Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

Everyone deserves a mentor

For every career crisis, every fork in the road, you need someone to talk to. Someone who's been there before, who knows exactly how wobbly and conflicted you feel, who can give it to you straight:

• Here's how to think about choosing a job;
• Here's how to be a better manager;
• Here's how to approach design;
• Here's how to start a company;
• Here's how to run it.

Tony Fadell learned all these lessons the hard way. He spent the first 10 years of his career in Silicon Valley failing spectacularly, and the next 20 building some of the most impactful devices in history - the iPod, iPhone, and Nest Learning Thermostat. He has enough stories and advice about leadership, design, startups, mentorship, decision making, devastating screwups, and unbelievable success to fill an encyclopedia.

So that's what this book is. An advice encyclopedia. A mentor in a box. But Tony's doesn't follow the standard Silicon Valley credo that you have to radically reinvent everything you do. His advice is unorthodox because it's old school. Because it's based on human nature, not gimmicks.

Tony keeps things simple: he just tells you what works. He gives you exactly what you need to make things worth making.