I did not think a biography could be this gripping and enthralling. Isaacson dove deep into fascinating anecdotes and facts about Steve Jobs. Additionally, interspersed throughout the book are these incredible Silicon Valley lores/history and mentions of all-to-familiar names. It was quite a fascinating book now that I’m living in the Bay Area.
The public perception of Steve Jobs is generally positive with some controversies in recent years with regards to his daughter. Despite his famously rash temper and tactlessness, love him or hate him, most would agree that he was a “visionary” that imbued into Apple its current culture of meticulous design, flawless integration, and wizard-level engineering. As Isaacson puts it in his book:
His passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores. […] He produced not only transforming products but also […] a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers.
Here’s what I learned about Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs
Jobs was such a perfectionist and so obsessive with every design detail that he had trouble furnishing his house. His Los Gatos house remained mostly barren
Jobs was also known to poke fun at straight-edge engineers. For example, on a visit to a Stanford class, he asked the group of well-groomed students: “How many of you are virgins?” and “How many of you have taken LSD?”. He also asked similar questions to new-hires.
Jobs had a extremely binary view on people. You were either “enlightened” or “an asshole”. Your work is either “the best” or “totally shitty”. If you are placed on a pedestal, then you could do no wrong. On the other hand, if you fall on the “shit head” category then your work will not get any recognition. According to Joanna Hoffman, who worked on the Macintosh team, you have to learn to stand up for what you believe in, which Jobs respected.
According to Joe Nocera, then writing for Esquire:
“Jobs had a almost willful lack of tact. It was more than just an inability to hide his opinions when others said something he thought dumb; it was a conscious readiness, even a perverse eagerness, to put people down, humiliate them, show he was smarter.”
Jobs on his own rough edges:
“You’ve got to be super honest. Maybe there’s a better way, a gentlemen’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and velvet code-words, but I don’t know that way, because I am middle class from California”
Jobs had a extremely tight-rein on hiring. He only wants a team of A-players. According to him, A-players enjoys working with, and attracts other A-players. B-players attract C-players and etc. His goal was to be vigilant against what he calls the “bozo explosion”
The trait that made Jobs so effective was his love for both Technology and Arts. He was well positioned to bridge the gap. He explained:
“Technology companies don’t understand creativity. They don’t appreciate intuitive thinking […] They think creative people just sit around on couches all day and are undisciplined […] On the other hand, music companies are completely clueless about technology. They think they can just go out and hire a few tech folks. But that would be like Apple trying to hire people to produce music. We’d get second-rate A&R people, just like the music companies ended up with second-rate tech people”
He attributed his ability to focus and his design philosophy of simplicity and minimalism on the Buddhist Zen training he received after dropping out of Reed College. It honed his appreciation for intuition and how to filter out anything that was distracting and unnecessary.
Dietary Habits
Jobs had an obsessive dietary habit and he would go on incredibly weird diets. For instance, after reading “Mucusless Diet Healing Systems” by Arnold Ehret, he would go on to eat only fruits and starchless vegetables. Occasionally he would have two-day fasts, sometimes week-long fasts. According to Holmes, one of his friends during his years at Reeds, he would make weird pronouncements like “I am a fruitarian and I will only eat leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight.”
He also believed at the time, because of his fruit-only diet, that he didn’t need to use deodorant or shower frequently. During the early days at Apple, he was often kicked out of staff meetings because he smelled so bad. Quoting Markkula: “At meetings we had to look at his dirty feet. Sometimes to relieve stress, he would soak his feet in the toilet.”
Jobs was a very opinionated eater. He could taste two avocados that most mortals would find indistinguishable, and declare that one was the best avocado ever grown and the other inedible.
Working at Atari
After Jobs dropped out of Reed College, which was known at the time for its eccentric hippie culture on campus and tolerating open drug use amongst its students, he decided to get a job at Atari (the video game company that created pong). Nolan Bushnell was the founder of Atari and he is another one of the Silicon Valley characters. Apparently, he sported a Rolls-Royce and occasionally held staff meetings in a hot tub while his staff smoked dope.
Job literally walked into the lobby and refused to leave until he was offered a job at Atari. To quote one of the Atari Chief Engineer: “I was told we’ve got this hippie kid in the lobby. He says he’s not going to leave until we hire him. Should we call the cops or let him in?”
