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.

As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by 'survival of the fittest.'