Founders - #249 Steve Jobs In His Own Words

Episode Date: June 1, 2022

What I learned from reading I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words by George Beahm.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----[1:05]On Steve Jobs#5 Steve Jobs: The Biography#19 Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader#76 Return To The Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs and The Creation of Apple#77 Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing#204 Inside Steve Jobs' Brain#214 Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography#235 To Pixar And Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment HistoryBonus Episodes on Steve JobsInsanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success (Between #112 and #113)Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs (Between #110 and #111)On Jony Ive and Steve Jobs#178 Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest ProductsOn Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs#34 Creativity Inc: Overcoming The Unseen Forces That Stand In The Way of True InspirationOn Steve Jobs and several other technology company founders#157 The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution#208 In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World[3:13] We're not going to be the first to this party, but we're going to be the best.[4:54] Company Focus: We do no market research. We don't hire consultants. We just want to make great products.[5:06] The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations. The world doesn't need another Dell or Compaq.[5:52] Nearly all the founders I’ve read about have a handful of ideas/principles that are important to them and they just repeat and pound away at them forever.[7:00] You can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there.[8:09] I think of Founders as a tool for working professionals. And what that tool does is it gets ideas from the history of entrepreneurship into your brain so then you can use them in your work. It just so happens that a podcast is a great way to achieve that goal.[8:48] Tim Ferriss Podcast #596 with Ed Thorp[8:50] A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market by Ed Thorp. (Founders 222)[10:43] In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.[12:05] The Essential Difference: The Lisa people wanted to do something great. And the Mac people want to do something insanely great. The difference shows.[14:21] Sure, what we do has to make commercial sense, but it's never the starting point. We start with the product and the user experience.[15:57] Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. (Founders #19)[16:41] We had a passion to do this one simple thing.[16:51] And that's really important because he's saying I wasn't trying to build the biggest company. I wasn't trying to build a trillion dollar company. It wasn't doing any of that. Those things happen later as a by-product of what I was actually focused on, which is just building the best computer that I wanted to use.[17:14] In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World by Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz.  (Founders #208 )[17:41] It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things in to what you're doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.[20:29] Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.[21:06]  A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman (Founders #95) “A very small percentage of the population produces the greatest proportion of the important ideas. There are some people if you shoot one idea into the brain, you will get half an idea out. There are other people who are beyond this point at which they produce two ideas for each idea sent in.”[22:29] Edwin land episodes:Insisting On The Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land and Instant: The Story of Polaroid (Founders #40)The Instant Image: Edwin Land and The Polaroid Experience by Mark Olshaker. (Founders #132)Land’s Polaroid: A Company and The Man Who Invented It by Peter C. Wensberg. (Founders #133)A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War by Ronald K. Fierstein. (Founders #134)[25:01] Macintosh was basically this relatively small company in Cupertino, California, taking on the goliath, IBM, and saying "Wait a minute, your way is wrong. This is not the way we want computers to go. This is not the legacy we want to leave. This is not what we want our kids to be learning. This is wrong and we are going to show you the right way to do it and here it is and it is so much better.[27:47] Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Productsby Leander Kahney. ((Founders #178)[29:00] Enzo Ferrari: Power, Politics, and the Making of an Automobile Empire by Luca Dal Monte (Founders #98)[34:39] On meeting his wife, Laurene: I was in the parking lot, with the key in the car, and I thought to myself: If this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman? I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she'd have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town, and we've been together ever since.[37:26] It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do.[41:29] Constellation Software Inc. President's Letters by Mark Leonard. (Founders #246)[42:30] Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony by Akio Morita. (Founders #102)[44:36] Victory in our industry is spelled survival.[45:21] Once you get into the problem you see that it's complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going, find the underlying problem, and come up with an elegant solution that works on every level.[48:15] Churchill by Paul Johnson (Founders #225)[48:25] I would trade all my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.----Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes.com----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested, so my poor wallet suffers. ”— GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing and it's totally true. And the reason is because this is so hard that if you don't, any rational person would give up. It is really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don't love it, if you're not having fun doing it and you don't really love it, you're going to give up. And that's what happens to most people. If you really look at the ones that ended up being successful in the eyes of society, and the ones that didn't, oftentimes, it's the ones who were successful, loved what they did,

so they could persevere when it got really tough. And the ones that didn't love it, quit quit because they're sane. Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don't love it? It's a lot of hard work and it's a lot of worrying constantly. And if you don't love it, you're going to fail. That was Steve Jobs talking about the importance of passion. And it's an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is I, Steve, Steve Jobs in his own words. So I counted the other day, and I think I've done 13 different podcasts on Steve Jobs. I will link them all with episode numbers in the show notes.

Most of those, he's the main character. Like there were biographies or books exclusively dedicated to him. In a few, it's about like his partners, like Johnny Ive or like Ed Catmull at Pixar. But even after reading all these books on Steve Jobs, I didn't know the book that I'm holding in my hand even existed. I walked into a small used bookstore the other day, and about after an hour of just going through all their shelves, I walked out with six books for $23.

