Running Through Walls: From Apple Intern to Entrepreneur
It’s no surprise that Matt Rogers, who started his career as an intern at Apple, would focus on creating a product of beauty and style in his first entrepreneurial venture. What may have been surprising, as Rogers told Venrock partner David Pakman, is that the product was a twist on the ho-hum thermostat — something most people used regularly but completely ignored. With the launch of Nest Labs, Rogers and his cofounder, former Apple iPod executive Tony Fadell, elevated the homely thermostat (and eventually, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors) to objects of desire.
“Products have to appeal to the logical part of your brain, but also the emotional side,” says Rogers. And you have to convince investors on this point before you get around to convincing consumers, he adds. “You have to have a rational, logical reason to want to get involved — like, it can save energy and save lives. But you also have to make a product that people will buy because it’s so beautiful.”
The reverse is also true, Rogers says — beauty alone won’t propel a product to success. “We wanted to create something that had a really strong core value proposition,” Rogers says — in the case of Nest, a product that would save money, make homes safer, was easy to program, and added beauty to a home.
Since a beautifully designed and connected thermostat didn’t exist in the market until Rogers and his colleagues dreamed it up, how did they test its potential? Steve Jobs’ dislike of extensive market research was an accepted fact of life at Apple; Rogers says the Nest founders didn’t completely eschew market research, but “we use both [instinct and research]. We don’t do double-blind studies or user groups behind glass, but we do find trusted people that we believe have both good instincts and good taste.”
One benefit of selling a connected product, Rogers says, is that the products can unearth user feedback on their own. “We can collect data from our testers to see how they’re using our products — something we couldn’t do 10 years ago,” he says.
That data, and the feedback from trusted people, helped keep Nest on the cutting edge — since a new-to-market product won’t be alone in the market for long. “We expected the entrenched players to rear up” shortly after the launch of Nest’s first thermostat. “What we didn’t realize is how slow they’d be at responding.” Constant innovation post-product launch is key to beating back the competition, Rogers says: “We’ve done hundreds and hundreds of software updates by now, major feature releases, and three major hardware releases. By the time incumbents have copied our last software product, we’re several generations ahead.”
The swift, innovative response to competition must also come into play when things go wrong — as in 2014, when Nest had to recall its Protect Smoke + CO Alarm because of a fault that delayed the alarm. “It’s a product developers’ nightmare,” says Rogers of the day he and Fadell decided to pull Protect from the market.” For the connected devices already in consumer homes, the company was able to issue an over-the-air software update; but devices in retail stores had to be pulled.
“We needed to be completely transparent,” Rogers remembers. “We had to move swiftly and call all of our retail partners. Because we moved so quickly and didn’t hide things and fixed it, we got a lot of credit with our customers. Now, Protect is our most successful and best reviewed product.”
