Tony Fadell is at the Grove, a spectacularly beautiful country estate outside of London. The event is Founders Forum: the ultra exclusive invite-only tech conference. Prince William is in the house. The guest list is lousy with knights and lesser officers of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Marissa Mayer, the now ex-CEO of Yahoo, and Biz Stone, recently returned to Twitter, are mingling with the other hundred or so invitees. But this is really Fadell’s moment.
It’s almost exactly 10 years since the iPhone was released, and the media buzz is inescapable. The press is having trouble coming up with superlatives to describe the impact of a device that has sold more than a billion units. A new book, The One Device, is lighting up the intertubes with fresh gossip about “the secret history of the iPhone.” And Fadell—both the source and the subject of that gossip—is getting his due as one of the guys most responsible for turning Steve Jobs’ one-device-to-rule-them-all vision into reality.
The title of the afternoon session is “What to Build Next?” and Fadell is onstage with two other bona fide tech zillionaires—Niklas Zennström, the Skype guy; and Kevin Ryan, one of New York City’s most successful internet entrepreneurs—as well as a couple of other founder-investor types. Of the five people onstage, Fadell is the only one who helped build an object that every person in the audience has most likely used at one time or another. First Fadell helped build the iPod for Apple, then the iPhone, and then he ventured out on his own to build the Nest thermostat.
Fadell is the star of the show, and he knows it. His self-confidence is well earned but can come across as overweening—especially to those who suddenly find themselves in his shadow. “Any VC who tells you that you have to move to Silicon Valley,” Fadell says at one point, gesticulating wildly, “is being very lazy.” Two of the other people onstage are, in fact, from Silicon Valley venture capital firms, and their collars seem to squeeze a bit tighter. Fadell, in comparison, is supremely comfortable: relaxed and expansive in a pair of bright red sneakers—no socks—and a polo shirt. The moderator, wrapping things up, calls for a lightning round: a rapid-fire series of questions—with only one-word answers allowed.
What’s the biggest problem facing the world right now?
“Climate,” Fadell says. Then he adds, “We’regoingtohavetogonuclear …” before being hushed by the moderator for busting the one-word rule.
What’s the next big thing in tech?
“Computational synthetic biology,” Fadell says, bending the rules a second time.
What is the one word that people who know you would use to describe you?
“Troublemaker!”
With that, the panel is over, and Fadell is mobbed as he tries to leave the Grove’s 18th-century manor. People want autographs, selfies, a word or two—but the most persistent want money and advice. Like many of his contemporaries, Fadell makes personal investments as an angel, through a firm called Future Shape, with one important difference: He says he has a venture-size pool of money—a portfolio of Future Shape investments worth more than half a billion dollars. Looking to make his escape, Fadell slips into the men’s room. One persistent supplicant follows and, while Fadell is standing at the urinal, penis in hand, proceeds to make his pitch. It’s a startup with a new design for a robotic arm. Fadell listens for less than a minute and, shaking off, says: “A new robot arm? China is going to copy that in a second! What then? What’s your value proposition?”
Faster, better, cheaper … blah blah blah.
“Not good enough!” Fadell thinks, before offering some bland words of encouragement and dashing off to slip into the back seat of a black Mercedes-Benz S-class emblazoned with the AMG performance badge. As we start to speed toward central London to catch the afternoon Eurostar to Paris, he entertains the chauffeur (and me) with the penis-pitch story. “I did like his persistence, though,” Fadell says, “I respect that.”
Turning philosophical, Fadell puts on his shades against the bright sun streaming through the backseat sunroof. “It’s kind of like being a film producer,” he says, reflecting on his new role, post-Nest, as an investor. People pitch him, and if he likes their idea, it’s go time.
As if on cue, Fadell is forced to cut his reverie short to take a call from a young journalist doing a story on “the new culture of celebrity in tech.”
Did you ever think that tech would make you into a celebrity?
