A Decade of Failure

In 2000, a hardware entrepreneur pitched venture capital firms 80 times and got rejected all 80 times. The world-changing product that resulted from all of that “failure” turns 25 today.

The entrepreneur was Tony Fadell, and the product was the iPod. His company, Fuse, had developed a jukebox that could rip songs from CDs to a hard drive, but in January 2001, they were running out of money. That month, Jon Rubinstein, who headed hardware at Apple, called Fadell on a ski lift. Apple wanted to make a music player.

Fadell took the six-week contract job and returned with three foam-core mockups, each weighted with lead fishing weights so it would feel as heavy as a real device in the hand. Apple picked one, and hired him to develop it.

Apple’s engineers were busy working on the Mac, so Fadell recruited people he knew to finish his project: engineers he had worked with at Fuse, and veterans of the General Magic and Philips teams, where he had spent the 1990s shipping handheld devices critics admired, but that sold poorly. He had joined General Magic in 1991, fresh out of college, as the kid on the team who wired up the demos by hand.

He came, of course, with a diagnosis for why things hadn’t worked. “A lack of discipline about who our customer was, what the product was we were making, what the timeline was, and how we were going to get it to market,” Fadell said about his time at General Magic. The iPod had one customer, one product, and a Christmas deadline. Apple introduced it nine months after that phone call.

Fadell calls that earlier period “a decade of failure.”

But it produced a team bonded by adversity, and a precise understanding of the mistake to avoid. When the right problem arrived at Apple, he’d been preparing for it for a decade.

Video credit in the supplied post: General Magic (2018).