Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making Hardcover – May 3, 2022

Let's say I told you that you could sit down to chat with the inventor and designer of some of the most successful products in history — things so crazy innovative, useful, and cool that they generated *hundreds of billions* of bucks. Heck, one of those products may even be in your pocket right now. And let's say the guy has a lot of great stories to tell — working with the geniuses of his age, taking mad risks, making huge mistakes, scoring epic wins. And he's a pretty good storyteller to boot.Interested? Well, Tony Fadell is that guy — the man behind the iPod, iPhone, Nest Thermostat and and much more you may not have heard of. If you didn't know his name or story till now, here's your chance to learn from one of the greatest inventor-entrepreneurs of all time, and drink in his hard-earned, often counterintuitive wisdom.Fadell divides his book into six parts: Build Yourself; Build Your Career; Build Your Product; Build Your Business; Build Your Team; Be CEO. Each part comprises a few chapters telling stories from his career along with the lessons learned. Each chapter begins with a nugget of concentrated Tony wisdom which is basically incompressible. Heck, the entire *book* is pretty incompressible — I highlighted almost a third of it. Here's one about mentorship:"A good mentor won’t hand you the answers, but they will try to help you see your problem from a new perspective. They’ll loan you some of their hard-fought advice so you can discover your own solution."This is straight-up Buddha talk, the 'ehi-passiko' of "Yeah, I've got some ideas to share but I want you to go figure it out on your own" — if the Buddha were a world-class coder, designer, manager, fundraiser, and CEO. Here's another one on what kind of company to join:"If you’re going to throw your time, energy, and youth at a company, try to join one that’s not just making a better mousetrap. Find a business that’s starting a revolution. A company that’s likely to make a substantial change in the status quo has the following characteristics:1) It’s creating a product or service that’s wholly new or combines existing technology in a novel way that the competition can’t make or even understand…2) This product solves a problem—a real pain point—that a lot of customers experience daily…3) The novel technology can deliver on the company vision—not just within the product but also the infrastructure, platforms, and systems that support it.4) Leadership is not dogmatic about what the solution looks like and is willing to adapt to their customers’ needs.5) It’s thinking about a problem or a customer need in a way you’ve never heard before, but which makes perfect sense once you hear it."What would I have given to have known that as a kid! There's a lifetime of wisdom scrunched down into those five bullet points there — and several more in the rest of the book. Really you'll want to read it for the stories of both epic triumph and epic failure, sometimes happening at the same time. Fadell tells the tales of brilliance and fallibility, the geniuses you may have never heard of, and how the success of no venture, no matter how innovative and well-planned, is ever foreordained.I won't give away too much so you can fully experience the joy of discovering this book on your own. This is obviously required reading if you're a budding entrepreneur. But if you're at all interested in leadership, innovation, management, resilience, or just the origins of miraculous gizmos, you need to read this book. It's about as close as you're going to get to living inside the head of one of our modern-day entrepreneurial legends.-- Ali Binazir, M.D., M.Phil., Happiness Engineer, startup coach and author of The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible, the highest-rated dating book on Amazon, and Should I Go to Medical School?: An Irreverent Guide to the Pros and Cons of a Career in Medicine

This book is excellent. Tony Fadell built the iPod (in 10 months!) & iPhone while at Apple and then founded Nest, which created the connected home category and was acquired by Google. He's one of the great operators of the last 30 years and this book is worth your time just for anecdotes re: General Magic, Jobs, building Nest, & Google politics.With that said, Build is probably the most useful book I've ever read. Fadell has tips for everyone from kids looking for their first job out of college to founders selling their business. I probably grokked 10-15% of the actionable advice on my first read and see myself returning to it repeatedly.Build also comes at an important time. I'm confident America's approaching a Seldon crisis this decade, and the way out is to build great physical things (atoms, not bits). Getting a how-to/memoir from one of the world's greatest living hardware engineers is truly a gift. Concise, entertaining, candid, and actionable, replete with anecdotes and advice, I'm confident Build is worth your time.And hopefully it shames other great operators to write something similar (looking at you Jeff Bezos). The next generation of entrepreneurs are ready for it.

The book lists many suggestions regarding the “recipes” of successful startups. Most of the tips are commonsense, and the non-commonsense ones are based just on the author’s intuition and personal experience. I know several counter-examples to these ideas, but since the recommendations are supposed to be probabilistic statements, my counter-examples are not refutations. The proper method to research this field is by constructing a table of a large representative sample of companies, where (1) the columns are whether the company succeeded or failed (the dependent variable) and many other features that might be relevant to the success or failure (the independent variables), and (2) each row refers to another company; and then (3) running some machine learning algorithm that finds the patterns of the successful companies. Intuitions and personal experience are not enough. Never.I enjoyed reading this book mainly because of the style: many short sentences (I tried to imitate this style in the last two sentences of the previous paragraph), and down-to-earth recommendations. There are also some thought-provoking ideas and lovely gossip about Apple, Google and some other companies in which the author was involved.

*Full disclosure - Tony Fadell is a fraternity brother of mine which is why I bought his book. I also like that he's donating all proceeds to good causes.This book is packed with tons of wisdom and real world examples of what it takes to succeed in business no matter what stage of your career you're currently in. Tony's not afraid to talk about his failures and missteps and shows the reader how to learn from every experience. I think everyone can gain valuable knowledge and insights from this easy to read book no matter who they are or what they're doing. This is not a book about Tony's success (which is huge) it's about about what's he's learned and he's honestly sharing it with his reader in a way that is engaging and interesting. Cheers to you Tony, thanks for a great read and for sharing your wisdom and vast experience.