Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 40-city community bringing the global startup world together while educating, inspiring, and connecting entrepreneurs.
I remember when the press
first
hit about Nest Labs, the guys behind the iPod/iPhone were taking on
thermostats everywhere! A collective “huh?” went through the tech
industry. It felt like the tech version of the Avengers got together to
build an office park, not save the world. After sitting down with
Nest co-founder Matt Rogers at
Google For Entrepreneurs‘
office a few weeks ago, I learned the backstory and vision of a company
on a mission to build one of the world’s only great hardware/software
companies in the world.
There are hard workers, there are really hard workers, and then there
are the Matt Rogers of the world. If you think you work hard, please
read/watch our
entire interview then reevaluate. He
had a quick start with his first Mac product interactions being at age
three. As a child growing up in Gainesville Florida, when asked what he
wanted to be someday, Matt would respond “I want to work at Apple.” At
16 he was building robots and entering them into competitions with his
classmates. As a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon, he agreed to basically do
anything (anything being to help draw bones in CAD for a robotics hand
project) to get a chance to work with with the robotics lab. His Junior
year he applied via Monster.com, and pestered employees until he got
accepted for an internship at Apple. That summer he took on the
worst grunt work project imaginable (he rewrote all the software for
manufacturing for iPod), and had three months for what he described as a
“one year project” — seven days a week, 20-hour days, and “basically
not sleeping.” How did it pay off? Apple awarded him a cash bonus as an
intern, what VP of iPod at the time and eventual Nest co-founder
Tony Fadell said was something, “He had never done before.”
Apple
After school he returned to Apple and spent the next few years
working on the firmware for iPod nano and iPod classic. After his first
weekend back at Apple, and spending Saturday and Sunday getting moved in
and buying furniture, his manager approached him saying, “Where have
you been?” Matt responded, “I went to buy furniture.” He replied, “You
should have been here.” He responded, “Oh. I didn’t even know!” Matt
said that this, ”Set the pace for how iPod would be for the next five
years.”
In December 2005, Matt and a small team started working on the first iPhone concepts in a project called “
Purple.” At
the time no one in the company knew what was going on, not even some of
their own managers. They built the initial prototype in four months. It
wasn’t good enough so they started again. That second version was the
one Steve Jobs would
unveil on
stage at MacWorld in January 2007. Four weeks previous to that,
25-members of the team went to China hand-building from scratch each of
the first 200-devices to be shown at MacWorld. The team was divided into
day shift and night shift to hit the deadlines, working through
Christmas and returning after New Year’s Day.
The Founding of Nest
After shipping the iPhone, Matt led work on nano, Shuffle, and parts
of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV projects. By late 2009 he had hired 40
people and managed teams building these products, all in his mid-late
twenties. That fall he had a two-hour lunch with Tony Fadell, his former
boss at Apple who had left in 2008. Matt told Tony he wanted to start a
company. “What do you want to do?” Tony replied. “I want to build a
smart home company.” Tony’s response? “You’re an idiot. No one wants to
buy a smart home, they’re for geeks.” But it turned out Tony was already
building a smart home in Tahoe, with solar panels, geothermal heat
pumps, and more. Tony honed in and focused on a single idea. “Why don’t
you just build me a thermostat?” Matt replied, “Why not? We could build
an iPod?” Tony responded, “We’ll do it in six months.”
Tony and Matt have what appears to be the ideal co-founder
relationship, stemming from his early internship days at Apple. “We
think very much alike, to the point where we complete each
other’s sentences. I don’t know if I would be able to do it without
him.”
But was this the idea to risk a promising future at Apple on? Matt
had elevated from intern to Senior Manager in just a few short years.
“The more we dug, the more we realized, this is a company we must go
start. We could save 10 percent of energy, solve an epic problem, no
innovation, multibillion dollar market. Why would we not do this?”
