What Would Steve Jobs Do? How the Steve Jobs Way Can Inspire Anyone to Think Differently and Win (3 page)

Never one to stop short of a goal, Steve traveled to India. He traveled with Reed College buddy Daniel Kottke, who eventually became the first employee at Apple. The purpose of the trip was to gain spiritual enlightenment from the popular Hindu guru Neem Karoli Baba, but he had passed away before Steve and Daniel managed to get there. It’s not completely clear what Steve and Daniel did in India, but they came back Buddhists with shaved heads and traditional Indian clothing.

One thing that
is
clear is that they experimented with psychedelics, notably LSD. Perhaps we really don’t want to know more, but Steve did call these experiences “one of the two or three most important things [he] had done in [his] life.” They certainly triggered his creative juices, and would be a natural cradle for the “think different” mantra he carried through life and used for years as a tagline for Apple products.

Then it was back to America, back to Atari, and back to hanging out alongside his old buddy Steve Wozniak. Many people speculate that if Jobs hadn’t met Woz before his trip to India, he would have been leading yoga chants in some far-off land for the rest of his life.

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Woz was what we would now call a nerd, an electronics and computer geek second to none (they probably called him something like that then, too). He became a whiz at circuit-board design and was still with Hewlett-Packard while attending classes at the University of California at Berkeley. He helped Jobs win a challenge at Atari to reduce the number of chips on a circuit board.

Woz had gotten Jobs interested in the Homebrew Computer Club, a local group of computer hobbyists and hackers that met regularly, before the India trip. After Jobs returned, he pressed Woz further on the idea of developing a single-board computer.

He wanted to develop such a computer just to see if they could, and to show it off and sell it to Homebrew members. But he was also thinking bigger. He wanted to start a company. According to Wozniak’s account, Jobs told him that “even if they weren’t successful, they could at least say to their grandkids they had their own company.”

They pooled their resources. Jobs sold a Volkswagen van, and Woz sold an HP calculator, among other things, to raise $1,300, which they used for the materials they needed to assemble some prototypes. Although many liken the story to Hewlett and Packard’s 1939 garage beginnings, this project started in Jobs’s bedroom and eventually moved to the garage.

By all measures, this was a primitive machine. It was what we would today call a motherboard, with a CPU, memory, and textual video chips. There wasn’t much memory, though—4 kilobytes, compared to today’s machines with 4 gigabytes, or a million times the memory. There was no keyboard, monitor, power supply, or case. The user had to supply these items. Software was the BASIC programming language; the monitor was typically an old TV. Really, it was an electronics kit along the lines of those sold by Heathkit or Radio Shack, a popular activity in those days.

The so-called Apple I went on sale in July 1976 for $666, with a production cost of $500. That sale price would be about $2,600 in today’s terms. A Mountain View computer shop known as The Byte Shop sold completely built-up versions of the Apple I.

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XECUTEK
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And where did the name “Apple” come from? Along with calligraphy, it was another of the epiphanies from Steve’s Oregon years. While in Portland, he got connected with a Zen-influenced (naturally) commune called the All-One Farm.

Steve returned to the farm periodically to work and hang out. And, of course, the All-One Farm grew apples. He admired apples for their simple, appealing look. Later, when Woz picked Steve up at the airport
after one of those trips, they talked about the new computer project, which was then still in the works. Steve simply blurted out, “I’ve got a great name—how about ‘Apple’? Apple Computer?”

Many people also attribute the name to Jobs’s well-known love for music, and the Beatles in particular, and others attribute it to images of Isaac Newton and great ideas falling out of an apple tree. Those references probably played a part, but the real story is that although they spent hours thinking of other geekier names like “Matrix Computer” and “Executek,” none of them really worked—so the name “Apple” stuck.

The whole sequence was a great example of how Woz’s technical ingenuity mixed with Jobs’s vision and marketing ingenuity. They sold about 200 Apple Is, started designing Apple IIs, and the rest is history.

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ISION
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The Apple II story is where the Apple Inc. that we know today really got going. Before venturing into that story, however, it’s worth noting that Woz, newly married and with a decent-paying job at HP, wasn’t quite sold on the idea of becoming an entrepreneur, so he pitched the idea of developing a microcomputer to the powers that be at HP. As we all now know, that went nowhere.

Still, Steve Jobs had big ideas and a grand vision for their microcomputer. He felt strongly that computers could be something other than large, impersonal, ugly gray machines that sat in a data center and could be touched only by programmers. He visualized “freedom from an IBM-controlled universe” for millions, while IBM and others, like HP, dismissed the Apple-style machine as being “too small to do serious computing.” Although his visions didn’t crystallize until the introduction of the Macintosh eight years later, in 1984, they were definitely on Jobs’s mind back in the mid-1970s.

Jobs quite clearly felt that the lives of individual people (consumers at home; engineers, scientists, and businesspeople in the workplace; teachers at school—you name it) could be improved with the use of a computer. But as the world was eventually to find out, the vision wasn’t about the computer; it was about what the computer could do.

The mold for the visionary leadership and boundless passion of Steve Jobs had been cast.

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ENESIS TO
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XODUS
 

While the Apple I represents the genesis of the product and the idea of personal computing, the real genesis of the business came with the development and sale of the Apple II. That came in early 1977. This section covers
Steve and Apple from that point through his exodus—his first departure from the company, which came shortly after the 1984 launch of the revolutionary Macintosh.