I love used bookstores. And not only because they're usually fantastic values, but because you just find books that you didn't even know existed. And this book is a great example of that. It is about 120 pages long. It is just quotes organized by topic from Steve Jobs. So consider this a bonus episode of Founders. Most of this is just going to be Steve Jobs talking directly to you and I.

And so I'm going to jump right in. He's talking about it's normal to have anxiety before you introduce a new product. He's talking about the way he felt right before he debuted the iPad. And I thought this was remarkable because it's the last product he ever introduced. And you just think about how many groundbreaking products he had created up until this point of his career, and he's still anxious. Even though we've been using these internally for some time and working on it for a few years,

you still have butterflies in your stomach the week before, the night before the before, the night before the introduction, the day before the launch. You just never know until you get it into your customer's hands. This is Steve on the fact that the core of your company is the quality of employee you have. He repeats this over and over again, that the founder's most important job is recruiting, is to assemble the greatest concentration of talent that you possibly can. He says, This is Steve on Apple's DNA.

Most of us can't wait to get to work in the morning, but it's not like Apple has somehow morphed into a mass market consumer electronics company. Our DNA hasn't changed. It's that mass market consumer electronics is turning into Apple. Then he talks about his goal has always been to be the best, not to be the biggest, not to be the first, to be the best. We're not going to be the first to this party, but we're going to be the best. And then Steve talks about what you do after you recruit great talent. It's not just recruiting. After recruiting, it's building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are. The feeling that their work will have tremendous influence and is part of a strong,

clear vision. Obviously, he means the founder is the one that sets that strong, clear vision. So he talks about recruiting usually requires more than you alone can do. So I found that collaborative recruiting and having a culture that recruits the A players is the best way. Any person he's interviewing is going to speak to a bunch of different people in the company. And he says the reason he does that is because the current employees can veto a candidate. And then this is Steve on the importance of communicating a feeling to your customers. We don't stand a chance of advertising with features and benefits and with rams and with charts and comparisons.

The only chance we have of communicating is with a feeling. And then there's another quote on branding. This is actually from 1997, just when he returned to Apple the second time. What are the great brands? Levi's, Coke, Disney, Nike. Most people would put Apple in that category. You could spend billions of dollars building a brand that's not as good as Apple. Yet Apple hasn't been doing anything with this incredible asset. What is Apple after all? Apple is about people who think outside the box. People who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things and make a difference and not just get a job done.

And this is Steve on what his company focuses on. We don't do market research. We don't hire consultants. We just make great products. And then this is about who he's building for. This is all the way back in 1999. I think this is one of his best insights, actually. The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations.

The world doesn't need another Dell or Compaq. This is Steve on the importance of simplifying your product line. This, again, is right when he came back to Apple. He said this in 1998. What I found when I got here was a zillion and one products. It was amazing. And I started to ask people, now why would I recommend a $3,400 over a $4,400? When should somebody jump up to a $6,500 but not a $7,300? And after three weeks, I couldn't figure this out. If I couldn't figure this out, how could our customers figure it out? And then as we go through this, you're going to notice that he just has a handful of ideas

that he just repeats over and over again in different ways. I was actually texting with my friend Richard the other day because he was asking, he's like, why do you say on your podcast, like repetition is persuasive? He's like, I have noticed like Jeff Bezos repeats himself a lot. And this is what I sent him. Nearly all the founders that I've read about have a handful of ideas and principles that are important to them, and they just repeat and pound away at them forever. And the fact that this tiny little book that you could probably read in two hours, it's just a great illustration of that because you can read in such a condensed amount of time

and you see him decade after decade, just repeating ideas that are important to him. He'll place the ideas in different contexts. He'll apply it to different parts of the company. But there is just a small handful of ideas and principles that were extremely important to him. And instead of getting fancy, I think he just really focused on mastering the fundamentals of those core principles. This is one of them. He's talking about consumer product design, but really he's talking about his love of simplicity. Look at the design of a lot of consumer products. They're really complicated surfaces. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there.

But if you keep going and live with the problem and peel more layers off of the onion, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. And even that phrase, most people, he's constantly comparing and contrasting what his company does compared to what most other companies and most other people do. Most people quit. He says half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the unsuccessful ones is just pure perseverance. Most people don't like what they do. He says he loves, he has a passion, a deep desire for what he's doing.

Most people, most companies don't put in the time and effort to actually solve the complexity and not just ignore it. He's saying he does. Most people don't focus enough on recruiting and having extremely high standards of excellence. He does. You'll hear this over and over again. And then there's just one quick sentence here that I really, I sat here and thought about this for quite a while because, you know, he's talking about, hey, it doesn't matter if I'm making an iPhone, I'm making an iPad, I'm making a computer, whatever it is. He's like, at the fundamental level, what are they? And he says, we make tools. That tool may manifest itself

in different physical forms, but at its core, it's a tool. And that really resonated with me because that's how I think of founders. I think of it as a tool for working professionals. And what that tool does is it gets ideas from the history of entrepreneurship into your brain so then you can use them in your work. It just so happens that a podcast is a great way to achieve that goal. But I really do appreciate what he said. He's like, this is the focus. We're making tools. And then the book is obviously filled with maxims from steve here's

two of them it's not done until it ships that is his credo and then another one of his something he repeats over and over again is the journey is the reward and that quote is from 1983 but again that's something he says even as he knew he was dying. He talks about the journey is the reward. And in fact, that made me think of this fantastic interview that I just heard with Ed Thorpe. Ed Thorpe, I've talked about a bunch of the podcasts, as you probably know. But it's episode 222. If you haven't listened to it, he's my personal blueprint. He was on Tim Ferriss' podcast, episode number 596.

