Every Monday morning at Nest, that’s how my management meetings started: Who are the great people we want to hire? Are we making our hiring goals or retention metrics? If not, what’s the problem? What are the roadblocks? And how is the team doing? What issues do people have? How are performance reviews going? Who needs a bonus? How are we going to celebrate these accomplishments so the team feels valued? And, most importantly, are people leaving? Why? How are we going to make this job more meaningful and fulfilling and exciting than anything else out there? How are we going to help our people grow?

Only after we got through this important subject could we move on to anything else—like what the hell we were building.

The managers on the team saw it was important to me, so that’s how they started structuring their weekly meetings with their teams. It became the Nest way. People first. Always.

What you’re building never matters as much as who you’re building it with.

People have this vision of what it’s like to be an executive or CEO or leader of a huge business unit. They assume everyone at that level has enough experience and savvy to at least appear to know what they’re doing. They assume there’s thoughtfulness and strategy and long-term thinking and reasonable deals sealed with firm handshakes.

But some days, it’s high school. Some days, it’s kindergarten.

That was true when I first joined the C-suite at Philips and when I became a VP at Apple and when I was CEO of Nest and when I entered the ranks of Google execs. All these jobs felt incredibly different, but at their core the responsibilities were the same—it was less and less about what you were making and more about who you were making it with.

As CEO, you spend almost all your time on people problems and communication. You’re trying to navigate a tangled web of professional relationships and intrigues, listen to but also ignore your board, maintain your company culture, buy companies or sell your own, keep people’s respect while continually pushing yourself and the team to build something great even though you barely have time to think about what you’re building anymore.

It’s an extremely weird job.

The Google teams with whom we’d planned to integrate and codevelop technologies and products were reluctant to work with us. They kept asking their execs for more details to figure out if they really had to help us at the expense of their own projects. Why? Why? Why do we have to help a team that isn’t Google? Over the subsequent months, every time we had to clarify yet again for customers that Nest was separate from Google, our internal reputation took another hit.

I should have remembered what it was like at Apple during the very first months when we started building the iPod. It just didn’t occur to me—Nest was so much bigger and more established than my tiny iPod team, I thought this was a completely different situation. But it was exactly the same. Back then Apple’s executive antibodies saw us coming to take their time and draw away their resources, so they tried to block our way and ignore our requests.

That’s when Steve Jobs gave us air cover, dropped bombs on the teams who were slowing us down, forced the issue, yelled sometimes to make sure we got what we needed. Steve Jobs fighting for us was ultimately what allowed us to succeed.

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.

When Google gave us new, gorgeous, high-end office space after the acquisition, I thanked Larry Page. I said it was very beautiful. And I told him—and our team—that we didn’t deserve it.

It felt wrong. We hadn’t earned it yet. That building was meant for a profitable company that had already proven itself. It was meant for people who could relax and spend their time arguing about who was going to get the window seat, who’d get the best view. But that’s not what Nest was about. We were focused on our mission, on staying late and solving problems and working hard and fighting through and over and around every obstacle in our path.