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.

Similarly, veteran tech executive Steve Blank wrote that many fast- moving and growing companies have excessive “organizational debt”—which “can kill the company even quicker” than technical debt. Steve defines organizational debt as compromises made to “just get it done.” Sometimes it’s necessary, and smart, to prioritize the most important work and get to the rest later. Yet, like borrowing too much money, so much organizational debt can accumulate that your company struggles to pay it down.

Appendix

“We wrote a friction article for Gallup.com, “Too Many Teams, Too Many Bosses,” and for Times Higher Education, “Our To-Do Lists Can’t Grow Forever. It’s Time to Try Subtraction.

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.