“Absolutely not!” Fadell says. “The tech business in the ’80s was Revenge of the Nerds. It was geeks. We were looked down upon, trodden upon …” Fadell is working himself into his trademark lather. “ ‘Who are these crazy guys with pocket protectors and broken glasses?’ ” he asks rhetorically. “So you never thought that you were going to become a rock star,” Fadell says, winding down, before quickly amending the thought. “Not that I am,” he says, “but that’s what some people think.”
I don’t think Fadell is a rock star, but I’m quickly realizing that he is not your run-of-the-mill Silicon Valley billionaire making an early retirement out of an investing hobby either. For starters, he doesn’t even live in the Valley anymore. He has moved to Paris. Permanently. And the more I learn about him, the more I begin to suspect that Silicon Valley’s favorite son secretly hates the Valley. To hear Fadell tell it, he certainly has reason to.
Rewind to the early ’90s. Fadell, a computer engineering major at the University of Michigan, has already tasted entrepreneurial success with a little education-software company called Constructive Instruments that he founded in his dorm room, but he wants more. “I was getting very frustrated being a big fish in a little pond in Ann Arbor,” Fadell says, “and my eyes were looking at the West going, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley.” For a technologist like Fadell, there was no other place. Then, when news broke that a handful of Apple alumni—including the hero-programmer behind the Mac, Andy Hertzfeld—had escaped the mothership and banded together to form a new company, General Magic, Fadell saw his future.
Not long after graduating in 1991, he showed up at General Magic’s offices in Mountain View, California, early one midweek morning, unannounced. And because he was there before the receptionist, he just started wandering the halls, uncomfortable in his jacket and tie, résumé in hand. He eventually found some people to pester—people who had clearly been there all night, hacking away. Leave us alone, kid. “I was humbled in the first 10 minutes of being there,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is not like Michigan, I have got to be here, these are the smartest people ever, I have got to be working here. I have to be working here.’”
The young Fadell had persistence, and it paid off: By the end of 1991 he had a job offer from General Magic. “I wouldn’t have said, back then, ‘This guy’s going to change the world,’ particularly,” Hertzfeld says. “He was incredibly talented, very opinionated, obviously very bright, and physically very strong.”
At General Magic, Fadell joined a small team that was trying to build something the company had labeled a personal communicator. “It had email. It had downloadable apps. It had shopping. It had animations and graphics and games. It had telecommunications—a phone, a built-in modem,” Fadell says. “It was the iPhone 14 years too soon.” It never got off the ground, and Magic ran out of tricks and cash by the early 2000s, but the experience was formative. “Hardware, software, services. That was the first link that I ever saw like that,” Fadell says. “That has influenced everything I’ve done since.”
A few years after leaving General Magic, Fadell had his own startup, Fuse Systems. It was a hardware company that was attempting to capitalize on the Napster-fueled rise of the MP3 music format. Yves Béhar, the noted product designer, remembers working with the nascent company: The idea was to make a full line of MP3-optimized music players—everything from a component stereo system to a small portable Walkman-type device. “Tony was talking about a world where media, especially music, was going to be all digital,” Béhar says. “And he got so excited and animated and passionate that he broke a chair—he was just very physical, getting up and sitting down again—and that became a joke: Tony’s a kind of excitable guy who breaks the furniture.”
To get the idea off the ground, Fadell rented an office in San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill neighborhood and hired about a dozen people. Then Apple called. This was just after Jobs had returned to the company he founded and was struggling to save it from oblivion. Jobs was looking for a way out of a no-win battle with Microsoft and, like Fadell, had hit upon the idea of a portable MP3 player. Toshiba had just announced the launch of a small-format disk drive that would give the Apple MP3 player a crucial advantage over the competition. But Apple needed someone who knew the tech forward and backward to build out a prototype. Executives asked him to come in to discuss something—they were cagey about exactly what.
Fadell assumed Apple needed some help designing a next-gen Newton and took the meeting. It was only after he signed the nondisclosure agreements that he discovered that the company wanted him to design a portable MP3 player—the future iPod. In effect, Apple was asking Fadell for help in competing with himself. Yet if Fuse were to have any chance of survival, Fadell had to take the consulting gig at Apple, because Fuse needed another infusion of cash. The traditional sources of funding had shut down because the dotcom crash was already under way.
