Fuck Massages by Tony Fadell

Tony Fadell co-created the iPod and iPhone before co-founding Nest. This essay is an excerpt from his book Build, originally published in 2022.

A friend once proudly told me, “I bring my wife flowers every week.”

He expected my admiration, I think. What romance! What generosity!

I said, “What?! I would never do that.”

I bring my wife flowers from time to time, but it’s always a surprise.

If you constantly give someone flowers, after a few weeks they won’t be nearly as special. After a few months she’ll barely give them a second thought. Every week she’ll steadily lose interest.

Until the moment you stop.

You should absolutely do nice things for your employees. You should surely reward them for their hard work. But you have to remember how the human brain works. There’s a psychology to entitlement.

If you want to give employees a perk, keep in mind two things:

1. When people pay for something, they value it. If something is free, it is literally worthless. So if employees get a perk all the time, then it should be subsidized, not free.

2. If something happens only rarely, it’s special. If it happens all the time, the specialness evaporates. So if a perk is only received occasionally, it can be free. But you should make it very clear that this is not going to be a regular occurrence and change up the perk so it’s always a surprise.

There’s a huge difference between giving people free food all the time, free food occasionally, and subsidizing food. There’s a reason Apple provides subsidized meals rather than free ones. There’s a reason you can get discounted products, but not free ones, when you work there. Steve Jobs almost never gave out free Apple products as gifts. He didn’t want employees to devalue the very things they were working on. He believed if they are worthwhile and important, then you should treat them as such.

At Google, all employees used to get a holiday present of a free Google product every year. A phone or a laptop or Chromecast—something substantial. And every year, people moaned and complained—that’s not what I wanted, that feels cheap, last year’s was better. And then when they didn’t get a present one year, there was outrage. How dare they not get us a gift! We always get gifts!

Free will screw you every time. Getting a really great deal on something creates a completely different mindset than expecting to get it for nothing.

Subsidizing perks rather than giving them away is obviously much better financially for your business, too. Companies that bubble-wrap their employees with tons of free perks are usually shortsighted and have no long-term strategy to sustain those perks, or they have an innately problematic core business and the perks are the cover. Facebook famously takes great care of its employees, but it also makes all its money selling customer data to advertisers. If Facebook changed its business model, their profitability would take an enormous hit and all those perks would disappear.

The trend of giving employees everything they could possibly want or need at the office originally started with Yahoo and Google. The idea came from a good, noble, honorable place—a desire to take care of people, an urge to make their company welcoming and fun. It was designed to make the office feel like college, better than college—a soft, comfortable place that you could settle into. And because Google has been making money hand over fist for so long (by selling its customers to advertisers, of course), the rest of the world thought this culture must be part of the reason. So the culture spread. Now the vast majority of startups in Silicon Valley offer gourmet meals, endlessly filled kegs, yoga classes, free massages.

But unless you have Google profit margins and revenue growth, you should not be giving Google perks.

Google shouldn’t even be giving Google perks.

They’ve been trying to cut costs for years—they even started giving people smaller plates in their cafes to encourage them to take less food and cut down on waste. But once you set the precedent and shift people’s expectations, it’s almost impossible to claw your way back.

In the early days of Nest we had some snacks and drinks in the kitchen—mostly fruit. No packaged junk food. Why poison your talent? Once or twice a week we’d get the team tacos or sandwiches or something a little fancier for lunch. Once in a while someone would light the barbecue out back and people would stick around for dinner.

But with the Google acquisition came Google food. We built an enormous, beautiful cafe that served free breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day. Five or six different food stations offered different cuisines and menus and there were fresh pastries every morning. Cookies and cakes everywhere. Everyone thought it was really great. But it was really, really expensive.

After the skyrocketing costs of Alphabet, we tried to trim down some of the options at the cafe. Still plenty of amazing food but no more pho station. No more mini-muffins. There was immediate protest, a universal “What the hell? You can’t take our mini-muffins!”

It was almost as bad as when we had to outlaw takeout containers after we realized a ton of people weren’t staying late to work—they were hanging out until dinner, then shoveling a full meal into to-go boxes for their families and taking off.

The whole point of serving dinner was to reward employees who were working incredibly hard. But because it was free, people took advantage of it. It’s free! It’s ours! What’s the big deal?

A couple of years before that, Taco Tuesday had been a treat. People were delighted when the fruit box got delivered. But now there was a new precedent.

And a new sense of entitlement.

I once saw a person stand up at TGIF, Google’s weekly all-hands meeting—literally a meeting of tens of thousands of people—and complain that their preferred yogurt had disappeared from the micro-kitchens. These snack centers are required by Google to ensure that no employee ever has to walk farther than two hundred feet in search of food. This person felt it was their right, nay, their responsibility, to complain directly to the CEO, with all of Google as witness. About yogurt. Free yogurt. Why is the brand I like not within arm’s reach? When is it coming back?

