Late last year, Tony Fadell was gearing up to release one of his most anticipated designs in years – the Ledger Stax, a hardware wallet for crypto. It was typical Fadell: useful, beautiful, designed for scale. Then the FTX debacle happened, and Bitcoin fell through the floor, taking the wider crypto market with it. “It wasn’t a failure of the technology,” Fadell says. “Just plain mismanagement.”
Fadell knows a little something about timing: in the ’90s, he worked at General Magic, the now-legendary Silicon Valley firm that worked on a precursor to smartphones decades before the real thing. General Magic flopped, but the idea would change the world. Fadell went on to help design the iPod and iPhone at Apple, and later founded smart-home company Nest. There’s a good chance that you’re reading this story on a descendant of one of Fadell’s products. The point is: success is often about timing.
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