But towards the end of the podcast, he talks about that a lot. That you don't confuse the reward as the main objective. The journey is the reward. But listening to that podcast and hearing Ed Thorpe at 89 just reaffirmed the fact that I really do think he's the blueprint. Going back to this book, we'll see that Steve's going to repeat himself here. This time he's talking about applying simplicity to the organization, like the actual structure, the way your company is set up.

The organization is clean and simple to understand and very accountable. Everything just got simpler. That has been one of my mantras, focus and simplicity. This is Steve Jobs when he was still in his 20s, and he's talking about setting up Apple as the David to IBM's Goliath. It's curious to me that the largest computer company in the world, IBM, couldn't even match the Apple II, which was designed in a garage six years ago. And so that's something he'll repeat over and over again. He's like, listen, it's not about the size of your R&D

budget. Like we out-innovated IBM and we were just working in my garage. It's the quality of the people that you have working there. This is Steve Jobs when he was 30. Keep in mind, he's about nine years into Apple at this point. I think that's one of Apple's challenges, really. When two young people walk in with the next thing, are we going to embrace it and say, this is fantastic? Are you going to be willing to drop our models? Or are we going to explain it away?

And really, he's just describing what happened to him when he was younger. He went to Atari. He went to HP. He was, at one time, the two young people that are walking in with the next thing. And so he knew from experience you're more likely to actually dismiss it because you already have something that's working and you're focused on that. This is Steve on what's important to him. Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful, that is what matters to me.

This is Steve Jobs on design. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. That's incredible. I'm going to reread it again. Keep in mind, he's saying this four years before

the iPhone comes out. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. Here's another thought he had on design. Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks, but of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something. Chew it up, not just quickly swallow

it. Most people, there's that phrase again, most people don't take the time to do that. And then this is his comment on the essential difference. This one really hit me hard. And I've read a lot about both the creation of the Lisa and the original Mac. And he said the Lisa people wanted to do something great. And the Mac people wanted to do something insanely great. The difference shows. And then on these two pages, I essentially just underlined everything. This is about employee motivation. Everything here is so fantastic. So it says we attract a different type of person, a person who doesn't want to wait five or 10 years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her. Someone who really wants to get in a little over

his head and make a dent in the universe. This is on maximizing employee potential. My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better. And then this is on excellence. People judge you by your performance. So focus on the outcome. Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected. And then Steve talks about part of having an environment dedicated excellence means that the founder is going to have to do editing. And so this is on firing people. It's painful when you have some people who are not the best people in the world and you have to get rid of them. But I found my job has sometimes been exactly that.

To get rid of some people who didn't measure up and I've always tried to do it in a humane way. But nonetheless, it has to be done and it's never fun. This is Steve Jobs on Focus. People think focus means saying yes to the thing that you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done.

Innovation is saying no to a thousand things. Then he extends this and he's talking about focusing on product. And so he's asked this question. What can we learn from Apple's struggle to innovate during the decade before he returned in 1997? He is answering this question in 2004. You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company.

Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people, but ultimately there needs to be some gravitational force. He's talking about the founder again. That's the role of the founder, right? But ultimately there needs to be some gravitational force. He's talking about the founder again. That's the role of the founder, right? But ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together. Otherwise, you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe, but it doesn't add up to much. This is another thought he has on focus, this time focusing on the right thing.

Sure, what we have to do has to make commercial sense, but it's never the starting point. We start with the product and the customer experience. And then the note I left myself on that page was the founders with this philosophy, because he's essentially saying, yeah, it has to make money, right? But if you can't start with the goal in mind is I just want to make the most money. You start with the product and the actual experience that your customer has. And so this is my note. The founders with this philosophy wind up getting the money anyways. This is Steve on the role of the founder forcing the issue, the important issues in the company. What happened that he's talking about the design of the iPhone. What happened was

the designers came up with this really great idea. Then they take it to the engineers and the engineers go, nah, we can't do that. That's impossible. And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people and they go, we can't build that. And it gets a lot worse. Sure enough, when we took it to the engineers, they said, oh, and they came up with 38 reasons, meaning why I can't do it. And I said, no, no, we're doing this.

