“In the late 1990s a young entrepreneur named Tony Fadell tried to persuade Stewart Alsop, a journalist who had recently become a venture capitalist, to invest in his startup, Fuse Systems. Fadell had done a stint at the pioneering mobile-software company General Magic and then created a division within Philips to make handheld devices,” Adam Lashinsky reports for Fortune. “Neither General Magic nor the Philips pocket computers amounted to much. But Fadell intended to leverage his experience with a new venture. His pitch was not subtle. Says Alsop: ‘He essentially said, ‘I’m the guy who knows more about mobile products than anyone else. Give me money.’’ Alsop declined.”
“An entire decade passed before Fadell asked VCs for cash again. But what a decade it was. Fadell abandoned Fuse Systems and joined Apple to lead the team that created the iPod. That singular achievement–the iPod rejuvenated Apple and reordered the music industry–transformed him from a struggling startup guy to an accomplished executive who’d withstood the sound and fury of Steve Jobs,” Lashinsky reports. “Fadell became known around Silicon Valley as the mercurial ‘godfather’ of the iPod, and he added another dazzling line to his résumé by assisting in the development of the iPhone. When he stepped down from Apple’s management team in 2008, there was much speculation about his next move.”
“Jobs and Fadell had a relationship that alternated between the father/son and school principal/naughty student archetypes. ‘He thought I asked too many questions,’ says Fadell. ‘I would just keep asking, ‘Well, what about that? What about that?’ And he’d say, ‘Enough already.’ It would frustrate him. But then he’d ask me a ton of questions, and he could frustrate me, and I’d be like, ‘Steve, leave me alone,”” Lashinsky reports. “If there’s one thing that gnaws at Fadell, it’s that he never got to tell Jobs about Nest. The two had corresponded, with Jobs checking in to express interest in Fadell’s stealthy startup, which, Fadell had told him, had an energy-conservation aspect to it. (A key selling point to the original Nest device is that it saves electricity by knowing when its owners don’t need it.) By the time Fadell was ready to share more in the summer of 2011, however, Jobs had grown gravely ill, and he died several weeks later. ‘I would have loved to have been able to show it to him, but the timing didn’t work,’ he says. Jobs presumably would have been proud of Fadell. And he almost certainly would have asked a lot of questions.”
Tons more in the full article here.
[Attribution: MacRumors. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]