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So it's a real pleasure to have Tony Fidel on the NFX podcast today. So many folks have heard of Tony. He started his career at a company called General Magic, which is a really iconic company, early company in Silicon Valley in the early nineties, which went on to have many innovations to incorporate into Apple later on. From there, later on, he went to Apple Computer where he was in charge of the ipod, which led to the iPhone.
And then after that, he founded Nest, the hardware and software company, which we invented that industry, and now he's a principal at future shape, which is a global investment advisory firm, coaching engineers and scientists working on foundational deep technology. So it's a real pleasure to have Tony on the NFS podcast So, Tony, last time we saw each other was in London at founder's forum a few years back, and I think you just moved to Paris. So you're still there in Flint?
Absolutely. In France right now in Central pain at this moment in time. So how's it been just in France during the pandemic? How's the last year been for Well, first, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate this, Pete. And, it's looking forward to having this whole discussion. As far as France goes, Right now, as of today, the curfew is going to 11 Pete. It's been at 9. So things can stay open till 11. And indoors and restaurants are now open, which is a big change.
It was just outdoors for the last 2 weeks. And before that, nothing was open. So things are starting to unlock here and vaccinations are starting to happen. I'll say at the beginning of the pandemic, France, was very, very organized in what they were doing. They made sure that they prioritized life over the economy, they made sure that all of the small businesses and all the large business all their payrolls were totally taken over by the government and just pay.
It was a very, very different thing than what I saw in the US where everybody's getting unemployment and having to go to the appointment off as these kinds of things. Here in France, everybody was just like, okay, we're just gonna sit here and wait, and the government's gonna take care of it. It was amazing to watch. And to see how swift it all happened in shutdowns and everything.
And, you know, and you can argue for the government one way or another was a too much too little, but it was vastly different than the US. Which was, as you know, and still is a pock mark of different things everywhere and everyone gets confused from the federal to the state. France, it was very, very good.
So I was very prize to watch the 2 and talk to my friends around the world and how the different governments, you know, like how Singapore did it, which was very similar to how France was doing at those kinds of things. It was very interesting. So in preparation for this talk, I listened to and watched your TED talk from few years ago, the first secret of great design, and your answer is really about learning how to Pete. And I just really wanted to sort of dive in on that. It had NFX.
One of our tech lines is Pete what others do not. Why do you think it is that humans have trouble seeing what's right in front of us? It is in our human nature, actually. To do so. We simplify the world. Now I remember very, very clearly when our first son was born. It was right before the iPhone shipped, actually. Mhmm. And when he crawled on the floor or even when he was not even crawling it, just rolling on the floor, whatever.
You could see him looking at every single detail in the carpet and touching everything and picking up and obviously trying to put stuff in his Morgan, and that was different things. But literally, he was interested in every little thing that was around him because he had never seen it before. Right? What is the stitching on the couch?
What's behind the TV and what are all these wires and And literally, he would get into all of those that you wouldn't say it, but you could see it in his eyes and he would be focused and working on it, you know, looking at it for minutes on end. For us, we don't even see that stuff anymore. Right? So if you think about it, look, you know those things when you start living in a house for, like, you know, 5 or 10 years, and there's those things that you never change.
Mhmm. And you never see them anymore. But then when you have maybe a new friend come over or something goes, is that new? You know, oh, what's that over there? And you're like, oh my god. I didn't even recognize that anymore. Because it's easier for us to make simplifications of the world than to always have to be curious about every detail. Right? We're tuning into the newness into the things we haven't seen before.
And if we've seen things over and over enough times, we start to habituate them and we start to filter them out. Just like our hearing, not just in our eyes, but our hearing. Like, we're really good at starting to get rid of noise in the background. Pete in a noisy street and we're talking to each other, our brains will suppress that noise as much as possible so we can get through to the signal that's new and different.
So we have a hysteresis mechanism in our senses to allow us to, you know, filter stuff and only see the new And so as product designers as entrepreneurs and founders, it's our job to understand it's there. Stripe it away. Bring it back to that virgin young mind state and then tap into it and be conscious of stripping that away every day and teaching our teams to do the same thing because that's exactly what new users and new customers do. They're looking from those untrained eyes.
