, many more hard questions. Tony takes you through his career and points out the learnings that he believes were important, not only to his successes, but also to his failures. Brutally honest and with a personal, and down-to-earth language.There have been so many points throughout my life where I have felt something should be the right thing to do or believe in, but where I haven't really dared. And where I haven't had enough conviction to push through, ignore nay-sayers, and just do what I believe in. Tony goes through most of these and more, one by one and also explains why it is the right thing to do. And then there are the hard to come by experiences, like how is an effective board supposed to work for a VC-funded, highly innovative product company. Or how important it is to have a mentor who has been there before and what you need a mentor for.The title says this is an "unorthodox" guide. To me this sounds like title was determined by the publisher's desire to make it a bestseller. Tony is seeing beyond the fuzz and the pretenders and focuses on the deeper fundamentals of human behaviour and the fundamental dynamics between technology, market, individual drive and motivation, and the sometimes harsh realities of starting a new company (or startup within a company). It's nothing unorthodox about what he is writing about. It cuts through the crap and gets you to focus on what is important.Also, in many of Tony's advice, it is evident that he is spoiled by living in the Bay Area. Examples are: always have a "seed crystal" on your board or you absolutely need to have a great mentor before considering starting a company or you should be relentless in pushing your employees to perfect the experience. The Bay Area has huge competition for talent, but the wider Bay Area also has the population of the entire country of Norway. That means that if you have a name in the Valley, know the other big names, and have built up a network over years, you can tap into a talent pool and a culture that is just there. You mostly need to carefully build this yourself outside the valley. Don't let that discourage you though, what Tony points out is fundamentally human and fundamental to building great product anywhere in the world. Just think carefully about what you might need to build yourself before directly following Tony's advice.

Let's say I told you that you could sit down to chat with the inventor and designer of some of the most successful products in history — things so crazy innovative, useful, and cool that they generated *hundreds of billions* of bucks. Heck, one of those products may even be in your pocket right now. And let's say the guy has a lot of great stories to tell — working with the geniuses of his age, taking mad risks, making huge mistakes, scoring epic wins. And he's a pretty good storyteller to boot.Interested? Well, Tony Fadell is that guy — the man behind the iPod, iPhone, Nest Thermostat and and much more you may not have heard of. If you didn't know his name or story till now, here's your chance to learn from one of the greatest inventor-entrepreneurs of all time, and drink in his hard-earned, often counterintuitive wisdom.Fadell divides his book into six parts: Build Yourself; Build Your Career; Build Your Product; Build Your Business; Build Your Team; Be CEO. Each part comprises a few chapters telling stories from his career along with the lessons learned. Each chapter begins with a nugget of concentrated Tony wisdom which is basically incompressible. Heck, the entire *book* is pretty incompressible — I highlighted almost a third of it. Here's one about mentorship:"A good mentor won’t hand you the answers, but they will try to help you see your problem from a new perspective. They’ll loan you some of their hard-fought advice so you can discover your own solution."This is straight-up Buddha talk, the 'ehi-passiko' of "Yeah, I've got some ideas to share but I want you to go figure it out on your own" — if the Buddha were a world-class coder, designer, manager, fundraiser, and CEO. Here's another one on what kind of company to join:"If you’re going to throw your time, energy, and youth at a company, try to join one that’s not just making a better mousetrap. Find a business that’s starting a revolution. A company that’s likely to make a substantial change in the status quo has the following characteristics:1) It’s creating a product or service that’s wholly new or combines existing technology in a novel way that the competition can’t make or even understand…2) This product solves a problem—a real pain point—that a lot of customers experience daily…3) The novel technology can deliver on the company vision—not just within the product but also the infrastructure, platforms, and systems that support it.4) Leadership is not dogmatic about what the solution looks like and is willing to adapt to their customers’ needs.5) It’s thinking about a problem or a customer need in a way you’ve never heard before, but which makes perfect sense once you hear it."What would I have given to have known that as a kid! There's a lifetime of wisdom scrunched down into those five bullet points there — and several more in the rest of the book. Really you'll want to read it for the stories of both epic triumph and epic failure, sometimes happening at the same time. Fadell tells the tales of brilliance and fallibility, the geniuses you may have never heard of, and how the success of no venture, no matter how innovative and well-planned, is ever foreordained.I won't give away too much so you can fully experience the joy of discovering this book on your own. This is obviously required reading if you're a budding entrepreneur. But if you're at all interested in leadership, innovation, management, resilience, or just the origins of miraculous gizmos, you need to read this book. It's about as close as you're going to get to living inside the head of one of our modern-day entrepreneurial legends.-- Ali Binazir, M.D., M.Phil., Happiness Engineer, startup coach and author of The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible, the highest-rated dating book on Amazon, and Should I Go to Medical School?: An Irreverent Guide to the Pros and Cons of a Career in Medicine

Typo in Chapter 5.4:For every version of the Nest story, we wrote down the most common objections and how we’d overcome them — what stats to use, what of the website to send people”Missing a word between “what” and “of the website”

This book is excellent. Tony Fadell built the iPod (in 10 months!) & iPhone while at Apple and then founded Nest, which created the connected home category and was acquired by Google. He's one of the great operators of the last 30 years and this book is worth your time just for anecdotes re: General Magic, Jobs, building Nest, & Google politics.With that said, Build is probably the most useful book I've ever read. Fadell has tips for everyone from kids looking for their first job out of college to founders selling their business. I probably grokked 10-15% of the actionable advice on my first read and see myself returning to it repeatedly.Build also comes at an important time. I'm confident America's approaching a Seldon crisis this decade, and the way out is to build great physical things (atoms, not bits). Getting a how-to/memoir from one of the world's greatest living hardware engineers is truly a gift. Concise, entertaining, candid, and actionable, replete with anecdotes and advice, I'm confident Build is worth your time.And hopefully it shames other great operators to write something similar (looking at you Jeff Bezos). The next generation of entrepreneurs are ready for it.