Nest Founder And CEO Tony Fadell Is Stepping Down: Here's What Really Happened

In a surprise announcement, Nest founder Tony Fadell revealed on Friday that he is stepping down from his role as CEO and leaving the company.

Fadell, whose impressive resume includes inventing the iPod, helping with the iPhone and starting Nest Labs back in 2010 to sell connected home products, said he will move on to pursue new opportunities but will remain an adviser to Alphabet and Larry Page without being active in the company's day-to-day operation.

"This will give me the time and flexibility to pursue new opportunities to create and disrupt other industries — and to support others who want to do the same — just as we've done at Nest," he wrote.

Marwan Fawaz, former CTO of the cable company Charter who also worked at ADT and Motorola Home, will replace Fadell as Nest's new CEO.

This news may come as a shock, but Fadell's decision to "leave the Nest" may actually have been a longer time coming. This transition, he said, has been going on since late last year.

Fadell co-founded Nest Labs six years ago with ex-Apple engineer Matt Rogers. What started as a thermostat maker grew to become a booming IoT company that essentially created a mainstream market of these products and services.

Then, in 2014, before Google became Alphabet, Google bought Nest for $3.2 billion. Even though Fadell will continue his relationship with Alphabet from the sidelines, now that he has stepped down from his position at Nest, this doesn't mean the two haven't had a rocky relationship.

When Google became Alphabet, Nest became a standalone division. The pressure was on for the company to release more new products to continue to make connected home gadgets mainstream. A Nest engineer revealed on Reddit that Nest was not making sales targets and failed on its product upgrades. Product launches were also postponed.

Further shedding light on the fact that there was trouble within the company, some employees complained on Facebook about Fadell and the work environment he had created, and they were fired for doing so.

Even Greg Duffy, founder of DropCam, publicly complained about his relationship with Nest, writing on Medium that he regretted selling his startup to Nest in 2014, and that his camera products were better than the products at Nest.

This makes it appear like Fadell could have been pushed out of his position. However, in an interview with Bloomberg, he states that negative comments come with the territory of running a company, and that not everyone will agree with how things are done.

"People will have their own opinions. The facts show that we shipped lots of product. We had really strong growth, revenue growth. Our customers love our products," Fadell said. "We have a road map. You know, people don't see that, but we have a road map that's really well-established and understood and teams are working on those products. We have lots of products coming and services coming."

Fadell revealed that, along with continuing to advise Alphabet, he will also continue to invest in technology companies, something he has been secretively doing for the past eight to 10 years.

Source: Nest

Photo: Web Summit | Flickr