Does that mean the experience works against us as entrepreneurs and naivety as an asset? Naivety is absolutely an asset. Right? That's why, you know, entrepreneurs can come in and disrupt a huge business full of incumbents with 1,000,000,000 of dollars in, you know, in market value. You because those incumbents, they probably knew what the disruption was. Look at Kodak. Kodak knew of the digital camera in the 70.
But they wouldn't acknowledge it and they wouldn't touch it because of all these other systems built around it. So entrepreneurs, if they tap into that and they see those things, they can unseat large incumbents, even if they're going into markets and they're like, they're daunted by.
You know, that's been, you know, the great thing about what I've been able to do over my career with the teams that, you know, that we built and the products we built, because we've unseeded the giants, and it doesn't take you being a giant to do so. I mean, that, you know, naturally in our psychology, we have this habituation, but obviously you can train yourself out of that.
And practically, how do you teach this to teams to strip that away and become, you know, naive and inexperienced in certain areas where you've kind of, obviously, you Beller up this experience time. Beller, one of the biggest things is being with the team and, you know, and walking through exercises with them so they can start to see through your eyes and how you approach problem and help to train them. So, you know, basically on the job, like, hey, look, look, what do you Pete?
And asking questions, what do you see? You know, the other thing is, Sometimes we go off and we tell them, hey, go home for the next 24 hours and write down all the things that you've habituated away. And everyone comes back and then say, okay. So that they start to see differently and start to look at things differently. Right? That's one of the best ways. The other way we also do it is put yourself in another customer persona's shoes.
So in other words, we come up with different customer types, you know, and go and live a day like that person think about the person. What do they do every day? I didn't really realize this till I had my first kid, but the world is a very different way you look the world in terms of what you do every day because when you have kids, there's almost this other communities that that's out there.
All the people with kids do things very differently than the people without kids or kids who left home or older kids. It's like this whole other world, and you have to go and live in it you go, oh my god, I didn't know that this existed, and this existed, and all these different products and services existed, because you were never looking for it. So putting yourself in that position of somebody that you've never been is incredibly powerful as well.
Yeah. In your talk, you've talked about it's easy to solve problems that almost everyone sees, hard to solve a problem that almost no one sees. And, you know, agree with this, but then how do you explain the trouble of serious challenges like climate change. I mean, we all see it, like, particularly here in California, like, every 4 of the fires. And the heat waves. Clearly, we're not doing enough about it. What's going on there? Well, very clearly, it's not a problem of habituation.
The problem is solutions. And people proposing in companies and entrepreneurs proposing solutions to fix them in a emotional storytelling way that's not just about, oh, save the planet. You know, we tried to do that in, you know, in the green wave of 2000. Right? It's, oh, the planet is diving. We have to do what we have to do, and you make you feel No.
What you have to do is create amazing solutions that are emotionally attractive to people, not just to do the right thing, but to make their lives better. And do the right thing at the same time. So you can only tell the rational story so many times and tug emotionally at heartstring. And you only get certain people. It's about making an emotion that the future is amazing and will fix the problems of the past at the same time. That's what's most important.
So we have to go and find more solutions and do a better job of storytelling them and building those solutions and presenting them to Pete. You know, to me, every time I open up my recycling bin, you know, I go to put something in, I get incredibly frustrated. I get heartbroken in a way. Because I'm like, I know this isn't gonna get recycled. I know Beller. Right? Like, should I be even recycling anymore? You're like, it's a hopeless situation. Right?
And we need to fix that stuff, and that takes entrepreneurs going, I see the problem, and I'm gonna fix it, and I'm gonna tell people that's what's most important because if you're just a general consumer and all you can do is choose the things around you and do a few things, okay, I'll, you know, walk or a Beller. You know, there's a few things, but you can't fix the fundamental system. The real problems underlying thing.
That's for entrepreneurs and other people to do to go and make those things and make those available to people. Is there any, you know, thinking, I mean, I fully agree on the storytelling Pete. The narrative around it is hard to get sort of near term excited about it. Long term is necessary. I think there's just not that perhaps instant gratification on these things, which is challenging.
Is there anything that specifically comes to mind in terms of both the solutions or the story, you know, opportunities for storytelling around climate change? Well, you know, I think the real fundamental problem here is the almighty dollar or currencies in general. It's finance. Right? It's where are we putting our money and where are we putting our regulations and our mandates and these things from various governments. Do we have a carbon tax? Do we have other kinds of incentives?