Fadell put Fuse on autopilot and designed the iPod prototype for Apple in six short weeks. After he demonstrated how the iPod could be built—which components, which interfaces, and at what price—Jobs put Fadell into a double bind. He asked him to abandon the Fuse MP3 player designs and develop his idea inside Apple, which would mean killing his own company. It was agonizing for the young entrepreneur. “I was just like, whoa!” says Fadell, who even now gets worked up at the thought. “I am like, ‘Wait a second, I have a company, and there are people over there working on this other thing. How am I going to do this?’ So I just got in my car, and I started driving through the hills of Saratoga and Los Gatos. I go up to Skyline, I wind up those roads, and I’m just sitting there going, ‘What am I going to do? What am I doing?’”
In the end, Fadell didn’t have much of a choice. The odds of Fuse succeeding on its own were not good. So he put his own dreams in a box and went to work for Apple as the head of the iPod project. The first iPod was not perfect, but it was still way better than the competition—and as it was refined, it grew into a monster hit. Steve Wozniak, who watched it all happen from the inside, credits the iPod with turning the entire company around. “It made our revenues double, our profits double, and our stock double,” he says. The iPod was a hit, and Fadell was a hero inside Apple.
When Jobs announced that he had cancer in 2004, Fadell was on every list of potential successors. He even reminded people of the mercurial Apple founder, both in his ability to get things done and in the way he operated. “Tony is a little bit like Steve Jobs in the way he shaded the truth,” says Hertzfeld, who was close to both men. “It’s not exactly lying, but it’s expressing things in an advantageous way.”
The iPhone, which came out in 2007, was Fadell’s last chapter at Apple. As the guy who built the iPod, he had earned the right to shape the company’s next flagship product. The phone project started in earnest at the end of 2004. By that time, Fadell and his team had prototyped iPods that could also make phone calls. Fadell’s design used the iPod’s circular controller like a rotary dial. But there was another team inside Apple with a bigger idea—the all-touch screen. And the competition between the two teams at times escalated into full-on corporate warfare.
Fadell lost the battle over the iPhone’s final design—but, because of his previous success, he was still expected to build the hardware, a power-sharing situation that created all kinds of drama with Scott Forstall, Apple’s legendary software guru. “This is when Steve’s leadership and management style started to permeate the company,” remembers Andy Grignon, the manager responsible for the “phone” part of the iPhone. “Tony started to adopt Steve’s mannerisms and persona because it was a pressure cooker—but also you emulate what works, right? And so everyone started screaming at each other. It became just like the thing to do: Fly off the fucking handle.” And by the time the iPhone was ready to launch, it seemed Fadell was no longer the golden boy.
Jobs appeared to confirm this fact in an exceptionally cruel way: The message was signaled from the stage at the very event where the iPhone was unveiled, on January 9, 2007. When Jobs was demonstrating the iPhone’s contact list, he showed that he could delete a contact with one tap—and the contact he deleted was “Tony Fadell.” The public may not have thought twice about the gesture, but the Apple engineers in the audience understood exactly what was going on. “People laughed about it, but everybody knew,” Grignon says. “Steve was in many ways diabolical, and Tony and Steve’s relationship had grown increasingly rocky.” Fadell insists that his relationship with Jobs remained solid, but he seems to have been pretty decisively outmaneuvered. “That demo script,” Fadell says, “was created by Scott Forstall.” (A source closely involved with the presentation says Jobs was ad-libbing.) Fadell and his wife, Danielle Lambert, also an Apple employee, eventually decided they’d had enough and were gone by November 2008. Fadell says they left to spend more time with their kids. “Steve was wondering why we didn’t do it sooner,” Fadell says. “And then for a year, year and a half, we kind of went around the world.” The city they liked best was Paris, so there they settled. They bought a big, beautiful apartment in the seventh arrondissement, started filling it with contemporary art, and enrolled their eldest son in the local school.
