“You need to create a chain of trust. You can't just message people on LinkedIn and say, 'Come and join me.' … you need to have people around you who can sell you and can be that chain of trust that can validate you.”
Who Will Vouch for You
From an interview in Ali Tamaseb’s Super Founders (PublicAffairs, 2021), a venture capitalist’s data study of what sets billion-dollar startups apart. Fadell led the iPod at Apple, and in 2010 he started Nest to rethink the home thermostat; Google bought the company in 2014 for $3.2 billion. The line is about hiring. A founder with no track record, he says, has a much harder time getting experienced people to join.
Fadell did not have that problem at Nest. He had worked in Silicon Valley for twenty years and had a reputation “for getting things done and working with outstanding talent,” so he could call talented people and hire them. He calls it “twenty years of a chain of trust,” and those years included multiple startups and ten years of failure before the iPod and iPhone.
Arie Belldegrun, interviewed in the same book, says credibility counts more than what you know, and that things get easier once people know your name. For a founder nobody knows yet, Fadell’s advice is to “work with your board members and investors to help you sell the vision you have.” Read plainly, the chain means someone the other person already trusts vouches for you, which a cold message on LinkedIn cannot do.
Fadell was talking about founders hiring, but the advice works for someone looking for a job too: a cold message to a hiring manager is a stranger asking to be trusted, and a referral from someone the manager already trusts is a link in the same chain.