Tony Fadell, who co-founded home automation company Nest in 2010, is stepping down.
Fadell, who made his name as the “father of the iPod” while at Apple, said in a blog post on Friday that he will be leaving his day-to-day job as Nest’s CEO, but will remain an advisor to both Nest and its parent company, Alphabet (formerly Google) (GOOG). Marwan Fawaz, the former executive vice president of Motorola Mobility and former CEO of Motorola Home, is joining Nest as its new CEO.
“Today though, my news is bittersweet: I have decided that the time is right to ‘leave the Nest,'” Fadell wrote. “Although this news may feel sudden to some, this transition has been in progress since late last year,” he added.
The news comes a the heels of scathing media reports about employees being unhappy at the company, some of them leaving, and tensions between Nest and Alphabet over its lack of new products. The company has also made headlines for some product bugs and for angering customers when it shut down Revolv, a connected home hub it acquired almost two years ago.
Fadell had also reportedly been put in charge of developing Google’s upcoming version of Glass, its connected eyewear.
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Nest is best known for its smart thermostat, a connected device that adapts to a customers’ temperature preferences and lets them control it from their smartphone. But the unit has also builds smoke and carbon monoxide alarms as well as an Internet-connected home cameras through its acquisition of Dropcam in 2014. Nest says that customers in 190 countries use its products including hardware, software, and a wireless technology it has developed.
Recently, however, Google has been developing some of its own gadgets for the home, including its upcoming Home device, a competitor to Amazon’s Echo home hub, underscoring rumored tensions between Nest and its parent company.
In 2014, Google announced its acquisition of Nest for $3.2 billion. Fadell co-founded the company with Matt Rogers.
The story has been updated with additional information about Nest’s recent tensions with its parent company.
