Anthony Michael Fadell was born in Michigan in 1969, to a Lebanese-American father and a Polish-American mother. His father was a sales executive with the Levi Strauss company and the family moved frequently when he was growing up. He attended 12 schools in a 15-year period. Grosse Pointe, Michigan was the community the Fadell family most often returned to, and he graduated from Grosse Pointe South High School. His maternal grandfather, a teacher and school superintendent, was an inveterate tinkerer and taught him to use tools, build things and repair machinery. He discovered computers at age 12 and caddied at a local golf club to raise money to buy his first Apple II. In high school, he perused MacWorld and the other computer magazines and dreamed of working with the team responsible for creating Apple's Macintosh computer. He got an B.Sc. in computer engineering from the University of Michigan and as an undergraduate built a small business, Constructive Instruments, producing multimedia composition software for children.
A new products division was spun-off Apple, General Magic, and several of Apple's most talented employees left to join the new firm. Eager to "work with my heroes," Fadell packed his bags for California and scored a job at the startup. He spent three years at General Magic, exploring the potential of handheld devices to make information technology truly portable. He developed a number of new devices, including the Sony Magic Link and Motorola Envoy. The company was packed with talent and new ideas but never achieved takeoff. Historians of the industry call it "the most influential failure" in Silicon Valley.
After leaving General Magic, he served as chief technology officer of the Mobile Computing Group at the international consumer electronics giant Philips. He helped develop a pair of portable devices, the Velo and Nino, but Philips never fully committed to marketing them and he was soon on the move again. A lifelong music lover, he hoped to develop a portable digital music player. While seeking financing for his own startup, he received an invitation to advise Apple, where founder Steve Jobs was once again at the helm.
Jobs too,was interested in developing a music player, and Fadell went to work for Apple as an outside contractor in 2001. He was wary of going to work for another large company after his experience at Philips, but when he presented his design, Jobs offered him a full-time job leading a new Special Projects group.
Fadell oversaw the first 18 iterations of the iPod, the device that revived Apple’s flagging fortunes and massively disrupted the cassette-tape and CD-based music industry. Within five years, he rose from outside consultant to Senior Vice President in charge of the iPod division.
When Steve Jobs decided to move into the mobile phone sector, he placed Fadell in charge of the new project. Efforts to add a phone to the architecture of the iPod failed, but when he and his team reimagined the project as a mobile phone with a built-in iPod, they created another game-changing device, the iPhone. For the second time, he and his team had overturned the equilibrium of the consumer electronics industry and set Apple on the path to becoming the most highly capitalized company in history.
While he was sometimes mentioned as a possible successor to Jobs, their relationship was as turbulent as it was productive. Friction between the pair led to impassioned arguments and repeated threats by Fadell to resign. Meanwhile, he began dating Apple’s vice president for human resources, Danielle Lambert, and the couple married within a year. In time, the demands of a growing family began to conflict with their grueling work schedules, and the pair resigned from Apple in 2008. Fadell took his family for a round-the-world tour, based in Paris, France, while completing an 18-month commitment as an advisor to Jobs.
Returning to California, Fadell and Lambert set out to build an environmentally sustainable, energy-efficient dream home in Lake Tahoe. When Fadell became dissatisfied with the existing thermostat designs, he set himself the task of creating an elegant, intelligent device that could conserve energy by learning the users' habits and adjusting the temperature of the home accordingly. It occurred to him that many of the devices in everyday use in the home were overdue for reinvention. With a former Apple colleague, Matt Rogers, he created a new company, Nest Labs, to bring digital technology into the basic systems of the modern home.
They recruited more former Apple personnel to staff the new company, and given his achievements at Apple, venture capital was quickly drawn to the startup. The Nest Learning Thermostat reached the market in October 2011 and has been followed by Nest smoke detectors and security systems. He has authored more than 300 patents. In 2012, he received the Alva Award as "the next great serial inventor." em>TIME, Fortune, Vanity Fair, Business Insider, Fast Company, CNN and CNBC have all named him to their lists of leading innovators.
In 2014, Google acquired Nest for $3.2 billion, making Fadell as the principal Nest shareholder a billionaire overnight. With his newfound wealth, he created an investment firm, Future Shape, to fund creative new businesses. He was an early investor in and adviser to Impossible Foods Inc., the Silicon Valley-based developer of plant-based meat substitutes. He has supplied the company with strategic advice while recruiting investors and personnel.
Meanwhile, he continued to run Nest as a division of Google for the first year after the merger. In 2015, He was put in charge of the stumbling Google Glass project, the company’s controversial effort to create a wearable computer to be worn like eyeglasses. When Google was reorganized at the end of the year, Nest was spun off to operate alongside Google as a subsidiary of a new parent company, Alphabet, Inc. The following spring, he resigned his positions with Nest and Google, and moved his growing family back to Paris.
In 2018, he moved his family to Bali, Indonesia, and began a yearlong firsthand study of Asian market opportunities. He observed the expansion of Impossible Foods into Hong Kong and Singapore while exploring financial technology startups that serve populations who live without credit cards or bank accounts. He is also reportedly investigating opportunities in battery manufacture and plastic waste recycling. One area he has avoided is mainland China, whose vast market and innumerable startups he prefers to leave to the experts.
Meanwhile, Fadell has built a European network for Future Shape, which as of 2019 has funded more than 200 startups, including Impossible Foods, whose progress seems unstoppable. Its plant-based proteins can now be found in Burger King's Impossible Whopper.
Skapa: Min guide till hur du bygger produkter, team och organisationer som förändrar världen