[#video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/0wQ7oL9pIIU
“Fuck Apple!”
Fadell is in full manic panic, and those are the first words out of his mouth as I step into his garden courtyard in the seventh. It’s early in the morning, the day after Founders Forum in London, and I’m being escorted onto the premises by Fadell’s PR person. Today she has scheduled Fadell for a long sit-down interview with me. But all of that has been forgotten, as Fadell has just been hit with some disturbing news. “Fucking Apple,” he says. Fadell clams up after this outburst, but I later hear there is a dispute brewing between one of the Future Shape companies and Apple.
Fadell has invested in hundreds of startup companies, and I have no idea which of them is butting heads with Apple. However, I do glean enough to understand that there is nothing unusual about the morning’s drama. Fadell is a drama king: The more drama, the better. In fact, Fadell’s PR person is a specialist in what has come to be called crisis PR, and she tells me that with Fadell, “every day is a new adventure.”
Indeed, the next thing I hear from Fadell is that “we’ve got to go now.” He has decided that, instead of sitting down for the interview this morning, he has to make an appearance at VivaTech—the TechCrunch of Europe. He points to a pair of bikes waiting in the courtyard, outfitted with a device that gives them an electric boost. The devices are from a startup called Superpedestrian, and Fadell is an investor. The bet on e-bikes is emblematic of the types of investments he’s looking for. He tends to like hardware startups. He looks for industries that are very stable, where the basic designs, tools, or materials have barely changed for a long time. Consider Modern Meadow, a Future Shape portfolio company, which is trying to replace cow leather with a lab-grown substitute. Then there’s a heating and cooling company aiming to replace every compressor in every industrial refrigerator in the world with a solid-state thermoelectric cooler—a chip, in essence. In Fadell’s mind, the ultimate triumph would be a breakthrough battery: “If we have energy storage technologies that are very cheap and very efficient, then we’re going to see wars stop, because no one is going to be fighting over oil reserves anymore.”
We each take a bike and head into traffic, riding south on Boulevard Saint-Germain and then merging into traffic to veer onto Boulevard Raspail. Fadell has our destination—the Paris Expo center—dialed into his iPhone. It’s only 4 miles away, but we are going to have to sprint to get there in time. There’s only one problem: “My boost doesn’t work!” Fadell says.
No matter, he just stands up on his pedals and grinds like a bike messenger who has just guzzled a gallon of espresso. Keeping up is not easy, even with my Superpedestrian-assisted superlegs, because Fadell is blowing through red lights, splitting lanes, squeezing through wormholes in moving traffic. And doing it all one-handed so he can keep an eye on the map.
“Watch out for cops, OK?” he says as we blast through another busy intersection. “If they see me riding with my phone out, it’s an automatic ticket.”
We’re cranking, running with traffic on the Rue de Rennes, and then the second technical fail strikes.
“What the hell?!” Fadell grunts, glaring at his screen while spinning his crankset madly. “My phone is only at 50 percent charge. It was full when we left this morning.”
“You need to be able to jack it into that battery in the bike,” I say, offering an unsolicited design critique.
“You’re right!” he says, leaning into a chicane designed to slow traffic.
A left, a right. The streets are getting wider: four lanes, then six. Traffic is moving faster and faster. Fadell is starting to sweat.
“I need to reboot. There’s a bug in the phone. It’s sucking power,” he says. We glide to a stop at the edge of a deserted plaza near a train station so Fadell can reboot his iPhone. The reboot doesn’t fix the bug. “Such is the life of a digital citizen,” he sighs.
I have an idea: I hand him my Android so he can continue to navigate, and we are off again. It’s all downhill from here, and soon we are on a paved bike path. Fadell narrowly escapes a head-on collision with a helmeted mountain biker while trying to get his bearings from the unfamiliar phone.
We’ve got gravity at our back, trees to our left, and pedestrians to our right. We’re laying down a groove in a dedicated bike lane carved out of an impossibly wide Parisian sidewalk.
