I had such failure for the first ten years in Silicon Valley. General Magic — over a billion dollars invested in 1990 dollars! Could you imagine what that is today? The best team in the world. We were told we were gonna topple Microsoft and all these companies.
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Tony Fadell
Engineer and designer; led the iPod and iPhone teams at Apple, founder of Nest Labs
United States · b. 1969
Technology
About
Tony Fadell is an American engineer, designer and entrepreneur. He was senior vice president of the iPod division at Apple and worked on the first three generations of the iPhone, then founded Nest Labs, the connected-thermostat company acquired by Google in 2014.
4 answers
Learn by doing, not learn first, then do. The way you discover what it is you like to do in life is by doing first, then learning about it.
every time I heard the word “smart” attached to anything, it means it’s pretty dumb, because no one knows what it really does. They just add “smart” as a prefix to say, “Oh, you must buy this, because it’s smart.” If they can’t tell you what it does and why it does it, don’t buy it just because it says “smart.”
Elliot, he has such passion for what it was we were doing that he instilled that passion in me. He was like, “Just go for it. Make it happen.” And I would give him some wild idea, and he’d say, “Go try it.” It was that next set of just knocking down the fear of failure. Just go try anything.
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