Cause if we fiscally incent Pete, they will more or less always do the right thing sooner or later because it's in their economic interest. We need to be Beller, obviously, an economic story and an emotional story, but we need the governments to enforce that and put those things in so that the corporations out there are forced to change. Look what happened with Dieselgate. Dieselgate with VW and a whole set of German auto makers. Right?
Diesel came out and the Germans went after the German company their number one industry by a mile and said, you can't do this. You were lying to us, and they took them down. And now look at VW and all the Beller stuff they're doing and all the electric car stuff, and they're leading the way. Obviously, Tesla showed the way, but now people are coming up from the rear very quickly and bringing all that to bear.
We need to continue to do It's great to see when we see things like the government saying, okay. If we're gonna fund a battery factory for you to build batteries, well, you're gonna also and we're gonna have to put money away so that we get a battery recycling facility at the same time. Right? It's the circular things that we need to promote through our capitalist system through the governments and other means to make sure that we think circular.
The reason why we're in the problem that we're in is everyone thought it was abundance infinite resources, and we could just keep trashing things. So we don't need that and look at what big oil's been doing, and they're finally starting to change the direction. Some of them, they've been all the time going, no, look, batteries are too expensive. It's all this. They're always distracting you from the problem, saying those aren't solutions. And as we know, they are the beginnings of solutions.
We know that the path that many of these companies are on the wrong, but we continue to fund them. We continue to give them money. We continue to invest in them from Wall Street and stuff like that. Of course, we need the energy in certain amounts to help us with transition and with things we're never gonna be able to replace, but we need to move more quickly on making sure there's ESG principles that are tested in each of these and shown and being transparent on.
So do you think fundamentally this is a climate change. It's a design problem. We got ourselves into this mess, and we potentially can design our way out of it. And, you know, we can envision with system design and a story and design, you know, really thinking about the mindset and systems that we need to apply to this Absolutely. This is a design problem. It's a design of a lack of circularity in terms of how the government and investors and businesses think of these systems that are built.
Right? There's a we can only do so much from, you know, incentivizing people with better storytelling with more emotional products that are better products you know, rationally as well. But at the end of the day, everyone comes back to, well, the incumbents are fine. You know, I'm gonna have to make changes in adjustment. You know, to my lifestyle. If we don't get those things, you know, I saw in one country, what was it? They're actually increasing the cost of ice cars with attacks on ice cars.
Not a incentive on EVs. They're doing exactly different. So instead of incentivizing people to buy EVs because they think there's problems with EVs There's problems with them. So we're gonna incentivize you to buy the EV so it'll be cheaper price up the ice vehicles. And it's like, oh, if I buy this thing, it's gonna me more. It's like, oh, buy this thing. Do you Pete?
Like, it's just a slight mental shift, and then all of a sudden you're like, oh, I'm not getting paid to take something inferior. I'm actually gonna have to pay more for something that in theory. Makes sense. One of the things I've been reflecting on is just with the pandemic. There's just there's a remarkable number of experiments, you know, both society and Beller care and economics and sort of fiscal stimulus.
And all these countries are doing it very differently, whether it's Sweden, whether it's France, whether it's the US, and it's gonna be the experiments that we performed in our society for better for worse have been just remarkable. And I think we're gonna come out of this with, you know, you talk about these sort subsidies or taxes, but also how we've experienced we run our society around Beller it's, you know, how do we provide vaccines? How do we manage health care?
How do we manage hospitalization? Is the Morgan of knowledge and information that comes out of this will be fascinating and for years to come. I fully agree. And you know what's really interesting, and this is what I always say to a lot of our startup and the, you know, the companies we invest in is that, you know, there's lots of naysayers. Oh, that's gonna take too much time. It costs too much. We don't know how to do it or whatever.
But when there's a crisis, and they see their way through the crisis. And they're like, oh my god. We got through this. You go back and go, well, if we were able to get through that, and we had all these naysayers and whatever. Why can't we do this? You know, why can't we do this and this and this? So you're gonna be able to take bigger risks.
You're gonna be able to try things more often because you can see when we marshal and we work together, we can all of a sudden make changes happen, and we can make changes happen in days, weeks, months, just like in a wartime situation because we were going and hopefully going through and ending this war. But this is a great motivator for all ages, but definitely for the young generation to go, look, we were able to do this can't we do this in the future too?
