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Steve Jobs and Larry Page
Fadell worked with Jobs during his nearly ten years at Apple, for which he's known as the "father of the iPod," and Page after Google bought his smart-home company, Nest, for $3.2 billion in 2014.
He learned very different things from both men, he told Bloomberg's Ashlee Vance as part of an interview about his decision to step down as Nest CEO.
Here's what Fadell said about working with Page and Jobs:
I respect what Larry and Sergey (Brin) have built. I've learned a lot from Larry, and a lot of the people that they've hired are just top-notch.
For me, it's really contrasting this with Steve (Jobs), because I learned a lot from Steve about experience and marketing and product design.
With Larry in particular it was about looking out well beyond the horizon and trying to pull out that horizon you can't see. They can jump up really high and see it well before anyone else does and try to pull it in. That is unheard of in Cupertino (Apple's Silicon Valley headquarters) from my experience there.
To me that was an eye-opener. Every time I open up another (Google research) lab or somebody introduced me to something, I'm like, "What? You're doing that? Oh, my God." And it just -- you know, it's candy for my brain.
In the past few months, several reports have scrutinized Fadell's management and Nest's product timelines. He tells Vance that he wanted to leave Nest to focus more on advising and investing in startups, and potentially work on new companies of his own (he's currently the cofounder of an electric go-kart company).
Read the rest of the wide-ranging interview here.