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Jun 2022
45m 53s

The Co-Creator of the iPod and iPhone on...

Azeem Azhar
About this episode

How do you talk about a product before anything like it exists? How do you guide the engineers building it and the marketing department who has to sell it?

As co-creator of the iPod and iPhone, founder of the learning thermostat Nest, and with over 300 patents to his name, Tony Fadell is a serial entrepreneur who now focuses on investing. He tells Azeem Azhar how he uses opinion-based decision-making in his work, and why thinking like a product manager helps drive radical innovation.

They also discuss:

  • What a “parent CEO” is and why they are crucial to an innovating company.
  • How focusing on profits and loss (“P&L”) can stifle innovation in large companies.
  • Why no one has been able to design the perfect TV remote.
  • Why Tony believes the metaverse, as a social experience, is doomed to fail.

@azeem
@exponentialview
@tfadell

Further resources:

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