Tony Fadell-the father of the iPod and co-founder of Nest-talked about how building the next generation of deep tech startups requires mission-driven a**holes. The entrepreneur-investor did not shy away on stage as he called out Silicon Valley on its entitlement and dunked on LLMs as being "know-it-alls", that brought a sea of laughter and applause to the fully-packed auditorium.

According to Fadell, "mission-driven a**holes are a good thing, and in fact, needed to create and ship world class technology products. End

"People work with people who are very difficult, and those are the ones that create and change the world. But there are two types of a**holes. Everybody's an a**hole, but you gotta understand why," Fadell said. "If they are an asshole because it's their ego, they are trying to push people down, that is an egocentric asshole. But if you are an asshole on the details, you are sitting there pushing on the details, you're not criticizing the people, but you are critiquing their work and saying you can do better, that is a mission-driven asshole."

Not a bad thing to Fadell is someone who is keen on the details and makes sure his team gets things right. To him, it is just what you need to make great products, and as long as you have a manager who cares, then everything seems fine.

The entrepreneur and investor also chided Silicon Valley for its sense of entitlement, joking that startups aren't hiring Googlers because "you're lucky that they even showed up."

"They just rode on a bus, and they came in for lunch, then they rode the bus back home," Fadell said. "They're like 'I worked today, I'm getting a massage, oh, where's the yogurt?' That's why I don't like any of our startups hiring most Googlers because they've got this culture thing."

He recalled that while at General Magic in the 90s, they decided they would not hire the people from the East Coast because of their demands.
"We said, we will never hire people from the East Coast," Fadell said. So this was IBM and Sperry and all that s*** because they had to have their driver, or they had to have their company car, and they had to have their corporate lunch and their special executive toilet. We're like we're never hiring any of these people, it's just not going to work, it's a culture clash.". And now wake up today and Silicon Valley's become that s***, and I'm like, get me the f*** out of here, yeah? Entitlement everywhere!

" 

Fadell did not stop there and just lambasted LLMs as know-it-alls, quipping nobody wants to hire a know-it-all. He thinks they are great for some stuff but can't be deployed everywhere.

He believes LLMs might be really great for fun applications, like if you ask ChatGPT to compose a humorous poem. Fadell cautions that because LLMs tend to hallucinate, they shouldn't be put into areas where people are going to get harmed. He gives the example that he thinks doctors shouldn't be using ChatGPT to produce patient reports because, when those plans of treatment are entered wrong or drugs misspelled, people could get harmed. "If you look at artificial-specific models, they work really well," said Fadell. "They don't hallucinate but LLMs are trying to be this general thing because we're trying to make science fiction happen."