My thoughts: 1. Lots of Steve Jobs talk. There's a whole chapter on the distinction between real assholes, and assholes that just really care about the product quality / customer. The distinction drawn was in motivation - but I wonder if it might just be a winner-writes-the-history situation. 2. Some advice goes heavily against current startup orthodoxy. He rejects fail-fast / figure it out later mentality, and argues for a lengthy product design process (for both atoms and bits!). 3. Lots of good details about how to think about managing people, managing and scaling team, and issues with scaling, etc, taken from his days building Nest.
Both (2) and (3) stand out to me as functions of his specific background. Building a company like Nest is obviously wildly (!) hard, but doing it after building the iPhone is a different game. I don't think his advice about lengthy design processes make a ton of sense for my startup [1], for example.
Generally, I always try and remind myself when I'm reading company-building advice books: this is probably good advice for someone in the same context as Tony Fadell (e.g. someone who is launching a second company after building... the iPhone). For me, it may or may not be relevant.
The good thing about failing fast is that you can use it at a strategy-level, aka fail fast _at_ failing fast, and switch to longer product cycles if you think that might work better. Starting with a long-product cycle doesn't give you much of a chance to try again if your first swing is a miss (which Mito's first attempt was...).