TONY FADELL

I don't look backwards. I'm pleasantly surprised, and I feel really proud of the team and what we were able to accomplish together. But really, where I'm focused is the future and where Nest is going.

I knew a lot about product design before coming to Apple, but I didn't understand a lot about consumer experience design, which is really Apple's forte.

It's not just about turning up or down the heat, it's about the other experiences that come with turning up or down the heat - what are we doing about energy, what are we doing about your health and safety.

There are two different types of prototyping. First, the gut sense. You know how far you can take it. Second, you need experts to figure out whether or not it is attainable.

I say homes are for families, and you have to make sure you design for the family, not just one person: kids, your wife, your grandparents need to be able to use it.

If you look at most successful startups, they're run by people in their mid to late forties, who've gone through the trenches multiple times and had multiple failures, so they understand.

You need to set near-term milestones. Put the assumptions down on paper, and make it to your vision or ultimate product. Your team has to understand where they're going. Your partners need to understand where they're going.

With most tech guys, it's the same outfit every day - they wear their company logo.

When I was four or five years old, my grandfather showed me how to build things, paint, saw. Through years of fixing bikes, repairing lawn mowers, I learned how things work.

Nest really came out of a process where I was trying to design the most connected and the most green home that I knew of. I was curious of just about everything that goes into a home and building a home.

Well, you can say there is a self driving car. I'm seeing the automation of vehicles. Really, computer-assisted driving. I think that is really interesting to us because we are taking all of the sensors technologies and putting them in cars and making people safer.

Usually, the biggest companies are not the most dynamic.

I have not seen a true grounds-up revolution from a bunch of companies getting together. It takes one company to put it together, then people draft off of that, but they don't build it top to bottom with a specific vision.

Every person I talk to has a story about how their smoke alarm went off or woke them up with a battery beeping. So you take it off the wall and you take the battery out and say 'screw this.' They hate the products.

I've been working with contractors designing and building a house on a nonstop basis since 2005. I learned about all these systems of audio, construction, electricity, energy, water systems.

Studies have shown that children are less likely to wake up to a horn than the sound of a mother's voice.

At the end of the day, customer choice is essential. And we don't make products that compete with Apple, nor make products that compete with Google. Our customers come in both iOS and Android flavors, and I hope our customers can still buy the products they want to purchase wherever they want to purchase them.

Computers are great tools, but they need to be applied to the physical world.

I don't want the iPod to be my defining thing.

I learned the power of 'no.' No is really important. Entrepreneurs are told to say 'yes, yes, more, more.'

I knew there were all kinds of interesting things going on at Google, but now that I've seen them, my mind has been blown - in a great way. They have all these amazing projects and people that the world doesn't know anything about. I'm like a kid in a candy store - it's an idea factory.

It wasn't until the Apple Macintosh that people understood what true hardware-software integration was about. It took one company to line it up: low-cost hardware, cool graphics, third-party products built on top of it, in an all-in-one attractive package that was accessible to consumer marketing.

Typical mergers happen when there are two competitors coming together, and they reduce overhead.

People buy products, and they want to understand what those things are and how they are applicable to their life.

In Tahoe, you want to be able check on the temperature of the house or turn it on before you get there. Because it's really cold in the winter.