• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, June 6, 2016

Alphabet, Inc. announced Friday that Apple veteran and Nest founder and CEO Tony Fadell would be leaving the IoT company that Google bought for $3.2 billion in 2004. Coverage immediately cited the very public complaints of a few employees and colleagues over Fadell’s  management style, coupled with some purported blown deadlines and dampened performance.

“The sharpest attack came from Greg Duffy, the founder and former chief executive of Dropcam, the home video camera and cloud-computing service that Nest acquired for $555 million in 2014, about six months after Google bought Nest,” Steve Lohr writes in the New York Times, which cites other criticisms as well. 

But Fadell seems to have preempted the negative commentary he anticipated in his chat with Lohr, which was conducted before his departure on the condition that the story not be published until the announcement was made.  

“Fadell characterized Nest as healthy, with 1,100 workers and strong teams in design, software and services around its three product families — its “learning” thermostat, smoke detector and video camera,” Lohr writes. 

“I’m a guy who’s at the beginning of things,” Fadell tells Lohr. “I don’t like to do maintenance mode. It’s not what gets me out of bed.”

In his own blog post, Fadell states: “Nest revenue has grown in excess of 50% year-over-year and today, millions of people in more than 190 countries use Nest products, which include hardware, software, services, and the Nest-backed Thread wireless protocol. In 2015 alone, we shipped four new hardware products and five significant App releases, and the Nest Learning Thermostat 3rd Gen reached the one million unit milestone in half the time as the previous generation!”

Fadell also expressed no regrets in a candid interview with Bloomberg Friday, saying Nest has shipped products that millions of customers have rated highly. Trotting out the “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” argument, he also points out that the people who worked with him at a previous venture 25 years ago “have their kids working for me now.” 

“To me, it’s truly, what’s your mindset? Are you coming to work? Are you truly respecting the mission we’re on?,” he tells Ashlee Vance.

More intriguingly, he reveals that he has invested in more than 100 companies “very secretively” over the past decade that “have incredibly just disruptive ideas that can change the world in a positive way, whether it’s in medical or it’s in consumer products or energy.”  Among them, according to several sources, are Phononic, Flexport, Airware, Bump (acquired by Google), ZEP Solar (bought by SolarCity), Actev, Mousera and Impossible Foods.

In some cases he’s on the board; in others, he helps find funding or works “on the marketing angles for them, the messaging, the product designs,” he tells Vance.

CNET’s Richard Nieva reports that Jackdaw Research analyst Jan Dawson “said the split was necessary because of the increased tension between Fadell and Alphabet's management, and the outsized media attention it was getting. ‘This should allow Nest to move on without the distraction of the recent news stories and criticisms,’ he said.”

But Fadell will remain an adviser to Alphabet and CEO Larry Page praised him Friday as a “true visionary” he looks forward to continuing to work with.  

Marwan Fawaz was named CEO at Nest. He “has extensive experience in executive positions, having worked at Charter, ADT and Motorola Home. He served as CEO of the latter, back when the company was still a part of the Google family, a position that no doubt helped qualify him for his big new gig,” Brian Heater observes for TechCrunch.

“Fawaz may be an experienced executive in the cable and telecommunications industry, but he's not the media darling that Fadell was,” Dan Seifert writes for The Verge.

Fadell himself cited Fawaz’ “extensive technology and engineering knowledge, his experience with global service providers, as well as his background in connected home platforms.”

As well as, one would expect, a higher tolerance for maintenance mode.