Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making – An NYT Bestselling Entrepreneurship and Product Design Manual

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

"Many times you just need someone to confirm your gut feeling and give you the confidence to follow it." - this quote from Tony's Acknowledgements chapter summarises my feeling throughout the entire book. When you are starting out your career, there is so much "wisdom/crap" that you need to parse through and figure out whether you believe in or not. It is so refreshing to read such a no-nonsense, detailed description of what matters and what doesn't from someone who has real battle scars and victories. Starting out my career in Silicon Valley in the late 90s, I was never fortunate enough to meet Tony, and when moving back to Norway I met a start-up world that was 20 years behind Silicon Valley. This was right around the time Tony got the call from Apple to work on the iPod. I would have loved coming along for that ride! For every single decision you need to make to build a great product, a great company, a great team, you have to also decide who am I? what do I believe in? what kind of values are important to me? what kind of culture is a great product culture that I will thrive in and want to work in? And many, many more hard questions. Tony takes you through his career and points out the learnings that he believes were important, not only to his successes, but also to his failures. Brutally honest and with a personal, and down-to-earth language. There have been so many points throughout my life where I have felt something should be the right thing to do or believe in, but where I haven't really dared. And where I haven't had enough conviction to push through, ignore nay-sayers, and just do what I believe in. Tony goes through most of these and more, one by one and also explains why it is the right thing to do. And then there are the hard to come by experiences, like how is an effective board supposed to work for a VC-funded, highly innovative product company. Or how important it is to have a mentor who has been there before and what you need a mentor for. The title says this is an "unorthodox" guide. To me this sounds like title was determined by the publisher's desire to make it a bestseller. Tony is seeing beyond the fuzz and the pretenders and focuses on the deeper fundamentals of human behaviour and the fundamental dynamics between technology, market, individual drive and motivation, and the sometimes harsh realities of starting a new company (or startup within a company). It's nothing unorthodox about what he is writing about. It cuts through the crap and gets you to focus on what is important. Also, in many of Tony's advice, it is evident that he is spoiled by living in the Bay Area. Examples are: always have a "seed crystal" on your board or you absolutely need to have a great mentor before considering starting a company or you should be relentless in pushing your employees to perfect the experience. The Bay Area has huge competition for talent, but the wider Bay Area also has the population of the entire country of Norway. That means that if you have a name in the Valley, know the other big names, and have built up a network over years, you can tap into a talent pool and a culture that is just there. You mostly need to carefully build this yourself outside the valley. Don't let that discourage you though, what Tony points out is fundamentally human and fundamental to building great product anywhere in the world. Just think carefully about what you might need to build yourself before directly following Tony's advice.

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.

Yes, probably this is the first time that I felt sad when the book ended. And to remind myself, this is a non-fiction! A total of 396 pages of absolute pleasure. When I started reading the book, a lot of Tony’s stories felt little cold, data driven, objective, and to a significant degree prescriptive. But, as I kept myself pushing through them, a different fabric unfolded. The same recommendations started resonating like stories of hard fought battles where the protagonist kept marching through uncertainties in the uncharted territories of new product development, go to market strategies, organizational growth, breakpoints, employee relationships, culture development, and eventually converging into a larger than life acquisition and all good and evils associated with it. If you are a founder/builder yourself (to some degree), you will undoubtedly experience this read as a VR experience! The author adequately drives you through the nuances of new tech venture development with an incredible storytelling capacity that only resembles a movie (Tony, how about a movie for the next one? -:) I would like to break the book in two parts. The first half is more tactical with operational tidbits and techniques to handle the process of starting something new or escalating something small to a grand scale. This half intricately narrates different technicalities about how to germinate a small idea and then drive it to something that will be adopted by millions - almost like a cookbook. The second half, the one that I like the most, explores the finer expressions of the human aspect of entrepreneurship. For a builder, these attributes of human relationships that involve continuous exchange of ideas, personalities, aspirations, incentives, and pure dreams make this book more valuable. And this is where it converts into one of a kind personal development guide but with empathy. Here, you will come to know the human side of the author, and the representative of many of us, builders. My biggest take away from this book is – “You don’t have to be an expert in everything. You just have to care about it.” We only grow from any pursuit only when we care about it, whether it’s work or relationship.

