We have Elon. He is now the Kardashians of the business, right?

I would just say that model of a team of rivals — where you have the big visionary leader and a bunch of high-powered executives, who are in competition with each other, with their projects — has fallen out of favor. I think we might be seeing less innovation for it. Is that what you see as well? To do things that are really differentiated, you need to have creative tension and creative conflict. If you don’t, you will not get the better result. It becomes much more group think, where everybody is happy. I think at the time, it was because of Steve’s personality. How can I say it this way? There were only so many dramas that you could cover in the news back in the early 2000s.

“No assholes, please.”

To make the iPhone, there was one team that tried to scale up the iPod and one team tried to scale down the Mac. Then Steve Jobs just spun around in a circle and picked one. What actually happened there?

Look, you can say what you want about Apple, you can always wish that Apple was going to surprise and delight you every quarter with something that the world has never seen before, but that is not reality. They’re the number one company in the world, and they are innovating at maybe the lowest levels, but those lowest levels are going to change the company and those products dramatically over the next decade to come. You just have to wait. I’m sorry, TikTok generation and millennials who need instant gratification. That just does not happen, especially at the scope and scale of Apple.

Like you said, these companies get so big. I think these companies need to go through some kind of existential crisis to actually help them solve their cultural issues.

In a way, yes. The other thing you have to understand is that Apple has been in business much longer, and it has gone through disasters, like in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It has gone through the cycles. Google has never gone through cycles. It has all been up, and they manage the downside so it does not really affect them. There has never been any reckoning for them to fix things, because they keep milking that cash cow. That creates a culture of thinking it is always going to be fine. You are living in a dream state.

perks

They just saw it more as dollars, at least from the finance side. People inside the company were just like, “Oh, it’s yet another project we are trying.” At Apple, every single thing that was tried — at least under Steve — needed to ship because it was existential. You couldn’t not make the iPhone successful because you were cannibalizing the iPod business. It had to be successful, and everyone needed to be on it. If you were on something that was distracting from it, you needed to move to it and work on it.

Our team at Nest went in there thinking of this as a marriage.

but you have to figure out a way to make individual operating units. Look at what Warren Buffett does. He buys fully operational companies and puts them underneath a financial management structure, but each of them operates independently. Alphabet had the right intentions, but it did it with the wrong business units. It took the most nascent business units and said, “We are going to spin them out.” Those are babies, and you need to coddle and protect them. You want the ones that are fully formed to go out in the wild and become more resilient. You make them individual public companies that have to try to survive by themselves, as opposed to the ad business funding everything and letting them just lose money. They have to live.

If you were plopped in the middle of a 100,000-person Meta — and you’ve got a $30 billion bet with 17,000 engineers on the Metaverse — how would you think about structuring and aligning that company so it actually executes?

Which breakpoint do you think is the hardest? I will tell you, I think it is like six to 20. You are on the same road 20 to 1,000. Well, six to 20 is definitely hard because it is so personal. The relationships are so close and you have to start to individuate in terms of roles and who is getting what information. You can kind of get away with 40 because you can still have weekly or bi-weekly meetings with the team, but that is when you have to change your whole communication style. When you get to 120, forget it. That is that limit of knowing everybody’s name and having personal relationships with them. That is just the physical limit of our brains to have a real personal connection — that much time and knowledge — about each person’s life. I think it is really down at that first level, then it is at that 120 level where you have to think about things very differently. You have to understand that this is a business and not just everybody having fun together. That does hurt.

You can tell someone that information all you want, but the actual pain of going through it is what makes you see that it’s real. How did you deal with that? I went through that nightmare when I was building my first real team at Philips. If you go past 40 or 50 and did not set up your organizational structure right, you almost have to go down and fix the structure before you can build back up again. When you go through that enough times, you learn tools, techniques, and how to engage your team to help get past that. Of course, sometimes you just have to learn by doing and failing. That is a part of the book. But if you went through that pain at 40 to 50 employees, do not let that happen again at 120 employees.

I am not against technology. I am against technology in service of no problems.

What I am against is pouring so much money and time to get people so focused and more insular, and to stop making human connection.

How do you make those decisions? Again, it is a mix of gut, rational, and emotional decisions. Do I like this team? Do I like the person? Are they transparent? Are they trustworthy? Are they able to break down walls — because you are going to get tons of walls? Are you doing something that matters? For me, “matters” means “existential.” Are you doing something to help society or the planet or health? I don’t want to hear about the Metaverse. I really don’t. Fuck the Metaverse. I understand VR and AR in certain applications, like in design, but I don’t want to meet people in the Metaverse. I want to be able to look into somebody else’s eyes. I want to see and feel and look into their soul and build a relationship. Zoom is much better than a phone call, but the Metaverse? Give me a break.

Every decision I have made and every job I have had — except for the one at General Magic — I created myself.

Obviously, you use your brain a lot, but there is a lot of gut in it.

As you were writing the book, how did you think to communicate, “There is a framework and a process here?” This was exactly another reason why I did the book. I just get a gut feeling. It’s not always the most logical thing. These are opinion-based decisions, not data-based decisions. There is a chapter in the book about that. The book was just my opinion saying, “I think this needs to happen. I am going to go explore it and see what happens.”

It is not about this one technical thing we did with the iPod or the Nest Thermostat; it is about human nature. I say it is an unorthodox book because human nature does not change. Technology changes. It is moving faster than everyone, and it is going to continue to move even faster. But human nature doesn’t change.

I thought about who those people were, and most of them had died, and I was like, “Wait a second. I’m not getting any younger.” I think the baton has been passed to me; I have to give back just like people gave to me, without any financial reward.

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