Just as any good and giving person can get taken advantage of, can be abused, so too can the good intentions of a company. Some people just take and take and take and believe it to be their right. And after a while the culture of the company evolves to accept that and even encourage it.

That’s why I said, “Fuck massages.”

When Google acquired Nest, I reluctantly approved the “all the time” free food and buses. They were part of working at Google, everyone already expected them, and they were genuinely helpful to our employees. I knew it would mean a cultural shift—I just hoped everyone would remember our scrappy roots. When we announced the Google acquisition to the team, I literally presented a slide that simply said, “Don’t change.” What got us there was exactly what we needed to continue. Just because we were changing investors didn’t mean we should change our culture or what made us successful.

When Google gave us new, gorgeous, high-end office space after the acquisition, I thanked Larry Page. I said it was very beautiful. And I told him—and our team—that we didn’t deserve it.

It felt wrong. We hadn’t earned it yet. That building was meant for a profitable company that had already proven itself. It was meant for people who could relax and spend their time arguing about who was going to get the window seat, who’d get the best view. But that’s not what Nest was about. We were focused on our mission, on staying late and solving problems and working hard and fighting through and over and around every obstacle in our path.

I wanted everyone to keep their focus on the things we were making, the vision we were trying to achieve. Not perks, not frills, not extras.

So there was no goddamn way that we were going to spend company money giving people free massages.

We needed that money—to build the business. To reach net margins. To make better products. To make sure our fundamentals were strong and sound so that we could keep employing all these people in the first place. And we needed it to help people have the life they wanted outside work. Instead of making the office so luxe that employees would never leave, we spent our money on meaningful benefits for them and their families—better health care, IVF, the stuff that really changes people’s lives.

When we handed out perks, I wanted them to be purposeful in the same way. So we didn’t try to trap people in the office—we rewarded employees by paying for dinner out with their families, or a weekend away. And we were happy to throw serious cash at stuff that genuinely improved people’s experience, that brought them together and exposed them to new ideas and cultures and turned coworkers into friends. Anyone at Nest could join a club and request money to do something cool—barbecues for the whole company, a Holi celebration that painted half the parking lot, paper airplane battles that got more and more elaborate every week.

But as more Googlers joined our ranks and Nest employees started understanding what kinds of perks were typical at Google, there was a huge internal debate about what people were and weren’t getting. Why did Googlers get massages? Why did they get more buses so they could come in late and leave after lunch? Why did they get 20 percent time (Google’s famous promise to employees that they can devote a fifth of their time to other Google projects outside their regular jobs)? We want 20 percent time!

I said it wasn’t happening. We needed 120 percent from everyone. We were still trying to build our platform and become a profitable business. Once we got there, we could talk about employees using Nest money to work on Google projects, get a free massage, and end their workday at 2:30 p.m. As you can imagine, my positions weren’t popular with the new employees.

But there was no way I was going to let entitlement creep in when there was still so much left to do. I wasn’t going to parcel out more perks just because Google employees were used to them.

The experience of being a Google employee is not normal. It’s not reality. Clive Wilkinson, the architect of the massive, luxurious Googleplex, has even come to recognize it. He now calls his most famous work “fundamentally unhealthy.” “Work-life balance cannot be achieved by spending all your life on a work campus. It’s not real. It’s not really engaging with the world in the way most people do,” he said.

It’s the same problem that the very wealthy face—a gradual drifting upward, away from the regular problems of regular humans. Unless you stay grounded—take public transit, buy your own food, walk the streets, set up your own IT systems, understand the value of a dollar and how far it can take you in New York or Wisconsin or Indonesia—you start to forget the daily pains of the people you’re supposed to be creating painkillers for.

It’s not just the customer that starts to go out of focus. As the number of perks increase, people’s reason for being at their job can begin to blur as well. I’ve seen people who loved their jobs, found meaning and joy in making something, who worked hard but never felt like they were throwing away their time—until they fell headfirst into Google or Facebook or another corporate behemoth and completely lost their way. The more free stuff they saw other people get, the more they wanted. But getting those perks was only briefly satisfying—they lost their value over time. So they kept trying to get more and more. That became their focus. And making stuff, caring deeply about the work they were doing, creating something meaningful, really liking their job—got lost by the wayside.

And it all started with the fucking massages.

To be clear, I fully support massages. I love massages. I get them all the time. Everyone should get massages. But at no point should your company culture be formed around the idea that massages are your due. At no point should you promise employees that they’ll get massages forever. At no point should perks define your business or drag it down.

Perks are frosting. High-fructose corn syrup. And nobody will begrudge you a little sugar—everyone likes sweets from time to time. But stuffing your face full of them from morning to night isn’t exactly a recipe for happiness. Just as dessert shouldn’t come before dinner, perks shouldn’t come before the mission you’re there to achieve. The mission should fill and fuel your company. The perks should be a sprinkle of sugar on top.

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