And they said, well, why? And I said, because I'm the CEO and I think it can be done. And so they kind of begrudgingly did it. But then it was a big hit. This is Steve Jobs on the importance of forward thinking. Why this really resonated with me is because he sang this when he was 30 years old. He had no idea what the next 25 years of his career, what he was able to produce. His biggest hits were so far in the future. If you want to live your life in a creative way, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away. And that's why I think my favorite Steve Jobs biography is Becoming Steve Jobs,

The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader. It was episode number 19 because that's what the book is focused on. It's his transformation. The person he was at 30 is vastly different than who he's going to become when he's 45, 55. When he's the person that is capable, that has the skills and has built the organization to create some of the greatest products

that humans have ever seen. And evolution is a fantastic description of that process, of the process of Steve becoming Steve Jobs. This is Steve on Goals. When we first started Apple, we really built the first computer because we wanted one. We designed this crazy new computer with color and a whole bunch of other things called the Apple II, which you've probably heard of. We had a passion to do this one simple thing,

which was to get a bunch of computers to our friends so they could have as much fun with them as we were. And that's really important because he's saying, I wasn't trying to build the biggest company. I wasn't trying to build a trillion dollar company. I wasn't doing any of that. Those things happened later as a byproduct of what I was actually focused on, which is just building the best computer that I wanted to use. And then he has a quote about testing people and putting them under pressure to test them. This comes from the book In the Company of Giants. I read this book for Founders 208 if you haven't listened to that episode yet. Many times in an interview, I will purposely upset someone. I'll criticize their prior work. I'll do my homework, find out what they worked on and say, God, that really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did you work on that? I want to see

what people are like under pressure. I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief and pride in what they did. And then here's Steve on the importance of studying great ideas. Really, this is just a giant ad for Founders Podcast. If you really think about it. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. Picasso had a saying, good artists copy, great artists steal. And we've always been shameless about stealing great ideas. And then he goes back to what are you focused on? What is your North Star? For him, it's very clear. I want to build great products. And in order to build great products, I have to build a great company that has the capability of building great products. My philosophy has always been very simple.

My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product. I obviously believed in listening to customers, but customers can't tell you about the next breakthrough that's going to happen, that's going to change the whole industry. So you have to listen very carefully, but then you have to go out and sort of stow away. You have to go hide away with people that really understand the technology, but also really care about the customers and dream up this next breakthrough. And that is my perspective, that everything starts with a great product. Then he talks about the importance of hard work. Keep in mind when he's writing this or when he's saying this, this is right when he came back to Apple. This is in 1998. He is already a billionaire. He did not have to do this. Pixar made him a billionaire. And so he says, I've never been so tired in my life. I come home at about 10

o'clock at night and flop straight into bed. Then I haul myself out of bed at six in the morning and take a shower and go to work. My wife deserves all the credit for keeping me at it. And then here's an example of something I love about Steve. He's a very clear communicator. I've told you this before over and over again. I think he might be the person that communicates the clearest out of every anybody that i've ever read or studied but he also has this like biting wit very similar to charlie munger but he makes you laugh and so he's talking about the fact that when he first came back to apple he said that he was just the interim ceo the i ceo right and this is hilarious because he just he's referencing how bad a job that the previous ceo gil amelio did

some people worried about the word interim but they weren't worried about the last CEO and he wasn't interim. And then this is a quote that he was addressing when he was addressing Apple employees. This is the very early days of Apple. We have a major opportunity to influence where Apple is going. The work that the 50 people here are doing is going to send a giant ripple through the universe. I'm really impressed with the quality of our ripple. I know I might be a little hard to get on with, but this is the most fun I've had in my life. I'm having a blast. This is on innovation. This is right after the great financial crisis in 2008, 2009. So he's saying a lot of companies have chosen to downsize and maybe

that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. And this is the most important part of this paragraph. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets. And then this is probably Steve's most famous quote on innovation. Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. And then Steve's going to say something here about insight that made me think of what Claude, a quote that Claude Shannon said one time. So Steve says, I think the artistry is in having an insight into what one sees around them. Generally putting things together in a way no one else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don't have that insight. So all the way back on Founders Number 95, I read the fantastic biography of Claude Shannon.

And I think Shannon said something that speaks to Steve's obsession with only working with the highest quality people. And Shannon said, a very small percentage of the population produces the greatest proportion of the important ideas. There are some people, if you shoot one idea into their brain, you will get half an idea out. There are other people who are beyond this point, at which they produce two ideas for each idea sent in. And then back to the book, this is Steve Jobs on the importance of inspiration. The most important thing is a person. A person who incites and feeds your curiosity.

And then this is Steve on the importance of having an interdisciplinary approach to your work. This is the first time in the book that he's going to mention his hero, Edwin Land of Polaroid. And he says, amount about how to cut stone at the quarry. I don't believe that the best people in any of these fields see themselves as one branch of a forked tree. I just don't see that. People bring these things together a lot. Dr. Land at Polaroid said, I want Polaroid to stand at the intersection of art and science. And I've never forgotten that. Edwin Land is extremely, extremely important person in the history of entrepreneurship to study. If you have not, go back and listen to the four episodes, five different books that I've read on him.

