This profile has not been claimed and data may not be accurate.
92nd percentile
94th percentile
iPod inventor, Nest founder ($3.2B exit), and deep-tech investor
Credibility
Traction · 90th percentile
- Nest Labs was acquired by Google for $3.2B in January 2014.
- Profiled as iPod inventor and iPhone co-inventor — a Tier 2 recognition as a feature subject in multiple tier-1 outlets including VentureBeat and Aspen Ideas.
Relationship Matrix
Most Complimentary
Founder score
- 99%Probability of being accurate (99%)Nest Labs was acquired by Google for $3.2B in January 2014.
- 99%Probability of being accurate (99%)Wikidata entity exists for Tony Fadell — a recognized public figure and entrepreneur.
- 98%Probability of being accurate (98%)Past founder of Nest Labs and Fuse.
- 97%Probability of being accurate (97%)Google Knowledge Graph maintains a knowledge panel for Tony Fadell as an American engineer and former CEO of Nest Labs.
- 95%Probability of being accurate (95%)47,567 LinkedIn followers — broad professional reach.
- 95%Probability of being accurate (95%)NYT, WSJ, and USA Today bestselling author of BUILD: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making — a feature-level recognition of domain expertise in product building.
- 92%Probability of being accurate (92%)Profiled as iPod inventor and iPhone co-inventor — a Tier 2 recognition as a feature subject in multiple tier-1 outlets including VentureBeat and Aspen Ideas.
- 90%Probability of being accurate (90%)Wikipedia page for Tony Fadell averages ~7,855 views/month — a widely-known public figure.
- 85%Probability of being accurate (85%)Nest Labs was co-founded with other co-founders.
Investor score
- 95%Probability of being accurate (95%)Publicly identified as an angel investor with a portfolio of 23 investments per CBInsights.
- 93%Probability of being accurate (93%)Principal at Future Shape, an investing and advisory firm he founded in 2017.
- 90%Probability of being accurate (90%)Has made 23 active investments per CBInsights, including Quibim (Series A, January 2025).
- 88%Probability of being accurate (88%)Portfolio includes Nothing, a unicorn (still-private company valued above $1B).
- 85%Probability of being accurate (85%)Approximately 8 years of active investing experience since founding Future Shape in 2017.
- 80%Probability of being accurate (80%)Backed Breakout Ventures' $112.5M fund alongside Chris Sacca and others — LP/backer signal.
What you likely need
As the founder behind Nest's $3.2B exit and the inventor of the iPod, you bring rare hardware-to-scale credibility that few in the room can match. Your current work at Future Shape investing in deep tech and climate hardware puts you at the intersection of engineering and capital — events that connect you with other hardware-first founders and climate-tech investors would be highest-signal. You'd also benefit from gatherings that let you share your product-building philosophy with the next generation of technical founders.
Would you attend these IRL Festival events?
We will tune and customize your Founder Festival experience to make sure you get invited to the events that would be most valuable to you.
- introsA deep-tech hardware founder dinner with other $100M+ exit founders to exchange lessons on scaling physical products to consumer markets.
- fundraisingA climate-tech investor roundtable with Future Shape-adjacent GPs and LPs to co-invest in battery, energy, and materials startups.
- hiringA Nest and Google Hardware alumni happy hour to surface founding engineers for the next generation of deep-tech portfolio companies.
- positioningA positioning workshop with other bestselling founder-authors to develop a speaker and thought-leadership strategy around the BUILD framework.
- tacticalAn MIT Designer-in-Residence office hours session with early-stage technical founders building hardware products at the intersection of design and engineering.
- introsA dinner with founders from unicorn-stage portfolio companies (including Nothing) to pressure-test go-to-market strategies for consumer hardware in 2025.
- introsA Paris-based European deep-tech founder and investor networking night to build deal flow and co-investment relationships in the EU hardware ecosystem.