As we will see, Steve’s leadership style really started to take shape during this period, but it came into conflict with the more traditional approaches employed by the bureaucracy that had started to build up around him. Naturally, Steve didn’t let the masses deter him; in fact, as we will also see, Steve Jobs’s exodus from Apple may have been the best thing that ever happened to him.

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Steve and Woz incorporated Apple on January 3, 1977. Prior to that incorporation, they had brought in a third partner, an older and more experienced Atari draftsman named Ronald Wayne, to help out and to “break ties” when the two Steves couldn’t agree on something. When they incorporated, they bought Wayne out for a reported sum of $800 (a stake that would be worth tens of billions today).

The vision of personal computing continued to grow. The Apple II was a complete product, with a case and a power supply and a keyboard; it looked like a computer. It supported color and sound and had eight expansion slots, and shortly after its introduction, it came with a
5¼-inch floppy drive. Now users could easily store and retrieve data—and share that data with other machines. As with the Apple I, Woz was the technical genius behind it, while Jobs provided the vision, the inspiration, and the marketing genius in front of it.

The few thousands that Jobs and Wozniak had invested in the business quickly proved not to be enough. They needed a partner. They needed a little adult supervision as well, because now they were entering the business world in a big way. And neither of them had much experience or know-how with that new can of worms.

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IKE
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ARKKULA
 

In 1977, Jobs visited a couple of prominent venture capitalists. Some of them were intrigued and referred him to others, but at least one of them reacted to Jobs’s hippie appearance and shied away with, “Why did you send me this renegade from the human race?” Jobs didn’t “get the girl” with that interview, but he was introduced to a veteran and semiretired Intel engineer named Mike Markkula. Markkula liked the story and its presenter, and committed $250,000 to the cause in return for a one-third ownership.

Markkula was to play a key business leadership role, mostly in the background and in support of what Jobs and Woz were doing in those early days. He eventually
became chairman from 1985 through 1997. He was all business, though, and, ironically, he sided with the team that eventually forced Jobs out in 1985. Still, in those early years, Markkula provided a solid business base for Jobs’s vision and operations. Jobs recognized and made good use of Markkula’s business skills, just as he recognized and made good use of Woz’s technical skills.

Good leaders realize what they don’t do well, and develop strong right-hand man relationships with others to get things done.

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As often happens in the computer industry, the challenge became software. People were fascinated with the product, which was often sold in department stores like Macy’s, but the typical Macy’s shopper was far from ready or willing to write programs in BASIC. What was needed was what today would be called a “killer app,” and indeed one came along, but not until 1979: Software Arts’s VisiCalc.

VisiCalc, which was similar to today’s Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program, really made it possible for users to do great things with their computers. They could do personal work and work in the workplace, and they could use the 5¼-inch floppy to bring their work home with them and vice versa. It opened up a whole
new market for personal computing, reaching far beyond the hobbyists and aficionados.

A T
RIP TO THE
PARC
 

The Apple II rolled along, generating annual sales of some $300 million and making Jobs and Wozniak almost instant multimillionaires. But of course, the story doesn’t end there.

They got the opportunity to bring a team of engineers to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, a cradle for ideas that, unfortunately for Xerox, didn’t turn into Xerox products. Jobs got PARC to grant his engineers three days of access and observation in return for 100,000 pre-IPO Apple shares (again, worth billions today). PARC had numerous ideas under development, including what would become laser printing technology and, most important for this story, the GUI, or graphical user interface, which today is more widely known as the computer mouse.

To their credit, the PARC scientists were a bit leery of letting Apple in on their secrets. As a testimonial to having the right versus the wrong vision at the top levels, one PARC scientist quipped: “After an hour looking at demos, they [Apple] understood our technology and what it meant more than any Xerox executive understood it after years of showing it to them.” (That scientist, Larry Tesler, eventually joined Apple.) Jobs called
the group a “bunch of copier heads” who had “no clue about what a computer could do.”

Jobs clearly saw what lay ahead: “a computer for the rest of us.”

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AC IN
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VERY
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OUSEHOLD
 

Jobs and his team returned from PARC with the inspiration to add the GUI to a feature-rich machine that was under development, known as the Lisa. The Lisa brought GUI to the forefront and was intended to make Apple a serious player in the business world, but it was not a commercial success because of its high price tag ($10,000).

Mike Markkula had recruited a new CEO, Mike Scott, to run things. Jobs was still chairman, and he was a visionary leader, to be sure, but he wasn’t CEO. He was never given the CEO job; others (and possibly Steve himself) preferred to bring in Markkula and Scott, and others later on, to handle this task and provide the necessary adult supervision mentioned earlier. Meanwhile, in 1979, a technical writer and publications expert hired by Apple by the name of Jef Raskin sold the company on a vision of a smaller, fully integrated machine that would be capable of doing what eventually became desktop publishing. By 1979, Markkula and Jobs were sold on the project and asked Raskin to lead the way.

The Macintosh project, reportedly named after Raskin’s favorite kind of apple, McIntosh (but spelled differently because of trademark concerns with a high-end audio manufacturer by that name), was kicked off.

The Mac project was much more aligned with both Steve’s vision and his personality. He saw it as a way to bring computing to the common man, and he was skeptical of the efforts by the Lisa team (and the developers of the Apple III, which had a very short life because of technical problems) to lure the business community. Steve became the de facto leader of the Mac team.

Meanwhile, Jobs and others had become disillusioned with Scott and started a search for a new CEO. Among other things, Steve wanted someone with a stronger consumer focus and a consumer marketing background. That led, at the recommendation of two recent Stanford hires, to the then-CEO of PepsiCo, John Sculley.

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