Eventually he was hired as a technician for $5 an hour. To quote those working alongside him at the time “This guys a goddamn hippie with b.o. Why id you do this to me? And he’s impossible to deal with”. He also became known for his brashness. He was prone to inform others that they were “dumb shits”.
Despite his temper and brashness, Bushnell and many others saw something in him. Jobs was incredibly intelligent and passionate about tech. Bushnell apparently taught Jobs that if you act like you can do something, then it will work. He told him “Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.”
Reality Distortion Field
Jobs had famously what others called a “reality distortion field”. He was charismatic and a bit of a con man such that he could bend situations to his strong will. He was so sure of himself and is often a little dictatorial. To quote one of his friends: “The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.” The most common application of the RDF is to set seemingly impossible deadlines for his team of engineers. Here are some other memorable quotes from other people about his RDF:
Bill Atkinson: “He can deceive himself, It allowed him to con people into believing his vision, because he has personally embraced and internalized it”
Steve Wozniak: “His reality distortion is when he has an illogical vision of the future […] You realize that it can’t be true, but he somehow makes it true”
Debi Coleman: “You did the impossible, because you didn’t realize it was impossible”
Jobs was inherently rebellious and believed that rules did not apply to him. He had the sense that he was the chosen one, an enlightened one. He was rebellious even in everyday mundane things like not putting a license plate, parking in handicapped spaces. “He acted as if he were not subject to the strictures around him”
Steve Wozniak
In high school, Jobs became friends with another graduate known for his wizardry and brilliance in class, Steve Wozniak. Although both Steve’s shared similar hobbies, it was clear early on that they were dissimilar to each other, perhaps polar opposites in some regards.
For example, Job’s adoptive Father Paul Jobs was a high school dropout who knew how to fix up cars and knew how to turn a tidy profit by striking the right deal on mechanical parts. Wozniak’s father (Jerry) on the other hand, was a brilliant engineer from Cal Tech who also quarterbacked the football team, who became a rocket scientist at Lockheed. Jerry exalted engineering and looked down on those in business, marketing, and sales. To quote Steve Wozniak “I remember him telling me that engineering was the highest level of importance you could reach in the world. It takes society to a new level.”
Both Steve seemed to have inherited the values of their father. Steve Jobs had a keen business sense and knew how to handle people. Steve Wozniak on the other hand was an extremely talented engineer.
To highlight another one of their difference. When Apple IPO’d. Steve Jobs did not grant any shares to one of his best friends during his Reed College days, Daniel Kottke, who started working at Apple when it was still headquartered in Job’s garage. He was not high enough level to be cut in on stock options at Apple. When Kottke confronted Steve about it, Jobs was so cold and unsympathetic that Kottke froze and cried. On the other hand, Steve Wozniak decided to sell, at very low price, 2000 of his options before IPO to forty mid-level employees. Most of them made enough to buy a home.
Wozniak recalled:
“my father told me, ‘you always want to be in the middle,’ I didn’t want to be up with the high-level people like Jobs. My dad was an engineer, and that’s what I wanted to be. I was way too shy ever to be a business leader like Steve.”
Xerox PARC
In the 1970s, Xerox developed the graphical user interface (GUI) for desktop computers and various other revolutionary technologies associated with it. At the time of its creation, it was part of an R&D group and Xerox had no intent of commercializing it. In the summer of 1979, Xerox accepted a deal to show Apple its new technology and in return got to buy around $1 million dollar worth of shares. To quote Jobs: “You’re sitting on a gold mine, I can’t believe Xerox is not taking advantage of this”
Afterwards, Apple borrowed (or stole) the design but also made much needed improvements to it. They also managed to poach many of the talents at Xerox for development of Apple’s computer GUI. Before GUIs, most computers operated with command line inputs that was geared mainly towards geeks and computer-folks.
Apple's Design Philosophy
Apple’s design philosophy takes on the Bauhaus Aesthetic, which is one of simplicity and functionality. Jobs emphasized that Apple’s product should be clean and simple: “We will make them bright and pure and honest about being high-tech, rather than a heavy-industrial look of black, black, black, like Sony.”