It's episode number 40, number 132, 133, and 134. This is Steve on the fact that the experience trying to build the iPad first is actually what inspired the iPhone. I actually started on the tablet first. I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard to type on a multi-touch glass display. And I asked our folks, could we come up with a multi-touch display that I could actually type on? And about six months later, they called me in and showed me this prototype display. And it was amazing. I thought, my God, we could build a phone out of this. And I put the tablet project on the shelf because the phone was more important. And we took the next several years and we made the iPhone and then he has this idea that when some

products you need to stop adding features and just figure out how to decrease the price so you can make it more widely available to people and this is about the iPod touch and so when they release that they realized oh it's kind of like an iPhone without the phone. But what customers started using it as, in addition to playing music, is a gaming machine. And so he's like, oh, OK, it's actually the lowest cost way for customers to get into the app store. And he realized that's a big draw. That's a big market we didn't even think about. And so he said, what we focus on is just reducing the price to $199. We don't need to add any new stuff. And then this is the way Jobs described himself. He was making this fake resume for one of Apple's products.

And he said, And I'm not afraid to start at the beginning. This is Steve talking about his legacy, the legacy of Apple when he was 30. If Apple becomes a place where computers are a commodity item, where the romance is gone, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, I will feel that I've lost Apple. And this is Steve on why he wanted to build really simple products, products that do not need instruction manuals. In fact, this is a lesson he learned 30 years previously when he was working at Atari, where the only instructions to one of their games

was insert quarter, avoid Klingons. And so this is what he says. It's insane. We all have busy lives. We have jobs. We have interests. And some of us have children. Everyone's lives are getting busier, not less busy.

You just don't have time to learn this stuff. And everything's getting more complicated. We don't have a lot of time to learn how to use a washing machine or a phone. This is Steve on making sure that your company has a point of view. This is absolutely fantastic. Macintosh was basically this relatively small company in California, taking on the Goliath, IBM, and saying, wait a minute, your way is wrong. This is not the way we want computers to go. This is not the legacy we want to leave. This is not what we want our kids to be learning. This is wrong, and we are going to show you the right way and do it. And here it is. And it's so much better. And this is Steve on the importance of marketing. My dream

is that every person in the world will have their own Apple computer. To do that, we've got to be a great marketing company. That particular quote was from 1987. He says that throughout his career in a bunch of different ways. The way I found it and read it and interpreted it in the book was that if you truly believe that the product that you're making or the service you're providing makes somebody else's life better, then you have a moral obligation to get good at marketing. Because the better you get at marketing, the more lives of other humans you will improve. More of Steve Jobs' biting wit. He talks about this and it's fine that Microsoft makes a lot of money. Good for them. I'm glad they're successful. That's not my problem with them.

He says the only problem with Microsoft is they have no taste. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. This is the quote I referenced earlier about that it's more important the quality of people you have as opposed to how much you're spending on R&D. Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on research and development. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it. So Steve said this all the way back in 1984, which is really fascinating because you figure how much Apple was still, you know, a couple of years old at this time, but they already

had this like bureaucratic creep that just appears over and over again. It's just part of the nature of building company. Sam Walton says, Hey, you have to draw a line in the sand and keep pushing bureaucracy across that line. And just know that that's something that's like a never ending job. It's you're going to push it back. It slowly grow and you push it back but i really liked what steve said here the people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the macintosh my job is to create a space for them to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay this is the neatest group of people i've ever worked with they're all exceptionally bright but more importantly they share a quality about the way they look at life, which is that the journey is the reward. Another thing that

he repeats over and over again, you see that? They really want to see this product out in the world. Another one of his most famous quotes, and I think founders understand this at their core, it is better to be a pirate than to join the Navy. And so I'm going to read this quote. This is actually, they cut off part of the quote because i really learned this lesson when i was reading that the biography of johnny ive and it says net this is steve saying why he's not going to build a netbook netbooks aren't better than anything they're just cheap laptops and so it actually gave me like a mental model to use because there's more detail in the in the johnny ive book so in the mid-2000s like i think from 2004 2007 somewhere in there netbooks were like 25 30 of the the laptop market they became quite large and so everybody is even within apple they're like hey we should make one and steve jobs adamantly refused

for that reason he's like they're not better than anything they're just cheap laptops and so instead of dedicating resources to making a netbook and just following on and making like a cheaper version of of a macbook or whatever the case is they directed resources at making the ipad and so that gave me a model like wow so everybody else was going in this direction because the market said hey look how many people are willing to buy a cheap laptop and steve's like no i'm not going to do that i'm going to create a create an entire new category and just make something better than a cheap laptop. And so really the way I think about it is like, are you making a netbook or are you making an iPad?

So this is Steve on new products. This is, I just re-listened to episode number 98. I think it's 98. It's the longest biography I've ever read. It's almost a thousand pages on Enzo Ferrari. But what I realized is they talk about their products the same way. Ferrari would describe his cars as like the is they talk about their products the same way. Ferrari would describe his cars as like the way you talk about like your lover.