“It says we’re here! Do you see it? It’s just to our left somewhere,” Fadell says, craning his neck, looking for the Expo center.
Then, crash!
Fadell’s front wheel goes kerflooey against a half-inch granite curb delineating the edge of the bike lane, and he’s thrown to the ground. The bicyclist behind us swerves to avoid the crash and curses at Fadell while he’s down, splayed over his crumpled bike: “Merde!”
My phone is yards away, having escaped Fadell’s grip when he went flying. The screen is shattered. Fadell has dirt stains on the knees of his white jeans.
“You’re not going to put this in the story, are you?” Fadell asks.
The one problem with moving to Paris was that Fadell had no real network there. Then he met Xavier Niel—a man sometimes referred to as “the French Steve Jobs.” He made his money as an internet entrepreneur and now, like Fadell, invests it. “I was reading blogs and stuff, but I wanted to talk to other people in the business,” Fadell tells me.
“At the time, Paris wasn’t a big tech city,” says Niel, who recalls meeting Fadell early one afternoon in his office in 2009. It was a blind date bromance, and they talked for almost 10 hours straight. “Oh my God, we just bonded instantly,” Fadell says. “We had similar backgrounds, just in different countries. He had an Apple II, I had an Apple II.”
“We spoke a lot about electronics …” Niel says.
Fadell had an idea about a company of his own and was looking for collaborators. “Nest was burning inside me to be created,” he says. Niel was an early investor.
The Nest elevator pitch: home thermostat meets the iPhone. Nest was never simply about making a smarter, more beautiful thermostat, any more than the iPhone was about making a smarter, more beautiful phone. The business pitch was that, someday soon, every device in the average house—every lock, appliance, power outlet, and light switch—would be replaced by a fancy cloud-connected gizmo. And what would connect this so-called internet of things? Who would provide the operating system to the houses and apartments we would all be living in? Well, Nest of course.
Fadell moved back to Silicon Valley to build it with Matt Rogers, who had been Fadell’s colleague at Apple. The company was incorporated in June 2010 and was in stealth mode for more than a year. Google’s Sergey Brin saw a prototype early in 2011 and immediately moved to buy the company. Fadell said no. Steve Jobs heard about the thermostat and wanted to see it too, but by the time Fadell felt it was perfect enough to show to the perfectionist, Jobs was on his deathbed. He never saw it.
The Nest thermostat debuted at the end of 2011 and earned Nest a raft of plaudits and design awards, and all the attention was making Fadell nervous. “I have seen this before,” he says, “where you’re the biggest fish in the smaller pond, and then all of a sudden the pond grows immensely because Google or Microsoft or Apple or Amazon or Samsung gets into it, and now you’re a very tiny fish with these big, big, big whales.”
By the summer of 2013, the second product in the Nest family, a smart smoke detector, was about to come out, and Fadell was looking to raise more money through an investment round. “We had connected products, but what we wanted to do was connect the whole thing together. That was the vision of Nest. So how much money was it going to take?” Fadell asks. The answer: a ton of money—and time too. Meanwhile, Google was still interested in buying the company outright. Nest was starting to look like the key that could unlock a gazillion-dollar “connected home” market, and acquiring Fadell seemed to be a chance to inject Google with some of the design DNA that had made Apple the most valuable company in the world.
Fadell was pressed hard against the same dilemma he’d faced at Fuse a decade earlier. He could bet everything on himself and risk losing—or he could try to pursue his vision inside the confines of a warm corporate cocoon. This time the double bind wasn’t so heartbreaking. Fadell wouldn’t have to kill his company, because Nest would effectively live inside Google. Fadell could keep control while drawing on all the Google infrastructure he needed to build Nest into a connected-home platform. “All kinds of promises were made,” Fadell says. Including, according to a source who saw the contract, a five-year “runway”—a period of time in which Nest could spend and innovate freely with the goal of capturing the entire connected-home ecosystem that everyone knew was coming.
