Nest Labs' thermostat bet: turn the box that runs home energy into a beloved object

Tony Fadell, the former Apple executive who oversaw 18 versions of the iPod and the first three iPhones, spent about eighteen months after leaving retirement building a startup in total secrecy. The idea came to him while designing his green home in Tahoe: he was shocked that not a single attractive thermostat existed, and the scale of the category—thermostats sit in a quarter of a billion US homes and offices and control roughly 50% of the average home's energy budget—convinced him it was a real business.

On 2011-10-24 the company revealed itself as Nest Labs with the Nest Learning Thermostat, a device built from the guts of a smartphone and aimed at the ugly, hard-to-use wall boxes that control home temperature. Fadell's goal was to make the thermostat more than sexy: he wanted it to become a beloved object, and he argued that the category needed someone who knew how to build drop-dead-easy user experiences. He had promised Steve Jobs he would not compete with his Apple work, so he took the design philosophy to an entirely different industry.

TechCrunch's reveal story ran on the evening of 2011-10-24 with Fadell's first video interview, and the news drew 172 points and 69 comments on Hacker News the next day. Whether consumers would actually buy a design-led thermostat was the open question at that point; nothing in the article documented price, availability or sales.