Book Notes

Build, Tony Fadell (7/10)

A guidebook on company and product building

Mar 31, 2023 • 2 min read

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

A guidebook on company and product building
Grounded in the personal experiences and stories of Tony Fadell, who played a prominent role in creating the iPhone and iPod
Accessible, comprehensive, and widely applicable to a broad array of contexts and readers

It's a okay book. It's well-structured and very comprehensive. It's also grounded in and written from the perspective of someone with very real company and product-building experiences, which I appreciate.
But I didn't really learn anything new about product building that I hadn't already seen/read. Most of it felt quite a lot like common sense.
Lean Startup was far more valuable for product builders, imo. Build, on the other hand, takes a broader, (hardware technology) company-building perspective and I think this generality is the book's strength and also its weakness.
Not really a book I would recommend for anyone to read, but perhaps some specific chapters are worth reading/converting into blog posts.

What you’re building never matters as much as who you’re building it with
Sometimes the people you don’t expect to be amazing—the ones you thought were Bs and B+s—turn out to completely rock your world. They hold your team together by being dependable and flexible and great mentors and teammates. They’re modest and kind and just quietly do good work. They’re a different type of “rock star
Traditional schooling trains people to think incorrectly about failure. You’re taught a subject, you take a test, and if you fail, that’s it. You’re done. But once you’re out of school, there is no book, no test, no grade. And if you fail, you learn. In fact, in most cases, it’s the only way to learn—especially if you’re creating something the world has never seen before.