Dropcam, as you know, was acquired by Nest in 2014 for about $555 million. In the past few months, we’ve seen many different reports talking about how what the public sees of Nest isn’t what actually happens at Nest. We’ve heard that the company’s co-founder, Tony Fadell has had his employees start over on projects which were almost complete. We’ve also heard that employees have had to work weekends to meet the insane deadlines set forth by Fadell.
Now, Dropcam’s former CEO, Greg Duffy is here to set the record straight, and he did so using Medium. It’s a pretty lengthy blog post and is in the source section below if you want to give it a read. Duffy talks about how the 100-person team at Dropcam accomplished quite a bit before coming over to Nest and Alphabet. He also mentions that while he is unable to publish financials for Dropcam, he thinks that a big portion of the “Other Bets” in Alphabet’s financials are from Dropcam. He also states that in comparison to Nest, Fadell’s company wouldn’t look good.
Duffy also says that “the ~50 Dropcam employees who resigned did so because they felt their ability to build great products being totally crushed.” That’s much different than what Fadell said about the around 50 people leaving the company after the acquisition. Fadell stated that these employees left because they weren’t ready to work at Nest. Duffy also noted that all of his employees had worked at big companies before. And that this was much different. He went on to say that where Nest has about 1200 people on staff with a nearly unlimited budget, there should be more to show than there is currently.
Former employees of Dropcam have gone on to create some other pretty amazing products, including Oculus, Eerie, Clara and Lilly Camera. All of which are pretty unique. There’s more and more evidence building that things at Nest aren’t as nice as Fadell and Alphabet would like everyone to believe. But remember, Nest has yet to put out a new product since being acquired by Google. And it’s been nearly two years since the acquisition. Which just shows you the problems happening within Nest.