And I fully agree that the constraints drive creativity. And I'm curious in that sort of constraints drive creativity perspective Pete your design thinking and design approach, are there any methodologies that you like to help to kind of bring out that creativity by pushing constraints Always constraints. I was at a company called General Magic Backing Day. There's a whole documentary about it. Oh, I love it.
Yeah. If any of your viewers your listeners are out there, you should definitely take a watch of that because if you look at what happened in general magic, it was all about lack of constraints. And how we failed because of it. And so you have to intentionally put constraints on, and this is where I learned.
It's like you have to create a schedule that's realistic and time bound and that happens within, you know, hopefully in a year or 2 years, not much longer than that, because people lose interest in the James change and environment changes. You need to put on money constraints. You need to put on, you know, team size or what are we gonna do? Where are we going to be specifically innovate.
Like, if you look at any press release or any kind of marketing launch, you usually get 3 or 4 things you can talk about totally in that release. Or whatever you're gonna do. That's a great constraint. You know, so what I always do is, you know, and we started this and Bezos also does it and stuff like that, which is create your press release. Before you start the project. What are those top three items that are gonna fit on that thing? And anything Beller, it falls off that.
And so you know what's important, what's not. Right? What are the messages and who's the customer? Who's the audience? You're gonna put that also in there. What's the price? You know, what market are you going into? All of those things just writing a one page or 1a half page press release is an incredible constraint. Yeah. And then putting, you know, the companies have raised too much money.
I think the general magic documentary, there's obviously a lot of money, but I think the deadlines and capital along with that narrative and sort of the storytelling component are a huge factor in pushing creativity and figuring out what's critical. Yeah. I, you know, I've seen, you know, I've been at big companies. Where they were pound wise and penny foolish. And then I've seen others that are billions foolish. You know?
And I was like, I'll tell you right now, the Pennywise at pound foolish doesn't work, and the billions foolish or the 100 of 1,000,000 foolish doesn't work either. You gotta be in this really narrow window where it's gonna force you to become creative. People with too much money, any project, whether it's a big company small it's the beginning of the We mentioned storytelling earlier.
So I listened to the Tim Ferris podcast where you talk about the one of the best that you learned from Steve Charles for storytelling. So tell me about what you've learned from storytelling. What entrepreneurs need to know? Well, storytelling, well, 1st and foremost, when we're telling stories, they have to be true. This is not fiction. Too many startups, you know, wanna believe their own BS. And they start telling stories that aren't true. You gotta first have a true story.
And even better is if you can under promise in the story and over deliver in their experience, right? So that's another another piece of it is really understanding your customer and speaking their language and understanding their pain. What is their pain? And remind them of their pain. And then show them the way forward that takes away the pay and gives them the superpower they've never had before. And the superpower is so magical that they wanna show all their friends.
And they go, look at this. Check this out. Look what I'm doing. And they feel like a different person because of it. Also, there has to be, not just an emotional superpower, there has to be a rational piece of it. So I always say that all good stories have 50% emotion and 50% rational pieces to it because you can be rational all day long. This will save you money. This is gonna do this. You're like, okay. Great. And, you know, look at GEICO commercials. They're like, 15 minutes.
We'll save you 15 bucks or 15%. Whatever. Right? And you're like, yeah. I'll get around to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then they have the fun, you know, GEICO and all that other stuff, and they try to make it emotional. And they're like, it's 15 minutes, and you're gonna save all this money. And so they try to make it emotional because it's really just a rational decision. It's like, oh, okay. I wanna do this. Do you wanna go get new insurance?
That's not fun, they're trying to make it as fun as possible because it's a very rational choice. You know, there's other things that are very emotional, but they're also just fleeting. It's like, look at this cool novelty thing, blah blah blah. And you're like, yeah, but sure. I'll like it for a day, and then I'm gonna get rid of it. I'm not gonna use it anymore. That was a fun toy. You know, you see this a lot with kids toys. Like, it's a novelty.
You have to have a great blend of rational and emotion. And that you're solving a problem that's not just novelty so that, you know, people like go, oh, this is important. It's important in my life. Yeah. I have similar philosophy. Just focus on the heart and the head. You know, you've gotta touch both to really have a message that breaks through. Totally makes sense. Absolute case, but, you know, you also have to remember what is in somebody's heart could be in another person's head.
