Where is tony fadell now

Fadell: And network with individuals who can help you with that vector. I feel that quality inching up, which is great. But it takes time. What does that phrase mean to you? Fadell: Deep tech is a different way of saying the VCs who have gotten really easy ways of making money because of the social mobile app experiences, those are long in the tooth now. Good luck finding those startups. VentureBeat: Given the wide range of disciplines covered by deep tech, how do you evaluate the technologies?

And after spending three months on diligence, I stopped the deal. Very few people invest in deep tech. They say they want to. So there are a few of us all round the world who band together, kind of like super angels, in a way, or deep tech VCs.

Or they know somebody who knows it really well at that university, and so we share these deals all the time.

And those things circulate. VentureBeat: So when it comes to France and deep tech, what are the strong and the weak points you see? Fadell: So, I find that there are incredible researchers in all kinds of fields: bio, silicon, RF radio frequency , all sorts of different areas. The problem is getting those researchers to think like business people and to want to take it on [the entrepreneurial challenge].

Professors go to start a startup and then come back in. Because they see all their colleagues doing it. But how does it get extracted? Here, you gotta go find them. You might find a researcher.

VentureBeat: So how do you find these ideas in universities here or research institutions? Is it the institution that contacts you? Or is it the researcher who reaches out for help? You better reach out. The only reason I got to Silicon Valley was because I emailed … well, not email because this was back in the day … but I wrote actual letters and printed them out on a laser printer and sent them over to various companies that I thought were interesting because I read about them in MacWeek, or whatever it was.

And I wish more people would do that. Fadell : Failure, failure, failure is going to happen. Learn from your failure. Newsletters Read More. Talks Read More. Credit: Tony Fadell, now deeptech investor at Future Shape. Sign up. Related Articles. By Georgina Ustik. By Maija Palmer.

By Isabel Woodford. By Steph Bailey. Get the best of Sifted in your inbox. Tony Fadell in one of the meeting rooms of Station F, the , square-foot startup incubator in Silicon Valley is where programmers grew Google, the iPhone, Uber and Facebook into behemoths, so conventional wisdom dictates you should go West to build the next big thing.

Long derided for its strikes, hour-work week and convoluted labour laws, the country would seem to be the last place on Earth to base a startup or venture firm. But things are changing, contends Fadell, who first moved there in after a round-the-world trip that saw his family stop and stay in Paris.

He bought an apartment in the seventh arrondissement and enrolled his kids in the local schools. In Silicon Valley, the French are everywhere; around 60, make them the biggest European nation represented in the tech-focused region, according to ManpowerGroup.

But some of those French expats who used to work with Fadell at tech giants like Apple and Nest are now asking him for help to move back home.

While Britain and the U. The meeting rooms of Station F are fashioned from shipping containers - a nod to the building's General Magic was described as "the most important company that came out of Silicon Valley that nobody ever heard of" in an documentary about the business. It was the company that designed the blueprint of the first smartphone and pioneered other modern technology, like touchscreens and emojis.

Fadell worked at General Magic for four years developing personal hand-held communications technology before moving to Dutch electronics brand Phillips , where he built its mobile computing group. He then struck out on his own, founding consumer electronics company Fuse Systems in , but the dotcom crisis hit a year later.