I wish I could go back in time with a copy of Build under my arm; it would've saved years of time, pain and mistakes. While I don't regret trying to figure things out for myself, I wouldn't have minded a few of Tony's HOV lanes. I've worked at four start-ups and started my own and I can tell you this book accurately presents how to build yourself, build an organization and build a product that matters. And who better to tell you than the guy who changed three industries and ultimately the world? IPod, iPhone, Nest, not bad! Tony's fascinating personal story forms the spine of the book; his accounting of biggest failure (General Magic) is almost more illuminating than his greatest hits. It's filled with ROTFs meaning not-rule-of thumb but rule-of-Tony Fadell. Just hearing him write, for example for company building "here's what's gonna come next (effective company meeting) and then this is going to happen (meetings too big to work), and that if you don't attend to corporate culture that (people leaving) could be the outcome" is invaluable, especially because it happens to be true; I've lived it. Build contains dozens of ROTFs. Most "business and innovation" books are deathly dull and poorly written. Reading them is like eating Styrofoam. By contrast Build is warm, accessible, funny, and wise. I read it on my Kindle where I jumped around via hyperlinks, out of order, and I still felt like it was an organized narrative. Whether you're just starting a new company or working at an existing one, whether you're fresh out of (or didn't even go to) school, or if you just need to resqueeze your creative juices, Build is the book for you. Get a second for your friend

Outstanding - and well built, of course. It says thirteen more words required for review, which I think is silly. Hrmph.

Amazing book that really does guide you through the process of developing an idea, creating a project or business and scaling it to a successful company. Even if you aren’t looking to do that, it can be an eye opener and put your current job and role in perspective and show you that you can do more to contribute, to grow and to work with your hero’s.

You may look at this book as a personal story of Tony Fadel and how he achieved success and fame within , lets call it "digital industry". Fadel gives you countless examples of what works and what does not work in wide range of companies - from startups to industry leaders (Apple, Google, Phillips(?) ). It is a story on how passion for product development can catapult you to the top of your profession. Written in a very informal and often entertaining way this books keeps you engaged from page 1 till the epilogue. Fadel give you plenty of advice, hints on how to succeed in your profession. How to talk to management, how to talk to venture capital firms, how not to get sold cheaply and how to value your skills, time and resources. You will get a bit of internal gossip straight from Apple or Google which by itself adds color to the book. But this book is not about gossiping. Far from it. It is a serious , yet very lightly written story of once person journey to the top of his profession. If you work in any "industry" you are guaranteed to find something for yourself.

スタートアップ経営者の生の声です。 自営も企業勤めもある者ですが、目次の項目１つ１つでうなずくことが多いです。 未経験のことでも、おそらくそうなのだろうなと参考になります。 少し内容に冗長なところもありますが、経営、事業、プロジェクトなど、誰にでも参考にする状況、任務、役職があるのではないかと思います。 理論やノウハウという形ではなく、”生の声”であるところが特徴だと思います。 それが共感と現場を思い起こさせます。語りも正直で、事業に真正面から取り組む一所懸命な著者の人柄を表しているのだろうと思います。

Çok güzel bir rehber kitap. Dönüp sürekli başvuru yapabilirsiniz.

Great for building team , management.best for CEOs, product manager.tony fedell talks about most of his challenges at MNCs like Google ,nest,apple.perspective of small companies remain untouched.

I bought the book thinking of finding passions and advice in the process of building a product, but I found much more. The book very well organized tells you, perhaps in an unorthodox way, the experience and key elements of manufacturing companies that make money because they think before making great products and not because they make products to make money.

Boken är inte en step-by-step guide till skapande, utan ger insikt kring de aspekter som rör skapandet av något som är värt att skapa. Allt mellan marketing och krångliga jurister till arbetsroller och arbetsdynamik diskuteras. Du blir alltså ingen snickare av att läsa denna bok.