“Nest designed us out of their final production build,” John, our Bay Area Sales Manager, said to me.
“Thanks for everything you did to trying to win this,” I said.
I took a deep breath. I didn’t like losing, and we had put everything into winning the Nest opportunity. It was a big deal for us, worth millions of dollars per year.
We’d done everything right to win Nest’s confidence, but it didn’t matter. They were going to use a product from one of our multi-billion dollar competitors, Microchip.
Nest ran their manufacturing business similarly to Apple with multiple builds before they went to production. They had a first build, worth over $100,000 that we won. Then we lost the second build to Microchip. Then we were back in the third build. But Nest went with Microchip, not us, for the all important final build.
We did everything we could to win, including levering the relationship one of our board members, Cathal, had with Nest CEO Tony Fadell. However, in the end, Nest’s buyer, who had the power to choose the vendor he wanted, went with the safety of the larger supplier.
There was nothing more to do, for now. As I said, I didn’t like losing, so this was a tough one for me to swallow.