Jobs cared about every detail of the Macintosh, even the parts that most consumers will never see. For example, Jobs critiqued the looks of the memory chips and circuits because the lines were too closed together. Famously he also ordered the factories that produces the Macintosh to be painted pure white. To quote Jobs: “If we didn’t have the discipline to keep that place spotless, then we weren’t going to have the discipline to keep all these machines running.”
The earliest designs from Apple came from Harmut Esslinger’s Palo Alto design office: frogdesign. The firms signed a $1.2 million dollar annual contract and from then on, every apple product has included the declaration “Designed in California”.
Jobs firmly believed in “end-to-end integration”. In other words, he wants complete control of every aspect of a product and how the end-user experiences that product. The Macintosh was designed with Apple’s operating system that worked only on its own hardware. This is distinctly different from Microsoft’s approach. To quote Dan Farber, a columnist at ZDNET: “Jobs is a strong-willed, elitist artist who doesn’t want his creation mutated inauspiciously by unworthy programmers.” “It would be as if someone off the street added some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changed the lyrics to a Dylan song.”. He went so far as to create special tools and screws such that the Macintosh case could not be opened with a regular screwdriver.
At most other companies, engineering tends to drive the outer design element. For jobs, the process tended to be reversed.
A perfect example of Apple’s design is the IPhone’s multi-touch gestures. Things we find completely intuitive now used to be completely revolutionary. Actions like swipe to open, double-tap to zoom, pinch and expand photos, etc. These gestures are so intuitive that even a toddler could readily navigate an iPad without prior instructions. In 2010, HTC (and by extension Android) blatantly copied these gestures and a fierce legal battle ensued.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates
Gates was fascinated by Jobs and said the that he was: “Weirdly flawed as a human being […] either in the mode of saying you were shit or trying to seduce you.”
On the other hand, Jobs said of Gates: “Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy than technology.”
To give a sense of scale, in 1982 Apple’s annual sales were around $1 billion dollars, whereas Microsoft’s were at a mere $32 million. In fact both companies had a symbiotic relationship where one was developing software for the other.
The cooperation ended when Microsoft announced that they would be developing their own GUI operating system called Windows. Jobs was furious and accused Gates of copying the Macintosh, to which Gates replied that both companies stole from Xerox PARC.
When Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, it was a shoddy product. But as is often the case with Microsoft products, persistence and the ability to hire talents made Windows better and then dominant.
NeXT
In 1985, Jobs was essentially fired from Apple. Despite his genius and knack for design, he lacked discipline was was famously a nightmare to work with. After a long period of disagreement with John Sculley, he planned a coup and caused havoc within the company. The board of director eventually sided with Sculley and Jobs was put to a non-consequential role of “global visionary”
He spent some time soul searching in Europe. In Florence, he soaked in the architecture of the city. He was particularly attracted to the paving stones which came from a quarry near the Tuscan town of Firenzuola. Twenty years later, most major Apple stores would have floors made of this sandstone.
He soon started another computer company named NeXT. Here Jobs was able to indulge all of his instincts both good and bad. The result was a series of spectacular products that were nevertheless market flops. In many ways, his failure at NeXT was the true learning experience that lead to the future success of Apple upon his return.
Some examples of Jobs’ indulgence:
He decreed that the NeXT computer should be an absolutely perfect cube with every angle precisely machined to 90 degrees
The perfection of the cube was difficult to manufacture. Most cast molds produces bends slightly larger than 90 degrees. As a result they had to use specialty molds that cost $650,000
He insisted that the magnesium case be painted matte black, which made it susceptible to blemishes. He even insisted that the inside of the case be painted as well
Rather than a typical screw, the screws inside the NeXT machine had to have expensive plating
When Jobs leased a new office space for NeXT, despite the fact that the office was already designed and furnished, he had it completely gutted and rebuilt
Bill Gates brutally critiqued NeXT:
“This machine is crap”
When asked if Microsoft would spend time developing for NeXT machines: “Develop for it? I’ll piss on it”
When Jobs confronted Gates about not developing for NeXT: “When you get a market, I will consider it”
Some Words of Wisdom
Mike Markkula, the first big Apple investor and chairman, as well as something of a father figure to Jobs, offered him much mentorship in the space of venture capital and entrepreneurship. Quote: “You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last”
“I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. Overtime the product becomes less important. The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company.”
