Tony Fadell

And if you think about it, you had data that said there was pros and cons on both sides.

And what happened was the data was not clear that we should choose one over the other.

And Steve said, we are going this way.

Enough other people kind of said, yeah, that seems like that's the right thing to do.

We're going to get close enough to get there.

And then other people were like, no, my opinion is this.

And guess who wins at the end of the day?

Steve Jobs' opinion does.

And he was like, if you're not going to get on board, get out of this room and you can go work on another project, but you're not going to work on this one.

When you're doing a 1.0 of anything...

If you're doing anything that matters and it's a 1.0 and it's a new category or it's a new device the world hasn't seen before, you have very few analogs that you can use to make data-driven decisions.

And so if most of your decisions are going to be opinion-based decisions for a 1.0, you have to have one or two or a very, very small set of people who are charged with making the opinion-based decisions and can actually get you from a blank sheet of white paper or whiteboard to an actual 1.0 spec.

Because if you try to do data-driven decisions all the way along, you're either not doing a differentiated product because you're taking data from another thing, or you're just getting just bullshit data, right?

So you're going to have to figure out how to get opinion-based decisions to happen.

And that means you have to have,

for lack of a better word, tastemakers.

This is what we are doing.

We are the person or the team who is going to make those opinion-based decisions.

Of course, some people aren't going to like it.

And it's to me like, I'm sorry, this is a benevolent dictatorship.