In January 2014, Google acquired Nest for $3.2 billion. Five months later, Google bought Dropcam, a smart home-security-camera company. The plan was to do some modifications, rebrand the system, and add the “new” Nest Cam into Fadell’s product line. That’s what happened, but not before the former Dropcam CEO, Greg Duffy, attempted a coup d’état early in 2015. According to an article on the news site The Information, Duffy sent an email to Google CEO Larry Page complaining about Fadell, his boss at Nest. He also recommended that Fadell be fired and suggested that he himself should replace Fadell. When Duffy’s insubordinate power play got no response from Page, he quit Nest and, for good measure, says he told Fadell, “I think you’re running this company like a tyrant bureaucrat!” before walking out.
There’s definitely a tyrannical streak in Fadell—in a heated moment Fadell once asked his cofounder, Rogers, to postpone his honeymoon to help the Nest team meet some deadlines. (Rogers knew the storm would pass and took his honeymoon as scheduled.) But Fadell’s real problem wasn’t his so-called tyranny—it was the new bureaucracy he suddenly found himself in.
The month after Duffy transferred out of Nest, becoming an “entrepreneur in residence” deep inside the Google death star, Ruth Porat was hired as Google’s new CFO. Porat had deep roots in Silicon Valley—her brother, Marc, was Fadell’s boss at General Magic—but Porat came from Wall Street.
She was hired to bring financial discipline to Google. And indeed, within five months, Google announced that it was no longer “Google” anymore. It was Alphabet, a holding company that would contain at least a dozen divisions. There would be the core search-and-advertising company called “Google” as well as what Alphabet called its “other bets.” Nest was one of the other bets, and as a division Nest would have to meet certain revenue goals, and its balance sheet would suddenly be subject to large overhead and other indirect charges from Alphabet.
Fadell remembers the moment vividly. He thought he had a promise: five years in which to build Nest into the dominant connected-home platform. But everything changed when Google morphed into Alphabet. “They decided there was a new regime in town, and they said, ‘We’re going to have all new metrics,’ and I was like, ‘This is not what we agreed to before,’ because this was not just about fiscal things—it was about getting married. I had never thought about being bought. It was about getting married to build a beautiful child, right?”
Fadell soldiered on under the new regime for four months, until at the end of 2015 he discovered that the new bottom-line-oriented Alphabet was going to sell Nest. “At that point I knew it wasn’t going to work out, and that’s when I came home to my wife, after a lot of struggles with the Alphabet thing. It wasn’t working, it was, OK, it’s over.”
Things went south after Fadell told Page that he wanted out in December of 2015. The tech blogs started circling, and the famously tight-lipped Google started leaking. Recode got ahold of a meme, created by someone inside the company, that showed a cartoon mob, torches raised high, behind the words “sell nest.” The Information did a damning exposé, featuring Duffy’s version of Nest as a bloated, ineffectual organization. In a follow-up blog post, Duffy accused Nest’s leadership of “fetishizing only the most superfluous and negative traits of their mentors”—in other words, Fadell had emulated Steve Jobs’ dark side but not his capacity for getting things done. Fadell, of course, rejected the charges: In his view, Duffy was acting out of line, while Nest was racking up accomplishments at Google—a regular drumbeat of significant hardware redesigns and new software services. Fadell felt blindsided by Duffy and hamstrung by legal agreements restricting what he could say publicly: “I was disappointed Google did not step up to the line when these personal attacks were made on me and Nest,” he says. Furthermore, Google threatened Fadell with legal action if Fadell went ahead and defended himself in the press—this tidbit according to the same source who saw the five-year runway clause in the original purchase agreement between Google and Nest. Alphabet, which politely declined to comment on what exactly went wrong at Nest, whether Fadell quit or was fired, or even if there was any runway agreement in the first place, vehemently denies threatening Fadell with legal action. Whatever really happened behind closed doors, we do know for certain that by June 2016, Fadell had returned to Paris for good.