That's very true. You know, look at couples. You know, couples is like, the man's like, look at this cool technology, and the wife's like, well, I don't care. It looks like crap. I don't want that in my house, right, especially whether it's a Pete to c or b to think you have multiple parties making decisions, right, and you have to remember that not everybody around the table who's making the decision is going to think the same way. And what's rational to one person is emotional to the other.
Yeah. That's true. Fully agree in our household. You're listening to the NFX podcast. If you're enjoying this episode, feel free to rate and review our channel and share this conversation with someone you think benefit from these insights. Follow us on social, nfx, and visit nfx.com for more content. And now back to the show. So you and I have this shared goal of wanting to inspire early stage founders to tackle big problems.
And and then effects, we often say that one of the biggest ways in that sort of ecosystem is great people work your mediocre ideas. And a future shape, you say that you're more like mentors with money, And so I have a bunch of questions around this. Firstly, how do you identify the really world changing founders? What's in their DNA? How do you know they're in that tribe? Beller, a few things. One is they find us. Right? Somehow they find us. And they're like, I want this.
And then they ask for advice. And they ask for really, hopefully, you know, smart questions. So that's another thing. Then the thing that they're doing, well, maybe malformed or it's a nascent thing they're working on something, you know, we can usually look at some and go. That's important because we see so many different things and from so many different parts of the world with so many different technologies. You know, we have you know, a keen eye on this stuff. So we're like, oh my god.
They actually solve this, or they're communicating to us in a way that's like sort of hinting at a really deep problem that they're trying to solve. And so it's really by their actions about how they speak, how they find us, all these things that really help us to go, oh, this person seems to be really on the ball. Obviously, it doesn't always work. It's really about the person's motivation and how they talk about why they're doing it.
And, you know, a lot of James, as you know, especially with first time founders, you know, on seed stage or a stage, they don't really know how to speak the language, you know, that we speak because they just haven't been in it long enough, and they don't know how to communicate or story Beller right anything. And so if you can have a great discussion with them and you can have like a moment with them and go, hey, did you look at it this way? And they go, woah. And then they build on top of it.
They get it back quickly when you instantly should give them a different perspective and they go, oh my god. Like, something just all came together and then they start building on it immediately, you're like, yes. They get it. Oh, yes. The it's sort of the iteration process you know, when we speak with founders and it's that kind of, you know, that tennis match of kind of back and forth and it Beller, and it's like magic forms really quickly. It's very special.
It's absolutely incredible to feel and to be a part of because then you start asking them second, third, and 4th order questions. And then you start to see how much they've thought about it, right, and then you start learning Morgan. They start teaching you. Right? And you're like, oh my god. This person is amazing. I'm gonna dig deeper. And then, you know, and then we both go, well, what about this? And what about and they're not afraid to answer the questions.
And they want to go deeper and they want to go further. And that's when you go, we got somebody special here. When I get these you know, founders would go, oh god. Another inquisition. Leave me alone. It's like, no. No. No. No. You're not curious enough. You're not really trying to solve the problem. You're just trying to get money. Get out of here. And when you speak to founders, do you often have people that come to you solving one particular problem?
And then, you know, you help them to see that problem much Beller, or is it sort of helping them to narrow, I guess, maybe a bit of both? Yeah. Absolutely. We have, like, in this one case, I had a company called Rohini, and they're in Idaho, Cortelaine, Idaho. They came to me and they said, look at this cool thing we got. And they found me. Yeah. I didn't even know who they were. They found me. Go. We got a demo for you. Gotta show it.
And then showed me this demo, and I was like, it was a Pete fill with LEDs, and they could just put the paste on any, you know, substrate, and it would become a light. They go, isn't that cool? And I'm like, yeah. That's pretty cool. But I said, you know, frankly, it's neat, but I don't see enough applications here. If you guys could figure out a way to take all tiny LEDs that were unpackaged and put it in an xy grid and do it predictably over and over. I said, now we got some And so guess what?
Now if you look at the newest TVs called micro LED TVs and the new micro LED iPad Pro, well, guess where that technology is. That's exactly that technology. Amazing. And so it was like, okay. And so we had to change it. We had to do this, and I didn't invest in it when it was a Pete. I said, look, guys, if you could do this, this, and this, I think there's a real market here. And then they came back 9 months later said, we figured it out. Check this out. Look at this.
