His choice, he says

• share
• tweet
• Linkedin

Tony Fadell is leaving Nest, the home automation company he founded and sold to Google (now Alphabet). He'll be stepping into an advisor role to Larry Page and Alphabet, but won't be involved in Nest day-to-day. According to a blog post he just put up, the transition has been in progress since "late last year" — but recent reports of turmoil, a disastrous acquisition of Dropcam, and delays at Nest plus Tony's new electric go-kart company Actev Motors have certainly fueled a sense that change would be coming one way or another.

"I don't like to do maintenance mode," Fadell told The New York Times about his departure. "It's not what gets me out of bed."

Nest's new CEO will be Marwan Fawaz, who was previously CTO of cable company Charter and worked at Motorola Home. Tony's statement specifically calls out the fact that he's leaving the company with a two-year roadmap in place, so we'll see if Nest can ship anything new in the near term — after the well-regarded Nest Learning Thermostat arrived six years ago, the Nest Protect smoke detector and the rebranded Nest Cam haven't made a huge dent in the exploding Internet of Things / home automation market.

Google acquired Nest in 2014, and after the search reorganized itself into Alphabet, Nest became one of those divisions, separate from Google. But since then, Nest hasn't had much in the way of good press. Fadell attended the Code Conference earlier this week, but gave no public indication that he would be leaving the company. A spokesperson for Next said that Fadell would be working more with some of the startups that he funds, including Phononic, Actev, Mousera, and Impossible Foods.