**Master’s Advice, with a Whiff of Ass **

  • Assholes: These are mostly men and sometimes women who come in some flavor of selfish, or deceitful, or cruel. *

Tony Fadell may be the worlds most successful builder for world-changing products. I would argue he surpasses both Musk and Jobs, since Fadell was primary driver behind not only the iPod and iPhone, but also showing he could do it independently at Nest. Tony is also an asshole, and that coprolite scent unfortunately has diffused into the entire book.

Just as sewage backflow can ruin even the best meal, Fadell’s crass and righteous arrogance spoils otherwise interesting stories.(1) Warning signs come in the introduction, where he tells his readers that * The world is full of mediocre, middle of the road companies creating mediocre, middle of the road crap. * But the first red flag was a chapter creating an entire nomenclature of assholes working in tech. If you meet with so many assholes that you need a categorization system, you might be the asshole.

It’s hard to come off poorly in your own memoir, but Fadell succeeds. His business competitors are either dumb or vindictive, indeed anybody not working at a high paying tech job must be dumb or defective. He takes joy in creating enemies. * That’s right fuckers, we’re coming for your lunch. * He even manages to fail to understand the business model of both his former employer and many other companies *[Their] goal is to sell user’s data to big business. That’s the story of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Instagram. *

Much of the book is goldilocks advice: Listen to your lawers, but not too much. Empower your teams, but not too much. Too bad Tony preaches that *If you want to start a company … you have to be the mission driven asshole. * It’s a shame because I see good people who believe this turn into bad people. They don’t pay their employees, they steal time and create broken families, they treat other humans in strict proportion to their ability to help the ‘mission’ of a startup. It might start with the workaholic gen-X Apple culture that Steve Jobs created and Fadell proseltyzes, but it ends with Theranos and the excesses of Uber.

In sum, taking this book’s advice might make you a better hardware PM, but it’ll also make you a worse person.

**

(1) Even at a dining establishment with a sewage problem, sometimes the wind shifts just right and you get good bites - some quotes I found helpful:

  • The value of startups is simply * Another lesson learned via gutpunch *
  • Manager Advice: * If you are doing what you loved in your old job, then you’re probably doing the wrong thing. You’re doing the job that you used to be good at, so you should be spending about 85% of your time managing. * *Breakpoints - company breakpoints come at 18, 40. *No project should last longer than 18 months. After that point the project is either infinite in time, or the company priorities will have changed too much for the project to continue.

** 97th book of 2022; 1.5 Stars **