Given that Fadell has tangled with major Silicon Valley companies and lost twice, it’s hardly surprising that he decided to relocate to Paris. The surprising thing is that he may have found something better. At least that’s the case Xavier Niel makes. Silicon Valley, Niel says, is for suckers. He ticks off the downsides: the sky-high salaries needed to attract engineers, the atrocious traffic, the relative dearth of cultural institutions, the isolation from the great cities of Europe …
I am, to say the least, dubious: France is known for being unfavorable ground for businesses of all kinds—especially startups. It has high taxes, rigid labor laws, and a culture that is averse to the free market. But I have to concede that Niel, a billionaire eight times over, is putting his money where his mouth is. He’s making the case against Silicon Valley in the middle of Station F, a massive complex on the outskirts of Paris devoted exclusively to the care and feeding of startups. The building that houses it all is a former railroad terminal almost as long as the Eiffel Tower is tall and filled with a sea of desks—more than 3,000 in all. Basically, it’s a gargantuan coworking space, one that comes with all the amenities you’d find in a big Silicon Valley company campus—foosball tables, private conference rooms, fancy food courts, a chill zone, beanbag chairs. All of it is owned and operated by Niel.
He operates as its landlord. Young entrepreneurs with an idea have to apply to get in, and if they do, they pay a nominal fee for a desk and plug-and-play access to the entire French entrepreneurial ecosystem. Looking down from all sides are offices of the permanent tenants: angel networks, VC firms, incubator and accelerator programs, outposts of large firms like Facebook and Microsoft looking to hire and acquire. Those tenants pay top dollar for the advantage of being in the same building with all the young guns.
One of the nicest of the permanent offices belongs to Fadell. Future Shape, his fund, is now worth, he estimates, between $500 million and $1 billion. That’s equivalent to a medium- or even large-size venture fund. But the difference is that, unlike a VC fund, Fadell doesn’t have a bunch of limited partners backing him, tracking returns over (typically) a 10-year maturation period. Future Shape is all Fadell’s money, so there’s none of the usual VC pressure to IPO or be acquired. His personal balance sheet is not public, but financial lightning struck him twice: Both he and his wife got a bundle of Apple stock options back when AAPL was dirt cheap, and then he sold Nest to Google for $3.2 billion. “It’s all covered,” Fadell says, referring to his finances. “I don’t have to worry about it.” So the point of Future Shape, for Fadell, is finding those magic products—like the iPhone or the Nest thermostat—that need long runways but might change everything.
“All of these incumbents with these big businesses that have been around for 100 or 200 years can be unseated,” Fadell says, “because technology is the unseating element, the levelizer.” When Fadell talks about “technology” he means something a bit different than the usual definition. He waves off things like email and spreadsheets as mere bolt-ons to existing business models. His thesis is that almost every industry is up for grabs when and if someone like him redesigns the essential hardware with software and services baked in. It’s the formula Fadell learned at General Magic and then applied at Apple and Nest. Everywhere he looks, he sees industries ripe for his particular brand of disruption: logistics and trucking, urban transportation, farming.
It’s an exceedingly familiar rap. Every venture fund claims that disruptive opportunity is everywhere—it’s the very premise of that type of investing—and lots of them claim, for one reason or another, that they don’t push their startups for exits.
Fadell indulges in one heresy, however: an insistence that you no longer need to throw yourself at the feet of the Silicon Valley masters, as he did 25 years ago. “If you’re launching a startup today, don’t go to Silicon Valley if you’re not from there,” Fadell tells a group of awestruck students at a coding school that feeds its graduates into Station F. “Don’t do it! You’re at an incredible disadvantage.” It is clear that he’s also talking about himself.
In fact, whatever the audience, whether it’s coding kids or the founders of Founders Forum, Fadell never misses a chance to pooh-pooh the Valley. Fadell made a fortune in Silicon Valley and now has left it for good. He’s putting down roots in Paris. He studies with a French tutor every day and is getting fluent. His two kids are enrolled in the local école, and the headquarters of Future Shape—the new business—are inside Station F.