And here's, and I was like, okay. Here's Do you have any theory on trying to solve small problems, or, you know, specific problems versus going off to big, huge, enormous markets? Because there seems to be sometimes a connect between founders who are, you know, focused on these very sort of small problems and then at the same time venture capitalists who are very much focused on these huge market gym, Pete? Any theories or frameworks you have?
Well, typically, if you're doing something important, you may not be scoping how much impact your innovation really can truly have. Now there's certain people who are like, oh, this is really cool technology, but then when you look at it, you're like, yeah. But it's really a small Morgan. Hank Beller, right, and then you go and challenge them. But there's other times where the technology they're working on is really big. They're just underselling it. And they don't see it as clearly.
And so you start there and go, look. Look at this. Look at that. Look at this. And is that just from these founder perspective, you know, entrepreneurship can often be a sort of decade long or Morgan journey. Any sort of formula or framework that you have to help founders understand. They know they're on the right path so that they can spend many, many years of life doing it, or how should it have found to know that they work on something that's truly magical?
Well, they need to surround themselves with people who believe in them and have a lot of external, you know, contact and a lot of external knowledge that they can go back and say, you're on the right track. Just keep going. Right? Because it's more about having your internal confidence that you're on track. Okay. And to also be able to, you know, modulate as necessary and adjust as things change.
And so you need external people, you know, mentor or a coach, or other people that you really believe in that are, you know, who can give you critical feedback on what you're doing and are knowledgeable, right, that you know, sometimes, hopefully, if you've got great investors who know these things, they can help you. But then you should also not just take investors words, Ward.
You should also, you know, talk to other smart people that you know who understand this stuff, you know, sometimes advisory boards or, you know, like I said, just mentors. The other thing that's really important, as you've mentioned at the beginning, Pete is, you know, these are 10 year kind of slogs. If you're doing anything important, I've always believed that it's takes 10 years to do something that's really and transformative. And so you should have a co founder with you.
You shouldn't have too many. You should have 2 founders because then they can be the yin and yang and, you know, and they can really help each other pull one up when the other one's down and vice versa, but you shouldn't have too many. Like, 3 is the max. Like, if I ever see startups with more than 3, I'm like, forget it. And if it's 3 of them, and they all do something similar. I'm like, forget it. They have to be complimentary.
And so I love seeing 2 entrepreneurs you know, founders working together that really compliment you. That's my preferred, you know, way of funding, you know, a small startup because of all the energy and time, emotions, and everything. Totally. Yeah. The kind of world changing activities happened by teams of small Pete, and that's born out through decades decades decades. Look at Apple. You know, look at Apple. Look at Google. You know?
Yeah. Most of them, you know, Amazon's, you know, an exception. Right? But if you look, there's really people who are behind that who a lot. You know, same thing with Facebook. They might not be called founders, but, you know, there are people who really were there and instrumental in helping in those early days. You talk about sort of this you know, 10 year journey, and you need to be excited about it.
One of the things that I've used in stony companies is does it pass this dinner party or cocktail party test Meaning that you can talk to a complete stranger about what you're doing, and they would be excited about it and interested in it. If you can't get other people excited about what you're doing, then you're probably not excited about it enough. And probably not interesting enough to get them excited about it. Oh, yeah. You're absolutely right.
You know, I always say that, you know, well, there's one which is you should know who the five people you're going to hire right away when you wanna start something, and you should be able to talk to them and convince them. If you can't get to that level, it's an issue. Right? But the dinner party is a perfect one. And a lot of James, you might be doing something interesting.
You're just not telling your story well enough for that other person to hear, and it might not be what you're doing it's what you're saying and how you're framing it. That's not hitting, and that tells you you're not using language that, you know, various people can hear. You're just using technical language. And that can be a great way. Just, you know, coffees or strangers just talking to them about it can be a great way to hone your language and storytelling. Absolutely.
Shifting gears a little bit when we spoke a few years ago on panel. I asked you to describe in one word or ask how you would describe yourself in one word, and you said troublemaker. To many chuckles from the audience. Do you think that you need to be a troublemaker to be a great entrepreneur? I think you do. Because whatever you're going to do, whatever you're going to do no. There's different ways of making trouble. And there's constructive ways and destructive ways and all Beller stuff.
But you're going out there as a startup, and you're saying I'm going to fix x. And I most likely I'm going to make trouble for incumbents or other people who are there. Right? And if you don't have that kind of thing, like, God, dang it. Like, I'm so sick and tired of this plastic problem. I gotta fix this plastic problem, and I'm gonna go after the plastic guys.
