When Larry told me during acquisition that Google would marshal the team and align their priorities with ours, he was 100 percent telling the truth. But what that looked like at Google was giving the team the skeleton of a plan and letting them fill in the rest as they went. Then they’d have a meeting every so often to ask how things were going.

But I had interpreted his words through an Apple lens. If Steve Jobs said he was going to marshal the team, that meant he was going to be there every step of the way—weekly, sometimes daily. He’d assemble everyone, tell them where to go, make sure they were marching together, and drag any stragglers back in place by sheer force of will.

Google Ventures, now known as GV, was an investor. They knew our financials and had always been extremely supportive, so I wasn’t worried about the number. I was worried about which teams we’d work with, what technology we’d share, what products we’d build. Nest wasn’t joining Google for the money—we were joining to accelerate our mission. So it was always mission first, money second.

Together with Google, we went through every single function—marketing, PR, HR, sales, every part of the company. We established where we could create synergies and where we couldn’t, figured out which managers would be assigned to us, how we would do the hiring, which perks people would get, which salaries they could expect, which teams would be working together closely, and how those relationships would be established.

It took a lot of time. In fact I was starting to get a lot of eye rolls. “Really, Tony? You want to get into the details of this now?” Yes, yes, I do. It’s important.

And it was—critically important and usually overlooked.

Most acquisitions are driven and overseen by bankers, and bankers only make the real money if the deal goes through, so they’re motivated to move fast and get paid. They don’t care about getting every detail of what happens to employees right. They don’t really care about cultural fit. Not deeply.

Robert Sternberg, the present-day guru of intelligence, writes that the major factor in whether people achieve expertise “is not some fixed prior ability, but purposeful engagement.” Or, as his forerunner Binet recognized, it’s not always the people who start out the smartest who end up the smartest.

Or, as Bill liked to say: “If you’re a great manager, your people will make you a leader. They acclaim that, not you.” He attributed this mantra to Donna Dubinsky and usually included the not-so-flattering story behind it. Donna worked with Bill at Apple and Claris, the software company that was spun out of Apple. Bill had been a big shot at Apple, VP of sales and marketing, and had been very successful at Kodak. In both companies he had been detail oriented, frequently micromanaging his team members. That worked pretty well, so when he took on the CEO role at Claris, he figured it was his job to tell everyone what to do. Which he did. Late one afternoon Donna dropped by Bill’s office and told him that if he was going to tell everyone what to do, they were all going to quit and go back to Apple. No one wanted to work for a dictator. She added a bit more wisdom for the first-time CEO: “Bill, your title makes you a manager; your people make you a leader.

THIRTEEN: Superintelligence

“It took a sharper eye to spot the differences. There was the vision question, with Musk moving backward from fantasy and Huang moving forward from reality. There was also the topic of loyalty. Musk did not value it; he often fired people arbitrarily and without warning, in one case canning the entire Starlink engineering team almost at random on a Sunday

afternoon. Huang almost never fired anyone, and when he did, it was only after multiple cautions and the offer of a performance-improvement plan. It took truly egregious behavior to get kicked out of Nvidia, and many employees worked there for decades, including boomerang hires like Catanzaro and Aarts. Even when operating economics forced Huang to shutter a division, he reassigned employees to other useful tasks. In 2019 Curtis Priem returned to Nvidia’s offices for the first time in sixteen years to join Huang and Malachowsky for a reunion of the company’s founders. “I was astounded at how many people were still there,” he said. “Jeff Fisher, his kids were working for Nvidia.