I knew there were all kinds of interesting things going on at Google, but now that I've seen them, my mind has been blown - in a great way. They have all these amazing projects and people that the world doesn't know anything about. I'm like a kid in a candy store - it's an idea factory.
I've been working with contractors designing and building a house on a nonstop basis since 2005. I learned about all these systems of audio, construction, electricity, energy, water systems.
Thermostats are made by very large companies with no incentive to innovate. Their customers are contractors or HVAC wholesalers, not consumers. So why spend to make them better? It's a good business.
We work crazy hours in Silicon Valley; my wife says we're all kind of diseased in some way. We're totally obsessive compulsive - when we see an idea, we're like, 'let me in, it's so much fun.'
You start with the right amount of rational and emotional experiences. You have to blend those in your product when you come out.
I knew a lot about product design before coming to Apple, but I didn't understand a lot about consumer experience design, which is really Apple's forte.
Nest Thermostat owners like the carbon monoxide link. If Nest Protect's carbon monoxide alarm goes off, the Nest Thermostat automatically turns off the gas furnace.
It can't be that difficult to build a great thermostat. So I decided to figure out: What would the thermostat for the iPhone generation look like? I got this bug. It really infected my brain. I kept thinking about it. This could be a cool product that matters and a cool product that has a great business.
It wasn't until the Apple Macintosh that people understood what true hardware-software integration was about. It took one company to line it up: low-cost hardware, cool graphics, third-party products built on top of it, in an all-in-one attractive package that was accessible to consumer marketing.
Typical mergers happen when there are two competitors coming together, and they reduce overhead.
You need to set near-term milestones. Put the assumptions down on paper, and make it to your vision or ultimate product. Your team has to understand where they're going. Your partners need to understand where they're going.
When I was four or five years old, my grandfather showed me how to build things, paint, saw. Through years of fixing bikes, repairing lawn mowers, I learned how things work.
Well, you can say there is a self driving car. I'm seeing the automation of vehicles. Really, computer-assisted driving. I think that is really interesting to us because we are taking all of the sensors technologies and putting them in cars and making people safer.
