Nest is not for sale, insists new CEO Marwan Fawaz

The last few days at Nest have been far from uneventful. It saw the exit of its CEO Tony Fadell last week. Fadell had co-founded the company in 2011 and he was responsible for guiding the company from its inception to the Google acquisition. While a new CEO has been announced for Nest, there were speculations surrounding the future of the company. To put to rest all the rumours of Nest apparently being ready for a sale, new CEO Marwan Fawaz shot off an email to current employees of Nest saying that it was not for sale. “My only agenda for Nest is to scale and grow with innovative products. Nest is not for sale, and scaling and innovation aren’t mutually exclusive,” said the email published on The Verge. These rumours came about due to his previous stint at Google, as the CEO of Motorola Home. Motorola Home was ultimately pared down and sold to Arris - another telecommunications company. Bloomberg has also reported about the problems that Nest has been having that could have possibly given rise to these rumours. In the past few months, Nest employees have openly complained about the problems they face inside the company. One of the engineers took to Reddit to post a lengthy rant filled with personal attacks directed at ex-CEO Fadell, claiming that Nest had missed sales targets, delayed future product launches and messed up product upgrades. Another Nest employee went as far as filing a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board against Nest and Google. According to  Business Insider, he alleges that Nest fired him for posting critical memes about the company on a private Facebook group. The Verge writes that Fadell said he had decided to leave Nest last year. According to several sources close to Nest, this decision was the result of increased pressure on Nest as a company to deliver profitable results as a standalone unit, part of the bigger new Alphabet operating structure; as opposed to being given more room to grow under the safety net of being a part of Google. Fadell, will continue as an adviser Alphabet and Google’s co-founder Larry Page. Greg Duffy, Dropcam’s founder also pitched in, claiming that he felt he had made a mistake in selling Dropcam to Nest in the year 2014. Duffy went on to claim that Dropcam’s products were a lot more popular than Nest’s devices and he blamed Nest’s divisive culture for an exodus of employees from the organisation. In a blog post published on Medium, he went on to say that the 50 odd Dropcam employees who resigned, did so because they felt as if their ability to build great products was being totally crushed. “All of us have worked at big companies before, where it is harder to move fast. But this is something different, as evidenced by the continued lack of output from the currently 1200-person team and its virtually unlimited budget.” Fadell previously worked at Apple and was senior vice president of the iPod division during his time there. Bloomberg reports that Tony Fadell started Nest Labs in the year 2010 with a vision to modernize home gadgets. In 2014, Nest Labs was subsequently sold to Google for $3.2 billion. From then on, he has spent the last two years working closely with Google’s vision of a connected future and tried integrating Google’s wares into consumers’ lives more efficiently.