Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

The best way to find a job you’ll love and a career that will eventually make you successful is to follow what you’re naturally interested in, then take risks when choosing where to work. Follow your curiosity rather than a business school playbook about how to make money. Assume that for much of your twenties your choices will not work out and the

Adulthood is your opportunity to screw up continually until you learn how to screw up a little bit less.

Remember that you don’t have to come in perfectly polished for that first meeting. You can say, “I’d like to give you an early look at this. Maybe it would be of interest to you. I’d love to get your comments on it.” Listen to their feedback and learn from it. You don’t have to take every word of advice or criticism, but you should understand the r

This perspective and focus allowed us to do something somewhat unique to Nest: marketing prototyped the product narrative in parallel with product development.

That’s what I said over and over at Nest. It became like a mantra: We’ll get through this. We’ve done it before. Here’s the plan. We’ll get through this. We’ve done it before. Here’s the plan.

You should be able to map out and visualize exactly how a customer discovers, considers, installs, uses, fixes, and even returns your product. It all matters.

After you’ve launched your V1, then two to four times in that year, you should be announcing something to the world. New products, new features, new redesigns or updates. Something meaty that’s worth people’s attention.

He used a technique I later came to call the virus of doubt. It’s a way to get into people’s heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again. If you can infect them with the virus of doubt—“Maybe my experience isn’t as good as I thought, maybe it could be better”—then you prime them for your solution. You get

Your team will have to figure out how to find product/market fit for V1, then get the product fixed up and properly marketed to a wider audience with V2, and only then can you focus on optimizing the business so it can be sustainable and profitable with V3.

We would create a slew of products, reinventing unloved but important objects everyone needed at home. And, most importantly, we were going to create a platform. We were going to build the connected home.