Tony Fadell on mission-driven a**holes, Silicon Valley entitlement and why LLMs are ‘know-it-alls’

Tony Fadell, the father of the iPod and founder of Nest, took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 on Tuesday to talk about how building the next generation of deep tech startups requires mission-driven a**holes. The entrepreneur and investor did not hold back on stage as he called out Silicon Valley for its entitlement and dunked on LLMs being “know-it-alls”, earning a wave of laughs and applause across the fully-packed auditorium.

Fadell explained why he believes “mission-driven a**holes are a good thing, and in fact, needed to create and ship world class technology products.

“People work with people who are very difficult, and those are the ones that create and change the world. But there are two types of a**holes. Everybody’s an a**hole, but you gotta understand why,” Fadell said. “If they’re an a**hole, because it’s their ego, they’re trying to push people down, that is an egocentric a**hole. But, if you are an a**hole on the details, you’re sitting there pushing on the details, you’re not criticizing the people, but you are critiquing their work and saying you can do better, that is a mission-driven a**hole.”

Fadell thinks it’s not a bad thing when someone is keen on the details and makes sure their team is getting things right. He believes that focusing on details is what you need to make great products, and when you have a manager who cares, that’s a good thing.

The entrepreneur and investor also called out Silicon Valley for its entitlement, making a joke about how startups aren’t hiring Googlers because “you’re lucky that they even showed up.”

“They just showed up on a bus, and they came in for lunch, and then took the bus home,” Fadell said. “They say ‘I worked today, I’m getting a massage, oh, where’s the yogurt?’ That’s why I don’t like any of our startups hiring most Googlers because they’ve got this culture thing.”

He noted that during his days at General Magic in the 90s, the team decided they weren’t going to hire people from the East Coast because of their demands.

“We said, we will never hire people from the East Coast,” Fadell said. “So this was IBM and Sperry and all that s*** because they had to have their driver, or they had to have their company car, and they had to have their corporate lunch and their special executive toilet. We’re like we’re never hiring any of these people, it’s just not going to work, it’s a culture clash. And now I wake up today and Silicon Valley has turned into that s***, and I’m like get me the f*** out of here, yeah? Entitlement everywhere!”

Fadell then went on to call out LLMs for being know-it-alls, joking that no one wants to hire a know-it-all. He believes LLMs are great for certain things, but that they can’t be adopted across the board.

He believes LLMs can be great for entertainment, like if you’re asking ChatGPT to write you a funny poem. However, Fadell says that since LLMs are prone to hallucinations, they shouldn’t be used in cases where people could be at risk. For instance, he thinks doctors shouldn’t be using ChatGPT to create patient reports because people could be harmed if treatment plans are entered incorrectly or drugs are misnamed.

“If you look at artificial-specific models, they work really well,” Fadell said. “They don’t hallucinate, but LLMs are trying to be this general thing because we’re trying to make science fiction happen.”