And so listen to Steve here. I've said this before, but I thought it was worth repeating. It is in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing. And nowhere is that more true than in these post-PC devices. And a lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in and they're looking at this as the next PC. The hardware and the software are done by different companies and they're talking about speeds and feeds just like they did with the PC. In our experience, and every bone in our body says that is not the right approach to this,

that these are post-PC devices and they need to be even easier to use than a PC. They need to be even more intuitive than a PC. And where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC. I just want to pause there because it just made me realize this as I'm reading it out loud to you. He's describing the advantage that his company and his company alone has and no one else does. And we think we're on the right track with this. We think we have the right organization to build these kinds of products.

And so I think we stand a pretty good chance of being pretty competitive in that market. This is Steve on the importance of not resting on your laurel. The way you and I usually discuss this is if you go to sleep on a win, you wake up with a loss. I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then go do something else wonderful. Don't dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next. And then here's Steve again describing what the only thing, what the capability that his company has that every single other company in the world lacks. Really, it's an echo of Edwin Land, his hero, his personal motto. He says, my motto is very personal. It might not work for other people. And it is this, don't do anything that someone else can do.

And so Steve says, we're the only company that owns the whole widget, the hardware, the software, and the operating system. We can take full responsibility for the user experience. That's a fantastic way to think about it. We're the only ones that can take full responsibility for the user experience. We can do things the other guys can't do. This is another quote from Steve on passion. I already read at the very beginning of the podcast the longer quote on passion. This one's shorter, but just as good. You've got to find what you love and that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large

part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. Don't settle. I love that quote so much. I didn't even, I just noticed what I'm doing. I'm sitting here punching my heart with my hand as I read it. So I'm going to read it again in case I caused my voice to change from hitting my chest. You've got to find what you love.

And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life. And the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. Don't settle. That kind of reminds me of the advice that Jeff Bezos gives. He's like, you can find a job, you can find a career, or you can find a calling. And he says the same thing. He's like, just keep hunting until you find a calling. This is Steve Jobs on perseverance. I already gave you the first half of the quote, but I'm going to finish the rest of what he says. He's saying this all the way back in 1995. I'm convinced that about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones

is pure perseverance. Unless you have a lot of passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give up. So you've got to have an idea or a problem or a wrong that you want to write that you're passionate about. Otherwise, you're not going to have the perseverance to stick through with it. This book is in alphabetical order, so now we get to a couple of quotes on Pixar. It says, Pixar's got, by far and away, the best computer graphics talent in the entire world. And it now has the best animation

and artistic talent in the whole world to do these kinds of films. There's really no one else in the world who could do this stuff. You see, he's using the same idea. He's describing Pixar.

Really, the echo of the Edwin Land motto, don't do anything anybody else can do. He's like, Pixar, it's the only company on the planet that has the skill set. He just got done, a few do he's like Pixar is the only ones are the only company on the planet that has the skill set he just got done you know a few minutes ago saying Apple's the only one that makes the hardware the software the controls the operating system that's the same idea

just apply to different domains don't do anything that someone else can do and on the very next page he goes back to the fact that the people at Pixar make all the difference. And really, you can think of what he's saying here. Like in many times in business, if you just think about the own experiences that you have in your life, like bigness and greatness, you usually find them in conflict. Apple has some pretty amazing people, but the collection of people at Pixar is the highest concentration of remarkable people I have ever witnessed. Pixar is more multidisciplinary than Apple ever will be. But the key thing is that it's much smaller. This is what I mean about bigness and greatness are usually in conflict

when you're building companies, right? Pixar is much more multidisciplinary than Apple ever will be. But the key thing is that it's much smaller. Pixar has got 450 people. You could never have the collection of people that pixar has now if you have to if it went to 2 000 people this is absolutely fantastic the heading here is priorities assessment but really i want to the way i think about it is what he keeps saying like the journey is a reward journey is a reward like think about how you're spending your time

and so i don't know if you know this but he met his wife yeah he's not not his wife yet what I'm about to read to you but his wife Laureen he goes to give a talk at Stanford if I remember correctly winds up meeting he's like who's this beautiful blonde woman gets her number uh winds up walking out like saying hey you know maybe we I want to take a dinner sometime or whatever the case is gets her number because he's got to leave and he's leaving his talk and going to a meeting. And then he thinks, what am I doing? This is really stupid. So he says, I was in the parking lot with the key in my car.

And I thought to myself, this is so good. So good. All right, let me start over. I was in the parking lot with the key in my car. And I thought to myself, if this is my last night on earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman? I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she'd have dinner with me. She said, yes. We walked into town and we've been together ever since. That is fantastic.

I thought, I asked myself, if this is my last night on earth, would I rather go to this business meeting or would I rather go to dinner with her? Imagine if he, just the difference in like that one decision. Yeah, maybe he calls her next week and they're still together, whatever the case is. Maybe he forgets to because he's so busy with work, whatever the case is. It's just like, that is the perfect framework. If this was my last night on earth, this reminder of his own mortality comes up over and over again, way before he knew he had cancer. This is years before that, but he uses it as a way to try to figure out like to make the big decisions in life. And he uses it at work and personal life. It's just really, it was just

really wise. I just love, I just love, I mean, I know this really doesn't have anything to do with work, but, you know, your spouse is maybe probably the most important decision, single decision you can make, right? And just that framework, just asking yourself, well, if this is my last day, if this is my last night, do I want to do what I'm about to do? Absolutely fantastic. All right, let's go back to products.

