Bantam Press Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

It's hard to summarise how good this book is. It is full of practical tips, fantastic anecdotes and delivered with great storytelling (a key factor for Tony advises for success)Using Tony’s check list that in order to make a difference companies need to focus on 5 things (abridged):1. Be humble and flexible, and able to adapt to customer’s needs2. Deliver something wholly new or deliver in a novel way that competitors can't3. Solve a real pain point that is relevant to many4. Execute the vision - in all aspects, not just a product5. Think about a problem/need in a way customer haven't and makes perfect sense to them when they hear/see/experience it.Using this approach, here is my assessment of Build:1. Packed full of humility, reflection, and learning; It is customer, problem and team obsessed. Tony packs in years of advice and hard-earned experience2. A great combination of stories, practical advice that are wholly engaging and unlock some of the aspects that can enable and inhibit venture and product building. Plus the proceeds from the book will be invested in a climate fund, plus Tony is also committing to a 5x match (up to $25 million) of his personal funds.3. Entrepreneurship and great product design is hard, really hard – successful practitioners model success, they constant seek to learn – so here’s an opportunity to learn from one of the best4. The book is great entertainment, great learning – one you won’t want to put down until you finish and will definitely want to return to time and time again. Beyond the content of the book Tony has tried to deliver a fully compostable book – he failed and he’s keen to engage with people that can help him (humility and striving for perfection)5. The learning is delivered in bite size chunks, nicely delivered in written and pictorial form, lots of links back to relevant sections to glue things together. A book you can read cover to cover, dip in and out of. The learning itself is brilliant, the fact that all proceed from the book are going into the Build Climate Fund to fund climate focused initiatives is fantastic (see https://tonyfadell.com/the-fund/ )A fantastic opportunity to learn and contribute to a valuable cause.

Are you about to start a start-up or taking your first seed round then read this bookOK, you could be anyway through the stages of building a start-up or an entrepreneurWritten by Tony Fadell, the guy who helped create the iPod and Nest, which he sold to Google for $3.2 billionIn the book, Tony shares his knowledge in terms of what it takes to create a start-up, from finance to culture. He also shares many of his marketing secrets, the importance of storytelling and what it takes to be a people leader. He also takes you through some of the rough aspects of being in a company which many people don’t talk about. Such as, why and when should you quit.Tony also worked for Steve Jobs at Apple so you get some Steve Jobs history, insight and history of building the iPod and iPhone thrown inThe book was recommended to me by Gavin Dimmock

Most business books don’t deserve to be longer than an HBR article and end up repeating the same thing in different ways. Not this book. Tony Fadell’s book is packed with helpful advice for anyone passionate about building products - everything from career advice to how to operate and build products in big companies to how to launch your own startup, as well as the importance of design, marketing and product management. Plus the book has lots of real examples from his experience on the iPod and iPhone teams at Apple as well as his experience building Nest. Tony isn’t a pundit or guru with little real world experience. Instead, he has lived it and experienced the struggles - and in this book he shares his wisdom.

This was a really enjoying read. I already knew about Tony’s journey in tech, even from his early days at the failed General Magic, but the way that he has weaved his history, up to Apple & Nest, into the book is so compelling. The lessons that he has learned and the structured advise he gives in the book is golden and even though my career isn’t in hardware, but software & not at startups, I could draw comparisons and wished he had written this many years ago. You now have the opportunity to learn from Tony, what are you waiting for?

I bought this book after I heard Tony Fadell talking on BBC Radio 4 about the Apple iPod he helped create.What a great book to read: full of insight about products, sure, but also career decisions, and life. Entertaining too.The main takeaway for me is that Tony says design must aim to build a painkiller and not a vitamin for user pain points. In other words, what is the reason for this product or service to existing?The sales prop for the original iPod release was a "1,000 songs in your pocket". It was a painkiller for users those days who had to drag all those MP3s around on a desktop or laptop in for sure! Worth reading. Worth building.