Father of the iPod and iPhone on building taste, judgment, and creativity in the AI era | Tony Fadell

**Tony Fadell** (0:00)
You still need humans in the loop. Don't surrender to the machine. We can use the machines, but don't cognitively surrender.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:05)
Because it's so easy to build, the things that stand out are the things that are really well thought through.

**Tony Fadell** (0:09)
Today, in the AI world, I can just make a prompt and all of a sudden it gets spit out. You're building on a really crusty foundation. You're getting short-term gain for very, very long-term laws. If you're going to build a real company, it can't be throwaway.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:21)
When your colleague, Herman Hauser, that ask him how he decides what is worth building.

**Tony Fadell** (0:26)
I always start from pain. Are there new technologies to solve that pain? Bring innovation in, revolution in, and redefine the space.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:33)
What's the threshold? What's the sign of, okay, this isn't big enough?

**Tony Fadell** (0:36)
Oh, the iPod wasn't big enough. It took three generations of the iPod before it became successful. You got to fail a few times till you find your way.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:42)
You are so into marketing that piece of building that I think a lot of builders don't think about at all.

**Tony Fadell** (0:48)
The technology is in service of the customer, not we're going to jam the technology down the customer's throat. A customer only sees what they see through the lens of marketing.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:57)
You often come back to the value of storytelling for product builders.

**Tony Fadell** (1:00)
Too many times when we're technology led, we talk about the what. We don't talk about the why. The why is the story telling. When I watched Steve, he was honing the story of the iPhone every day. And so when you saw him come on stage, it was just…
Because he had done it a hundred thousand times.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:19)
Today my guest is Tony Fadell. Tony doesn't know this, but ever since I started this podcast, he's been near the top of my wishlist of people that I've dreamed to have on this podcast. And that's because Tony is the epitome of what most people listening to this podcast want to become. He co-created some of the most innovative and beautiful and popular products in history. The iPod, the iPhone, the Nest Thermostat. He's also famous for being part of the legendary team at General Magic. He's co-authored over 300 patents. He also wrote one of the most important and valuable and inspiring books for builders called Build. Tony is currently an active investor and advisor to deep tech startups with his team at the Build Collective. He was recently named the inaugural designer in residence at the MIT Morning Academy of Design. There's so much gold in this episode. I could go on and on. I'm gonna leave it there. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for a free year of some of the hottest and most well-crafted AI products in the world available exclusively to Lennys newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Tony Fadell.
Tony, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Tony Fadell** (2:31)
Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:33)
I have a bazillion questions I want to ask you. I feel like I could fill four hours of conversation of all the things that I want to get out of your head. I want to start with the BlackBerry.
I was just watching the BlackBerry movie recently and it's kind of this journey of the BlackBerry founders and their story. Then at the end, they're like, oh, and this iPhone thing launched, and they're like, no, this is dumb. It's like no keyboard, this is not serious, can't do anything with it. I've always wondered, just being on the other side of this, being within Apple, building the iPhone, how much did you guys actually doubt that, okay, maybe they have something, maybe we need to add a keyboard?

**Tony Fadell** (3:08)
It was the most heated conversation and it dragged out the longest. There was one way of looking at the BlackBerry, which was, that is the market we want to go after or we want to win, and then there's the other side, the flip side of that argument, which is only 1% or 2% of mobile phone users at the time had a BlackBerry, knew what a BlackBerry was. So what about the other 98% of the people? What would they want? What would they need? Why are we gonna go after winning this very loyal and incredibly passionate user base and try to pull them away from something? And so there was this basically head-to-head competition between a display keyboard or a virtual keyboard and a physical keyboard. I had been doing virtual keyboards for a while since General Magic in the 90s. And I knew what handwriting was and keyboards were like on these touch screens.