Tony Fadell

Thermostats people could actually set. Fadell, who led Apple's iPod engineering, co-founded Nest Labs in 2010 with Matt Rogers to replace confusing programmable thermostats with one that learned household routines and could be adjusted by turning a ring or from a phone. Google bought Nest in 2014. The convenience came with data collection about home life and dependence on the company's servers, as some owners found when older Nest devices lost support.