Tony Fadell Quotes

The perception in Silicon Valley is that if you dress well, you couldn't possibly be smart, or you're in P.R. but couldn't possibly run a company. I remember briefly attempting the Adidas and jeans and sweatshirt over T-shirt look, but I realized I was trying to dress like a young tech geek, and that just wasn't me.

I am just happy to be part of the Nike family.

Storytelling is the game. It's what we all do. It's why Nike is Nike, it's why Apple is Apple, it's why Walt Disney built Disney World and it's why Vince McMahon makes a billion dollars.

I'm probably not your typical business person in many ways. I don't wear a suit. I don't carry a briefcase. I don't wear a tie. I'm fairly casual. I haven't got a big office, and it's in a very ordinary part of town. I'd much prefer to downplay than impress.

We are fortunate to have collectively built a culture that matters, a brand that matters, a business that matters. It is impossible to state in words how much this team means to me, how much Hulu means to me.

When you see all the suits in the room, everybody in the room has on suits, you know, the women, too. We're not wearing dresses and chiffon and we're not as fun as we used to be.

You know, people at Wal-Mart are standing there with their uniforms on. I feel like I'm putting on a uniform to do a movie. I don't feel like it's dressing in drag.

The NBA's a Fortune 500 company. That's how you look at it. And all the other Fortune 500 companies out there in the world, you don't see their CEOs and COOs going to work with white tees and baggy clothes and stuff like that. So I have to take that same approach.

In the rough and tumble world of business, media, or politics, the black knitted tie is indeed indispensable.

If we all dress alike, we might as well all work in cubicles.

For one of my first TV jobs, I was required to cut my hair, dress a certain way, and wear a certain amount of makeup. I was even told to have my hair cut based on a picture in a magazine. I realized that until I complied, I wasn't going to get any airtime.

My dad's a businessman, and I grew up looking up to him, how he dressed to go to work and, whenever I went to his office, how he spoke to people.

As a racing driver, you're representing a brand and your appearance is part of your job. But there's a fine line between being feminine and creating attention on yourself because of what you're wearing.

I come from an environment where the men actually say, "Is it OK if I take off my jacket?" in a meeting. Everyone wears suits; it is a very dressed-up world. Even if I wear jeans, I still wear a blazer and jewelry. I think there is something nice about coming to work and dressing nicely.

Aerie builds you up, and it makes you feel positive. Why don't more companies do that?

I love challenging the notion that, in order to be a tech founder, you have to be holed up in a dark room wearing a T-shirt and baggy jeans.

The phrase "corporate identity design" seems to be a bit exclusive it sometimes frightens the smaller client who can't relate because they don't consider themselves "corporate."

The hat is not for the street: it will never be democratized. But there are certain houses that one cannot enter without a hat. And one must always wear a hat when lunching with people whom one does not know well. One appears to one's best advantage.

In some contexts in Pakistan maybe a beard is negative. It depends. And in some contexts in America maybe a beard is positive. I think there's certainly lots of hipster communities where having a beard makes me look a little bit less like a, you know, middle-aged fuddy-duddy. And there's some places in Pakistan where having a beard, you know, certain corporate contexts, certain social contexts, where it's not an advantage to have a beard.

I wanted to distance myself from those pasty faced corpses in suits I saw in airline magazine ads. If I was going to become a businessman, I was going to do it on my own terms.

Too often it's not the most creative guys or the smartest. Instead, it's the ones who are best at playing politics and soft-soaping their bosses. Boards don't like tough, abrasive guys.

I often ask students: 'Is this what you would show Tom Ford?' and they say: 'No, we'd have done more work' or 'We'd have dressed better.' So I say: 'Why don't you do that here?'

The pressure to perform is relentless in today's workplace - regardless of where you work. We are all being asked to do more with less. I think what we could borrow from the culture of Silicon Valley is "eat your own dog food ." That is an expression used by tech types to mean using what you make or sell.

If you have a profession that depends on what you look like, you can't blame somebody for caring about that. It's part of their job. So it's vanity but it's also not in a lot of cases. It's being professional.

You can be serious without a suit