We’ve reported before on how Nest’s issues in the managerial area have been a real problem for the Alphabet subsidiary. Where Nest employees have been asked to work weekends, and that Nest co-founder, Tony Fadell has had his employees scrap projects when they were nearly finished. In a new report from The Information, it appears that is only the tip of the iceberg with Nest. And there are some real issues going on at the company. So much so that Dropcam’s co-founder, Greg Duffy told Fadell that he runs his company as a “tyrant bureaucrat”. When Nest bought Dropcam for $555 million, the investors of Dropcam argued against selling, but Duffy had much respect for Fadell at the time.
After acquiring Dropcam, Fadell decided to put all of Dropcam’s upcoming projects on the backburner, and replace one with their which still hasn’t even launched. Fadell said that it wouldn’t take long for Nest to add some features to the Dropcam and rebrand it as the “Nest Cam”. Fadell actually said it would take a month, Duffy said it would take nearly nine months. In reality, it took about a year to happen. This report also notes that Duffy witness Fadell berate a Google engineer in front of “about 20 other people”, Duffy realized that Fadell was managing technologies that he knew nothing about. He also concluded that employees were not able to speak up and share their views. A huge difference compared to Dropcam, prior to the acquisition.
Nest acquired Dropcam less than two years ago, and nearly half of Dropcam’s employees have already left including their co-founder Greg Duffy. He told Fadell that he wanted to report directly to him, and have control over the camera division of Nest – aka be in charge of Dropcam. Fadell reportedly told Duffy that he can’t report to him because he “hasn’t earned it”. With that, Duffy called it quits and left the company in January 2015.
After seeing multiple reports from multiple sources talking about the issues within Nest, it’s clear that something needs to change. Whether that is a replacement for Tony Fadell, or something else entirely, something needs to happen soon. Nest has yet to release their own product since being acquired by Google in January 2014. While Nest has released products, they have only released a new version of the Nest Protect smoke detector, the Nest Learning Thermostat and rebranded the Dropcam to Nest Cam. Although there are rumors of more products in the pipeline, including a competitor to Amazon’s Echo, nothing has been announced yet. And this could spell and issue for Alphabet sooner rather than later.