Tony Fadell

Tony is an active investor and entrepreneur with a 25-year history of founding companies and designing products that profoundly improve people’s lives. He is the founder and former CEO of Nest, the company that pioneered the “Internet of things”. Previously, Tony was the SVP of Apple’s iPod Division and led the team that created the first 18 generations of the iPod and the first three generations of the iPhone. Tony has authored more than 300 patents. In May 2016, TIME named Nest Thermostat, the iPod and iPhone as three of the “50 Most Influential Gadgets of All Time.”

His book Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making, is a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and New York Times bestseller.

Tony was not always the success he is today. His first job out of college was such a disaster that it killed all new development in consumer-oriented personal computers for a decade. The next products he built were commercial failures, then he started his own company – a year before the .com bubble burst.

But after 10 years he learned – with every team, every product, every disaster – how to design, manufacture, market and sell something people actually wanted.