Now you don't wanna make trouble like what, you know, the early Pete guys did, like np3.com and Napster and everything else, which is be so trouble making that you're destructive and you're hurting yourself in the process because you're just being, you know, I'm gonna be a pirate and I'm gonna take the hill and you're like, gotta play along too. You gotta do it smart. You gotta be a smart troublemaker. You gotta be a clever one.
You can't be deceiving or any of the other stuff, but it's always that thing of, Man, they're smart. God damn it. I'm so pissed at myself or not, you know, whatever. You don't want them to get pissed at you. You want them to get pissed at themselves. It's a different way of thinking. What's in the mindset, troublemaker? Is it a kind of a persistence, a frustration, a kind of like a disruption, like, I'm fascinated by this notion of troublemaker and shake things up.
Well, you know, the whole thing is about knocking people their foundation, knocking companies off their foundation, knocking, you know, individuals off their foundation, and saying in a nice way, wake up. Look at what's going on. This is the habituation. Look at all this habituation that's going on. We've been going down this road for too long. We need to change it. We're gonna go a different and trouble makers or change makers do that, and they have to be insistent.
And they're gonna sit here and tell you things you don't like to hear. Right? You're gonna say things some people don't wanna hear. And you're gonna remind them of pain and reminding them that they habituated away. And so you're knocking people out of their comfort zone because they think they live in this perfect bubble. You're gonna go, no. You don't. Let me show you why. Not that you're wrong, but there's a better way. Right? You were sold a bill of goods by x, y, and z. That the wrong thing.
Let me show you the right thing. People don't like change. People don't like change. Like, you know, some founders just aboard with this ability to shake things up and others just it's, you know, they develop it over time. Is there any sort of suggestions to help found this to kind of push them to be more change makers, more trouble makers, or do you believe people are born with it? I don't know what I believe yet on that because, you know, I was the troublemaker kidn's class. Right?
So it's just like, that's the way I was. It was just, you know, no. No. No. This is it. This is it. You know, what have you. But I've seen other people who can make trouble in a different way, but they typically don't know or don't have the confidence or they're too worried about what people will think of them if they do rock the boat.
You know, there's different styles of trouble making, but at the end of the day, it it emanates from confidence in telling people that there is a better way and that you're gonna go for something that a lot of people will say is crazy, and you're gonna cut against the grain. And it's a confidence in yourself or a confidence in a team's abilities or what have you to say I'm going to do this. That's it. I'm gonna do this.
I don't think it's people who always like, you know, they stay in their parents' houses, you know, until they're 30 or 35. I don't think it's those kinds of people. I could be wrong, but I don't think usually people who wanna get out, take the bull by the horns, and literally go, hey, world. I'm here. I'm gonna show you what this is all about, and it's taking an initiative. There's different styles, of course. But at the end of the day, it's about having that attitude.
That attitude is a feedback loop. You know, as you do more, even through failure, that's the other thing is you're not afraid of failure. You can fail and you can learn from it. It's do fail, learn, not learn, do who, then fail. Everything in school is about learn and test and hopefully you don't fail. Everything in life is all about failing first, then learning. So we have our educational systems totally on end. And if you don't fit in the educational system, because you don't wanna just do it.
You might have the basis of a pretty good, you know, founder because you're like, I wanna only learn what I wanna learn, and I wanna do things. Don't just make me sit for 12 years learning something, and then I'll do something. Wanna do something right away. And, Sutra, a lot of the sort of filters by which employers can look at things is by, like, academics and grades and all the rest of it, but people that really changed the world are a little bit wonky and they're different.
Absolutely. First question I have is, you know, sure, you can have a resume or whatever. Care less. I, you know, I've hired amazing people from music schools and dropouts and, you know, all that kind of stuff. The first question is, what do you wanna learn? You wanna come. What do you wanna learn? Because if you wanna learn and you're curious, that's gonna be a very good sign that we're gonna get somewhere because we're doing something that's new. Right? You're gonna need to learn.
You're talking about failure that took world and entrepreneurship often celebrates failure. Is that really the right way? You know, no one likes to fail. Is it more about celebrating, trying? It's not celebrating failure. It's about you acknowledging and learning from it and then being able to tell people unemotionally. Yeah. I failed. And let me tell you what I learned. Here's how I'm not gonna create that problem again. Right? So it just last few minutes.
