Tony Fadell

You have to look at why people come and work at Nest. Part of it is that a lot of people here already know each other, but we're also on a mission with a purpose. People are personally motivated by energy or safety.

Every person I talk to has a story about how their smoke alarm went off or woke them up with a battery beeping. So you take it off the wall and you take the battery out and say 'screw this.' They hate the products.

It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.