“I hate it when people call themselves ‘entrepreneurs’ when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. […] You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now. That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, no just to make money”
There is an old Hindu saying: “In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you”
The essence of design is to subtract. The best design should be intuitive and minimalistic
Jobs thought that if Pixar could live through its second film, it would make it. Quote: “There’s a classic thing in business called the second-product syndrome. It comes from not understanding what made your first product so successful”
Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings: “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘wow’, and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas”
The best way to begin a speech is to tell a story. Nobody is eager for a lecture but everybody loves a story.
In ancient Rome, when a victorious general paraded through the streets, legend has it that he would be trailed by a servant whose job was to repeat to him: “Momento mori”. Remember you will die. A friendly reminder of mortality helps keeps things in check and instill some humility.
“The political axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive.”
“You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. […] The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their arts. That’s what I’ve always tried to do […] As Dylan says, if you’re not busy being born, you are busy dying”
Some Other Fun Facts
He believed that taking LSD was one of the most important and profound experience of his life. It helped him reinforce his sense of what was important - creating great things instead of making money.
In 1982, Apple was in need of a new president. He was smart enough to know that he was not ready to run the company himself. The board turned to John Sculley, the president of Pepsi-Cola. After much discussion and negotiation, Steve Jobs dropped the bomb and said to Sculley: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want to a chance to change the world?”
There was actually a lot of back-and-forth around the slogan “Think different”. Should it have been “Think differently”? The discussion of using a adverb vs. a noun (as in “different”) came down to Jobs preference. He preferred “think different”; Similar to “think victory”, “think beauty”, or “think big”.
When Jobs showed off the blueprints to the new Apple headquarters, which originally had 3 ovals, his teenage son Reed joked that the aerial view remined him of the male genitalia. Jobs dismissed the comment as that of a teenager. But next day Jobs mentioned the comment to the architects. The shape was soon changed to a simple circle.
With the opening of the first Apple retail store:
Business Week: “Maybe it’s time Steve Jobs stopped thinking quite so differently”
Joseph Graziano, former Apple CFO: “Apple’s problem is it still believes the way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese and crackers”
Retail consultant David Goldstein: “I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake”
When the ITunes store was unveiled in 2003, Apple predicted that it would sell a million songs in six months. Instead it sold a million songs in six days.
Microsoft tried to compete with Zune, but it was not successful and had a market share less than 5%. To quote Jobs:
“The older I get, the more I see how much motivation matters. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don’t really love music or art they way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you’re doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you’re not going to cheese out. If you don’t love something, you’re not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much.”
The Ends
Jobs tried to keep his battle with Cancer private, but this raised some legal issues. SEC opened an investigation into whether Apple had withheld “material information” from shareholders. Apparently Jobs genius and his magic on the company was so profound that his health seemed to meet the standard of influencing share pricing
Steve Jobs nasty edge to his personality often hindered him, but it also pushed his engineers to do things that they never dreamed possible. He didn’t invent anything outright, but he was a master at putting together ideas, art, and technology that invented the future. To quote Isaacson: “He designed the Mac after appreciating the power of graphical user interfaces in a way that Xerox was unable to do, he created the iPod after grasping the joy of having thousand songs in your pocket in a way that Sony, which had all the assets and heritage, never could accomplish. Some leaders push innovation by being good at the big picture. Others do so by mastering details. Jobs did both”. Over the decades, he launched a series of products that transformed whole industries:
Apple II which took Wozniak’s circuit board and made it into the first personal computer not just for hobbyists
Macintosh which began the home computer revolution and popularized GUI over CLI
Toy Story and other Pixar blockbusters
Apple retail stores which reinvented the role of a retail store
iPod changed the way we listen to music
iTunes Store changed the music industry
iPhone which revolutionized the smartphone industry
App store which spawned a whole new industry of content creation and startups
iPad which launched tablet computing
On Wednesday, October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs passed away with members of his family around him at the age of 56. A formal memorial service was held at Stanford’s Memorial Church. During the service, an unused version from Apple’s 1997 “Think Different” ad campaign that Jobs himself recorded played on the loudspeakers for the first time:
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
The Musician Bono, a friend of Jobs, said of the unique environment of the Bay area in the 60s and 70s.
Bay Area ended up helping to create the personal computer industry. “The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently”. “The mechanical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking.”