Fadell founded the smart-home company and sold it to Google himself. The decision to leave, Fadell claims in his blog post, was in the making since last year. This year, Fadell led a move to brick Nest-owned Revolv, a home automation hub, in a move that rendered it completely useless to its owners. Resulting bad press and Nest employees’ comments on Fadell’s management practices proceeded Fadell’s departure. As Tony Fadell phrase it: Marwan Fawaz will be the replacement CEO. Fawaz’s past experience includes a stint as CTO at cable company Charter and CEO at Motorola Home. Google probably didn’t foresee this happening back in 2014: their $3.2 billion purchase of Nest that year was their third-largest acquisition ever.