This is Steve Jobs talking to Apple right after he came back, right after they fired Gil Amelio. And Jobs has now reassumed, assumed control of Apple. And he talks about what is the problem. And he says, it's the products. The products suck. There's no sex in them anymore. Goes back to this idea of the way Steve talked about his products, just like Enzo Ferrari, just like all these other people.

It's not normal. And I think that's so interesting to me. He talks about it's in my soul. It's in my bones. It's my heart. You're an artist. You're a craftsman. He uses these words.

Listen to what he's talking about. Now he's talking about the design of icons on a screen. Who talks like this? We made the buttons on the screen look so good that you want to lick them. And then he talks about the fact that designing up new experiences, new products, that's your job, not the customer's job. It's not about pop culture. It's not about fooling people. And it's not about convincing people that they want something that they really don't. We figure out what we want. I hit my chest again. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether or not a lot of people are going to want it, want it too. That's what we get paid to do. So you can't go out and ask people,

what's the next big thing? There's a great quote by Henry Ford who said, if I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse. Oh, my goodness. This is amazing. Again, repetition is persuasive. Two separate quotes. There's like five paragraphs on these two pages. I'm only going to pull out one sentence from each. There's two sentences, right?

They're not next to each other. And it's the same idea. We're the only people left in the computer industry that can do that. That is in 1994. Ten years later, Apple is the only company in the world that has all of that under one roof. And I think the lesson there for you and I is figure out what your basics are, what are your fundamentals, and master those fundamentals. Let's go back to Steve describing the process of building a product.

Again, it's like a love affair. This is all about the importance of quality. We just want to build the best thing we could build. When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall, nobody will ever see it. You know it's there. So you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back for you to sleep well at night. That aesthetic, the quality, it has to be carried all the way through. Then he talks about his decision, which at the time, everybody criticized. They're like, why is Apple putting their stores in these high-end malls? You know, why don't you just put them in like these big warehouses where everybody has to drive

really far away? And that's where, you know, everybody else sells electronics. Why are you trying to do things differently, Steve? I don't understand. And so he talks about like this is why I wanted Apple in high-end malls. The real estate was a lot more expensive. But people didn't have to gamble with 20 minutes of their time. Meaning they'd have to drive out to these faraway places like every other, you know, computer like hardware store, whatever the case is. They only had to gamble with 20 footsteps of their time.

They didn't have to gamble with 20 minutes of their time. They just had to give me 20 footsteps. This is the importance of always risking failure. He's saying this the year after he came back to Apple. And he's really describing, why is he doing this? I had a good life. My family's happy. They're seeing me all the time.

Pixar's doing great. I'm now a billionaire. Why am I taking on this momentous task of turning around Apple? One of my role models is Bob Dylan. I learned the lyrics to all of his songs and watched him never stand still. If you look at the artist, if they're really good, it always occurs to them at some point that they can do this one thing for the rest of their lives and they can be really successful to the outside world, but not be really successful to themselves.

That's the moment that an artist really decides who he or she is. If they keep on risking failure they're still artists. Dylan and Picasso were always risking failure. This Apple thing is that way for me. I don't want to fail. Of course I don't. But even though I didn't know how bad things really were, I still had a lot to think about before I said yes. I had to consider the implications for Pixar, for my family, for my reputation. I decided I didn't really care because this is what I wanted to do. If I try my best and fail, so what? I've tried my best. And then this is where he actually compliments Bill Gates, which is really surprising.

This is really on just how bizarre. One, I think the lesson here is like if you can arrive at an insight before anybody else, like you can have a massive advantage. But two, it's also how bizarre software businesses are. I don't know if you've listened to it yet, but I just did Mark Leonard's shareholder letters. I think it's like episode 246, something like that. And really a large part of those letters, just how the bizarre economic characteristics of software. And I almost did not put out, I recorded that entire podcast. I wasn't sure as I went through it. I thought there was good information in there, but I almost didn't put it out. And I'm glad I did because I've heard from a ton of people actually like that podcast. But I just wasn't sure because I didn't really know who

Mark was as a person. It's like, I'm just reading shareholder letters as opposed to a biography. And so I was like, all right, hopefully I get an insight into who he is, you know, as he has he writing to his shareholder letters or shareholders rather. But anyways anyways i'm glad i actually published it so this is uh steve jobs insight onto what bill gates did bill gates built the first software company in the industry and i think he built the first software company before anyone in our industry knew what a software company was and that was huge and the business model they ended up pursuing ended up working really well bill was focused on software before anyone else had a clue there's a lot more you can say but that's the high order bit and then he's going to talk about really if

you i've told you this before but if you listen i think it's episode 102 uh akio marita which is the founder of sony which is one of somebody's steve jobs studied and really copied a lot of ideas from because if you could think about the ipod what steve made is kind of like the digital version of the walkman which is one of the the maybe the most successful sony product ever it sold like 400 million million units or like just an insane amount of numbers especially before like the pre-digital age but what's really interesting is like learn from your heroes but keep in mind like you can compete with them right you can actually improve on what they did.

