Recent press reports of trouble at Alphabet’s Nest subsidiary apparently got so bad that its CEO, Tony Fadell, reportedly made a rare appearance earlier this month at an all-hands meeting at Google.
According to Re/code, Fadell showed up at Google’s “TGIF” meeting on April 1. His appearance came after earlier, but unconfirmed, reports that claimed sales of Nest’s smart devices came in below Google’s expectations in 2015. There have also been claims that Fadell has a poor management style.
Re/code’s transcript of the meeting claims Fadell addressed those concerns:
First and foremost, you know, the articles that you see and read about either me or about Nest — they are incredibly disheartening because we don’t believe — and I don’t believe specifically — that those articles represent our culture, represent our work ethic, represent the respect we have for each other inside the team. And so it’s really — it really hurts us a lot when see those things.
Of course, we’re not perfect. No company is. Nest isn’t perfect. I’m not perfect. No one’s perfect. But we know what our problems are. We have been addressing them over the last two years. And, frankly, we have more room to go.
He added that reports that Nest doesn’t respect its employees are “absolutely wrong”. He also defended sales of Nest’s products:
Every single year our annual sales have gone up nicely, nice growth every year since our inception. We have not had any slowdown in our sales growth. It continues. And, in fact, this quarter we actually beat our numbers. Well, let’s hope in the next two days we’ll be our numbers.