Nest CEO Tony Fadell talks about smart homes, company culture, and launching too early

Being acquired by Google has allowed Nest to finally spend money on marketing and advertising — something investors are often not keen on seeing their money go towards, Nest CEO Tony Fadell revealed.

Fadell made the comment earlier today at GigaOM’s Roadmap conference, where he spoke onstage with GigaOM’s Om Malik about this new pool of resources the company has had since joining Google.

Here are three standout moments from his discussion:

“It’s not about the product; it’s not about the business; it’s about the culture.”

Fadell spent a few minutes explaining to Malik what appears to be his true goal with Nest: to build a company that will forever want to look around, think of new ideas, and “innovate,” as Fadell put it.

Design is a huge part of the culture Fadell has been working to cultivate in his company.

I’d venture to say that Fadell was never that passionate about temperature and thermostats, or smoke alarms, or home cameras. But he and Nest, it seems, are happy reimagining how we interact with the objects around us in the home.

And in the future, this could mean any object. In a few years, Nest might be building objects for driverless cars. But if Fadell has anything to say about it, Nest will still have its culture of design and innovation.

The “conscious” home 

In perhaps the most comical moment of the interview, Fadell corrected Malik after Malik referred to Nest’s product category as the “smart home.”

“I don’t like to call it the smart home,” Fadell said.

How about the “intelligent home,” suggested Malik.

Turns out Fadell prefers the “conscious home” because “Smart is overused — it’s not smarter than you,” he said. Moreover, connected home devices are there to make consumers more conscious of their environments so they can make better decisions, he said.

“My worry is, are you too early? — not too late, but too early.”

Fadell came from Apple, a company that released the Newton many years before we were ready for tablets. Apple also gave us the iPhone after years of carefully teaching us about its vision for consumer electronics — first an MP3 player, then one with video-watching capabilities, followed by a smartphone that could also hold the iPod’s music, and so on.

Fadell also worked at General Magic in the 1990s, an Apple spin-off that focused on an operating system for handheld devices. But again, the OS came well before its time.

So it’s no surprise that Fadell wants to make sure that whatever products his company puts out come at the right time for consumers.