And so that's what he's talking about. He learned their best ideas and then he corrected what he feels were their mistakes. What's really interesting is if you look at the reason that the iPod exists and that Apple is in that marketplace, it's because these really great Japanese consumer electronic companies who kind of owned the portable music market, invented it and owned it, couldn't do the appropriate software. So he's found a weakness. He's like, I can do that. They couldn't conceive of and implement the appropriate software because an iPod's really just software.

This is the importance of story. He says, one of his famous quotes, Steve Jobs said, is like, storytellers are the most powerful people in the world. This is something he learned at Pixar, too. We've pioneered the whole medium of computer animation, but John Lasseter once said, and this really stuck with me, no amount of technology will turn a bad story into a good story. That dedication to quality is really ingrained in the culture of Pixar. This is fascinating because this is after he gets kicked out of Apple. He's I think 31 when he says this, I feel like somebody just punched me in the stomach and knocked all my wind out i'm oh so

actually he's 30 i'm only 30 years old and i want to have a chance to continue creating things this is the punchline this is why i'm including it i know not i think i know i've got at least one more great computer in me and as we know benefit hindsight, he had way more than just one great computer left in him. I love this. Optimize for survival. To win, you must first survive. Or as Charlie Munger says, the survivors know. And so this is what Steve Jobs said. Victory in our industry is spelled survival. The way we're going to survive is to innovate our way out of this. This is Steve talking about the Think Different ad campaign that came up when he came back to Apple. He's talking about this in 1999.

He says, we have a problem. And our problem was that people have forgotten what Apple stands for. And so we needed a way to communicate what the heck Apple's all about. And we thought, how do you tell somebody what you are, who you are, and what you care about? And the best way we could think of was, if you know who somebody's heroes are, that tells you a lot about them. So we thought, we're going to tell people who our heroes are. And that is what the Think Different campaign is about. It's about telling people who we admire. This is Steve on the importance of thinking

through problems. And this is going to echo and sound very familiar with something that he's repeated previously, that most people stop a few steps way too short. Once you get into a problem, you see that it's complicated, and you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's where most people start, or excuse me, that's where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for a while. But the really great person will keep going, find the underlying problem, and come up with an elegant solution that works on every level. And then the next page, he's going to repeat something that he says over and over again. The importance of time.

How are you actually spending time? That's all life is made up of. Your time is limited. Don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. Hitting my chest again. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

This is Steve Jobs on Trash Talking, which is hilarious. This is Steve Jobs on trash talking, which is hilarious. He's going to be talking to, this is, he's telling a story, you know, probably 20, 30 years after it happened, but he's going to be talking to Adam Osborne, who was another computer manufacturer and founder in the 80s. And he says, Adam Osborne was always dumping on Apple. He started joking about the Mac and I was trying to keep my cool and be polite, but he kept asking, what's this Mac we're hearing about? Is it real? He started getting under my collar so much that I told him, Adam, it's so good that even after it puts your company out of business,

you still want to go out and buy it for your kids. And then this is Steve reminding us, the most important thing is the customer experience. At Apple, we come at everything asking how easy is this going to be for the user? How great is it going to be for the user? And it's like at Pixar. Everyone in Hollywood says that the key to good animated movies is story, story, story. But when it really gets down to it, when the story isn't working, they will not stop production and spend more money and get the story right. That's what I see about the software business.

Everybody says, oh, the user is the most important thing, but no one else really does it. This is Steve on Vision, but really it is another way that he's just reframing Edwin Land's idea over and over again. We're gambling on our vision and we would rather do that than make Me Too products. Let some other companies do that. And then I love this quote because this came a few years, about three years before the introduction of the iPhone. I'm always keeping my eyes open for the next big opportunity. I don't know what that next big thing might be, but I have a few ideas. I recently discovered this fantastic author that writes these 200-page biographies. His name's Paul Johnson.

I've read a few books on him. I would check out number 225, which is Winston Churchill, which I thought was fantastic. But I have a biography of his that I'm going to read on Socrates, and part of it is because this is what Steve Jobs said. I would trade all my technology for an afternoon with Socrates. This is on the conflict between working harder and growing older. I read something Bill Gates said. And he said, I worked really, really hard in my 20s.

And I know what he means because I worked really, really hard in my 20s too. Seven days a week, Lots of hours every day. But you can't do that forever. And then we'll close with Steve reminding us to always keep our minds open to the many possibilities. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. Less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert's, there are few.

And that is where I'll leave it. I paid $2.25 for this book. It's crazy to me. I'll link it. It's probably more expensive than Amazon, but if you want to buy the book using that link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. And the very best way to support the podcast is by giving a gift subscription to a friend, family member, or colleague. I will leave that link in the show

notes as well. And it's always available at founderspodcast.com. That is 249 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.