I spent nine years at Apple. It’s the place where I finally grew up. I wasn’t just managing a team anymore. I was leading hundreds, thousands of people. It was a profound shift in my career and in who I was. After a decade of failure, I finally made something—actually two things—that people actually wanted. I finally got it right.

But it didn’t feel like success at first. Or even in the end. It was still work, every step of the way.

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.

One of the most painful parts of the Google acquisition of Nest was losing our board. We had an amazing board at Nest—structured and informed, operational and active. We could go to the board, get firm agreement on a clear strategy and plan: yes, we’re going to do this, I’ll get back to you in a week with next steps.

When we were acquired, our beloved board was dissolved and replaced with . . . nothing. We were supposed to have a governing board of several Google execs, but our meetings were either perpetually rescheduled or barely attended. We’d propose a path forward and everyone would say, “Yeah, well, let’s think about that a little bit more.” The can would get kicked down the road to the next meeting that nobody went to and we’d be left sitting

on our hands.

One might look at that and say, “So what’s the problem? If the board doesn’t give you guidance, then just go do it yourself. You’re the CEO.”

But that is not the solution. Even the most incredible CEOs in the world still need a board. Not the meetings, necessarily, but the advice of smart, invested, experienced people. Even big projects within a company should have a mini-board—a collection of helpful execs who can work to guide a project lead and step in if things go sideways.

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.