I wanna just talk to a few founders out there. And, maybe it's sort of quick fire question. So what's the worst product design choice that you've ever made? This is where I thought rash instead of emotionally, and this was back in the nineties when I was designing a product called the Phillips Velo. And we were doing the 2nd generation of product, and the first one was black and white, or gray scale product, had a gray scale screen.
The second generation was like, I'm like, look, our battery life gonna go to shit. It's harder on the processing cost Morgan everything. I'm like, guys, we're gonna just screw up everything the success we've had. We're gonna stay with the black and white one. Right? And then we lost that whole product cycle. It was like, some things are so emotional that people could care less about the rational argument.
I always like, oh, I'm never making that mistake and hopefully never have and never will again. And do you have a general framework for the product design process? Do you believe in sprints? I think everybody has a different heartbeat, and it depends on what you're building. You have to have your internal and external heartbeats, and you know, some people, you know, it's like, okay, agile scrum, 2 week, 4 weeks, 6 weeks sprints. You can't do that in hardware.
You can't do that with drug design, you can't do it with lots of things. So I think for certain types of products, yeah, maybe you can have that as an internal heartbeat, but other things you can't. It just doesn't work.
So there's a nature of the beast that you have to, you know, embrace, but you gotta put constraints on again, whether that's a weekly, monthly, whatever needs to happen And that depends on the type of problem and, yeah, and the and the type of individuals and the team that you're trying to solve. That heartbeat, that momentum, the cadency you're building. Yeah. Absolutely.
And that cadence, you know, when you don't have a cadence, it ebbs and flows, and then there's no rhyme or reason to it people can't set their own internal schedules to it. You know, it's kind of like, you're like a time zone Omri. You know, when you travel around the world in different time zones, like, what time is it now? Am I sleeping? Am I now? What am I doing?
Well, if you don't set that heartbeat and you get it regular and predictable for people in side of your team and then and maybe even for your partners and investors and everything else, it becomes really wonky fast, and no one knows what's up or down. So you need to set that and communicate that. And, you know, you can change it, obviously, but it shouldn't change too often. We talked earlier about adding restrictions or constraints at what are some of the top failure modes?
Big don'ts in product design that you see? Big don'ts in product design. Obviously, we talked earlier about too much money and no constraints. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. So let me see. I'll tell you this. I see the 3 things, like not gaining enough insights from smart customers. Not getting data from customers and not making them make the choice, but getting real insights insights to their paying and what is their real pain and what is their feeling of that pain?
How and not just giving them what they say they want, but giving them something much more that superpower, not just fixing their pay, but giving them something that they never thought they had while fixing the pay. So that's one thing. So Morgan insights from your customers or your smart team around that, you know, is generating this stuff. I think understanding that in product design, most things are opinion based. It's not consensus driven. It's not data driven decisions.
These are opinion decisions, and you have to have a clear point of view and that person who is holder of that opinion based decision can clearly state that point of view and has a story to back it up and let everybody know.
This is the reason why we're going where we're going, even if you don't have data sometimes, even if you don't get everyone to consents Everyone has to clearly know who is the leader of making opinion based decisions, and that person has to communicate why and the story behind it and try to get more people on board to maybe form a consensus if they don't, but it's not about, okay, you know, three people, four people.
Okay. And it's also not like taking everybody's suggestion, and it turns into, you know, Microsoft products from the 90s, which is millions of features that no one uses. Like design by Yeah. Exactly. No. None of that. And then the third one, it really is, you know, being able to tell that story over and over a clear story as we Pete talking about, you know, people at the dinner party or whatever, talking that story to many of the target customers and making sure that that is great.
And most people don't do that enough either. They think marketing's at the end and the stories at the end. Great designs. 50% of design is the design. 50% of a great design is the story behind the design. Well, on that note, Tony, I wanna thank you for joining us today. It's fascinating conversation. Keep up the trouble making. Love I hope you guys find a lot more troublemakers out there. Inspiring many more troublemakers. I hope so too troublemakers in my way.
Okay, Pete. Have a great one, and thanks for the time, and thanks everyone listening. Wonderful. Take care. At NFX, we believe creating something of true significance starts with seeing what others do not. Send this episode to any friends that may need these insights and frameworks, and feel free to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform Thanks for listening to the NFX podcast.