You don’t need Freud to figure out why. Look past the big wallet and the big ego and you see a guy who has been grievously hurt by the Silicon Valley system—exploited and then betrayed, twice. First by Steve Jobs, who squeezed Fadell for all the juice he had and then publicly tossed him aside. The second time it was the same shit, different company—Fadell was again sucker-punched on the way out. The wave of bad publicity while he was at Nest—the Recode memes, the Information exposé—came after Fadell told Page he wanted to leave Google.
Sure, he might have failed altogether if it hadn’t been for the support of Apple and Alphabet. And by one very important measure, Fadell succeeded stupendously, thanks to Silicon Valley: He walked away from both companies with huge piles of money. Maybe for mere mortals, money would be enough. But it wasn’t for Jobs, who famously plotted and finally succeeded in winning back the control that Apple’s early financiers took from him. Hardware is tough: Putting millions of things in the hands of millions of people requires large amounts of capital. And when someone gives you large amounts of capital, it often means you lose control. Elon Musk, who is two years younger than Fadell, is the first Silicon Valley hardware titan in generations to retain control of his inventions. Fadell seems to yearn to oversee his own dominion. This idea that he had to sell his babies is, I sense, what drives him.
Fadell is almost pathologically compelled to say what’s on his mind, and never in the week I spent shadowing him did he say anything that smacked of self-pity. But by the end of the week, it was clear what this third act of his career is about. He’s trying to challenge a Silicon Valleycentric system that separated him from his creations.
In France, Fadell has a mini-replica of Silicon Valley outside the Future Shape door. It’s a place where he can pick out younger versions of himself, give them money, and—in a sense—watch all the possible versions of his own life story unfold again and again. “My job is to come here and bring Silicon Valley here,” he says. “It’s that cultural element that people are trying to replicate around the world, of taking risks and believing in yourself and changing the world, and there’s no reason it can only be done in Silicon Valley.” Fadell is the vector, the human tissue culture in a grand cloning experiment—as well as the experimenter, tweaking the rules.
What I see is a guy trying to prove to Silicon Valley that his way was the right way all along—with the irony that he’s trying to make that case in a high-tax country that has, so far, produced very few high tech companies of note. But who knows? It might just work. Station F is not some government-hatched “development” plan but rather the private gamble of a self-made tech billionaire, and Niel’s stated goal is to have it pump out a thousand additional startups a year into what is one of Europe’s biggest startup cities. “It’s the ambition of all the people here, including Tony, as well as our new president Macron”—the young French president has met with both Fadell and Niel—“to help this ecosystem become huge.”
As for Fadell’s Future Shape, it already includes chunks of some of the more promising non–Silicon Valley companies going—Superpedestrian in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Modern Meadow in Nutley, New Jersey; Convargo in Paris; DICE in London; CashShield in Singapore—and to a person their CEOs have described Fadell’s behind-the-scenes help as invaluable. Judging by the idolization that Fadell gets from young French coders, Future Shape will undoubtedly get early access to the startups that will emerge from Station F and elsewhere. His rock-star status is probably his main advantage as an investor. Will it be enough to beat Valley VCs at their own game? We’ll see.
But in another sense, Fadell’s big bet on Paris has already paid off. Spiritually, he’s back home—to that Midwestern place where he was before he was sucked into Silicon Valley’s vortex. He calls his own shots. He’s a big fish in a small pond. He’s in control. And this time around, Silicon Valley comes to him. “Tony meets more American tech people in Paris than in the US,” Niel says. “Because if you are a big US tech manager, you come to Paris at least one or two times a year—and when they do, they all call Tony!”
By all means, when you come to Paris, you should definitely look Fadell up. He’s a wild man, a maverick, a bull in a china shop, and a lot of fun. But take one bit of advice from me: Whatever you do, don’t let him borrow your phone.
Adam Fisher (@AdamcFisher) is the author of Valley of Genius, an oral history of Silicon Valley. It will be published in spring 2018 by Hachette.
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