Tony Fadell Joins Arm Board of Directors | Hacker News Reader

Tony Fadell Joins Arm Board of Directors

arm.com

92 pointswallflower29 comments

Met his parents once, while working in retail.

They wanted to see, if we were selling nest devices. I told them no, but they could find them in this and that shop.

They answered something along the lines: “Don’t worry, we already have enough of them. Our son Tony invented those, and everytime we travel around the world, we would check, if stores would sell them and send him a picture.”

They were really nice.

wait till they hear about how he also lead the creation of iPod and iPhone.

Not the same.

At nest he was the founder.

I should add that this was in a country in the middle of Europe. Makes it a bit more random than if it happened in the states, I believe.

I've been reading Tony Fadell's book "Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making" and it's great so far!

https://www.amazon.com/Build-Unorthodox-Guide-Making-Things/...

You should watch the General Magic documentary and see the interviews of his former/current self

I'm curious why you think one should watch these?

Because they support the parent comment, or for some other reason?

I found it fascinating seeing archival footage of an idealistic startup too early to market, where he appeared to be the youngest and least experienced on the team.

I agree, it shows how Tony Fadell joined a company with little to no hardware experience and how it ultimately led to him helping build the iPod and Nest later in his life using similar ideologies he learned from General Magic/early Apple.

They talk about parts of the book on his Lex Fridman interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oDZyOf6CW4

Fadell: "I couldn’t have built the iPod, iPhone, or Nest without Arm"

Yes, he did lead the team that built the first hardware manifestations of iPhone.

Software-wise though, there seems to have been a conflict between Fadell and Forstall. Forstall thankfully won.

I mean, have a look at the video in this article:

https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/6/14188624/apple-prototype-i...

edit: parent comment asked "not sure what value Arm is getting from this" but this was later removed. My comment below was answering that.

Tony is one of the few people out there who’s got a deep and broad understanding of how all the pieces need to work together. Marketing, sales, supply chain, software Eng, product marketing…etc. He’s just as comfortable talking about the details of a new microcontroller as he is talking about the marketing implications downstream from it. That’s the value Arm is getting from this.

agreed re: Forstall, but the guy clearly did an amazing job hardware-wise... don't know anything about him personally, but he must be pretty god damn competent.

I wonder if they should bring him back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw4RrcPxBIk

Though Cook had his reasons for firing. https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-why-i-fired-scott-f...

Clearly, Forestall was a bit of a dick.

But I wonder if CEO should also be able to harness diversity in personality and style.

Hey, it worked when they brought back Jobs!

There’s a difference between harnessing diversity of personality and empowering an asshole.

If someone’s personality is “being a dick to people” and you have a choice for someone similarly talented who isn’t a dick to other people, what benefit is the personality trait of “is a dick”?

People have this obsession with the idea that people are successful because of their being a dick rather than in spite of it, and there is not evidence that being an asshole is the cause of success. There is plenty of evidence showing the damage it can cause.

We can compare to Bunnie Huang and Jim Keller, both of whom get important, difficult things done and are far on the other side.

I've had friends work for him and they described him as a hard driving, awful tyrant and generally an asshole. He's clearly intelligent but his personality seems like a bit of a tire fire. The Forstall thing makes more sense in that context, at least to me.

I wonder if Fadell is similar in his own way, from what it sounds like, Nest was a very top-down, stringent environment, which is why it didn't play well with the more open and casual Google after acquisition.

Ah I was referring to Fadell but I understand the ambiguity now.

Ah. Then that proves my suspicions about Nest.

I wonder how Forstall is as a leader, then.

I think it may also depend on your role in the company. I knew someone who worked in marketing at Nest both before and after Fadell's departure. We met a little bit after he'd left and they were struggling a bit because they had essentially felt that they just needed to tailor their work to his taste and it didn't really matter what anyone else thought. Things got harder without that strong personality at the top and more people to please (with arguably worse taste). They were perhaps just short of a true believer, but they did have a lot of respect for him. On the other hand, it didn't seem like he drove the marketing team nearly as hard as the engineers. The media reports that followed his departure described something bordering on a reign of terror that my friend didn't exactly deny but didn't seem to have been subjected to directly.

I’ve heard the same about people who worked directly with Fadell.

However, your last comment made me LOL because Forstall had the same reputation!

Yeah, I had a strong reaction to his claiming all the credit for those products. A simple change from I to we makes all the difference. But I guess that's part of why he's on the board of arm and I'm not :)

Depends whether you are thinking of the screen wheel version or the physical wheel version, I think the physical controls could have lead to a better end product. I think we have touchscreen stockholm syndrome, they're not good until you've adapted for years.

I’m a big fan of Tony. Everyone should listen to the episode where he was on the Lex Friedman podcast. It’s pretty interesting.

Will this lead to problems with cook/apple as apple is quite reliant on ARM licenses?

Also recent news about ARM moving away from licensing to chip companies to directly OEMS such as apple Samsung etc . What will this do?

Imagine what this guy could have done if he had gotten a C64 instead!

Edit: I should really wait before saying something like that, he basically made a C64 from an Apple II!

Good to know actual luminaries can helm critical technology.

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