Nest’s CEO has stepped down from the top spot within the company. Marwan Fawaz only joined the company in 2016, and is out after barely two years. Reportedly, employees pushed for Fawaz’s exit. Employees were pushing Fawaz out because he was reportedly more of an operations manager than a leader. This is coming from multiple sources within Nest, as well as some former Nest employees.
Fawaz and Rishi Chandra, who is the vice president of product management for Google’s home and living room products, said in an interview on Monday, that this move is going to make it easier for Google’s smart home devices to work together. It’ll also allow Nest to tap into the artificial intelligence and machine learning advances that Google has done. Separating Google Assistant and Google Home from Nest was a bit strange, but now the combined team will be reporting to Chandra, who is a 12-year Google veteran. As a combined team, consumers may see more fluidity when it comes to Google’s smart assistant and its smart home products.
Since Nest was bought by Google back in 2014 for around $3.2 billion, it has had a hard time fitting in, so to speak. Nest was taken out of Google, and was a separate company under the Alphabet umbrella, but then returned to Google’s umbrella just a few months ago. While Nest was a separate company, it had all sorts of problems, mainly with Tony Fadell, the founder of Nest. Reportedly, Fadell would force his employees to start over on products when they were nearly finished. This caused Nest to take many years before it even released a product after being acquired by Google, even after it acquired DropCam, it had issues with new products. Although the DropCam acquisition was also a pretty big mess for Nest, that ultimately had the founders of both companies leaving the combined company.