Matt quit his job in spring 2010, rented a garage in Palo Alto, and
started cranking in secret. Matt would visit with old colleagues and say
“Hey will you quit your job? Will you come work (for free) with us on a
new project I can’t tell you about?” The first ten hires worked for
free for six months before finally raising money in October 2010. They
bootstrapped with money from Tony and some from Matt. “We were all
working basically severn days a week, twelve hours a day, it was crazy.
Not everyone was living in the office – people have families, so they’d
go home for dinner and then come back. It was craziness.” Everyone
worked on Thanksgiving only taking a few hours off. Matt claims no one
got divorced over the extreme conditions, adding that “all the wives are
happy now.”
Still no one knew that Tony was even involved. “In the early days
when we were fully stealth. “We had no website, no LinkedIn, we had
nothing. Zero outbound communication. I wouldn’t even tell people that
(Tony was involved). For all they knew, I was the only founder. To get
people in the door the first time meant I did a lot of lunches, a lot of
coffees to get people excited. I wouldn’t tell people on the first date
– I’d show a little leg, but I wouldn’t go all the way.”
So here is Nest, in stealth, building an incredibly difficult
hardware/software product, with limited funding, but still managing to
assemble a killer engineering team in the midst of a talent war with
Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon, and Twitter exploding all around. “It was a
mixture of my old team at Apple, my old professor from CMU and a few
folks from Tony’s early days at General Magic twenty years earlier. One
guy was a VP at Twitter, one was running Microsoft User Experience.
Unlike most startup teams the average age of our team was about 40. I
think I was the youngest.”
A year after raising a Series A from Kleiner Perkins, Google
Ventures, Lightspeed, Shasta, and others, they shipped their first
product. This spring Nest
was widely rumored
to have raised $80MM at an $800MM valuation and shipping 50,000
thermostats each month. This company that was in a garage in 2010 is now
+200 employees, and selling products in Lowe’s, Apple Stores, Best Buy,
and about half their inventory is sold online. The company is not
without controversy, having been
sued by Honeywell for
patient infringement, and as one friend in the home automation industry
recently told me, “Everyone is watching Nest.” They also recently
acquired venture backed energy dashboard
MyEnergy.
Building HARD-ware
Nest launched their first product a year after raising Series A,
18-months after their inception, with 75-employees and having spent
$10MM. “That’s with a team of extremely senior guys who have all done
this a dozen times before. The difference between doing it a dozen times
before at Apple, Samsung or Google and doing it on your own, is that
there’s no backup. At Apple we worked on the project for a year, got it
ready and hand it over to the operations team to go scale and shoot to
the moon with. We all had roles we played at previous companies and that
all went out the window at Startup Land. You have an HR hat, facilities
hat, janitor hat, doesn’t matter, you have do it.”
Is it any surprise that there are so few hardware startups the
Valley? Or that most entrepreneurs choose an app or a website over a
hardware device? Entrepreneurship is hard enough not to have to layer in
these complications. Matt adds, “I don’t believe I could build Nest if
Tony and I didn’t have all that experience at Apple. It’s really hard to
pull off fully integrated consumer electronic devices. It’s also really
expensive to build a consumer electronic product. You have to build
prototypes but you have to build tools. You have to get a manufacturing
line set up. You have to front inventory costs. It’s crazy expensive.”
When our interview finished a few weeks ago, I walked Matt out to his
car. It was 9pm, and he was cheerfully headed back to work for yet
another late night at Nest. After hearing about the culture and work
ethic at Nest, his attitude simply reminded me of how he described
working a holiday a few years previously. ”That’s what it takes,” he
casually said. And if you really want to change the world I couldn’t
agree more.
Vemale.com - Ladies, death is a mysterious thing for humans. We can only live as well as possible for a given occasion. Achieve a dream, to do good for others, other people happy, to return to Him.
Here’s a little noodle-scratcher for you fellow mobile hardware nerds
to ponder this evening. This little Motorola Mobility beauty,
brandishing the model number XT1058, recently 
