Founders - #390 Rare Steve Jobs Interview

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

I've read this interview probably 10 times. It's that good. Steve Jobs was 29 when the interview was published and with remarkable clarity of thought Steve explains the upcoming technological revolution, why the personal computer is the greatest tool humans have ever invented, how the computer compares to past inventions, why software needs to be simplified (You shouldn't have to read a novel to write a novel!) why the future is always exciting and unpredictable, what soul in the game looks like and why his competitors don't have any, why slightly insane people are the ones who make great products, the importance of questioning things and how doing so produces novel insights, why it's dangerous to have layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work, the importance of hiring troublemakers, why more people should aspire to be like Edwin Land, and how if he every leaves Apple he will always come back. Read the full interview here ----- Ramp gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save time and money. ----- Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book ---- 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.  ---- Highlights from this episode: We’re living in the wake of the petrochemical revolution of 100 years ago. The petrochemical revolution gave us free energy—free mechanical energy, in this case. It changed the texture of society in most ways. This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well, but of another kind: free intellectual energy. This revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution. We’re on the forefront. A computer is the most incredible tool we’ve ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communications center, a supercalculator, a planner, a filer and an artistic instrument all in one, just by being given new instructions, or software, to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer. We have no idea how far it’s going to go The hard part of what we’re up against now is that people ask you about specifics and you can’t tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, “What are you going to be able to do with a telephone?” he wouldn’t have been able to tell him the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn’t know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out what movies were playing that night or to order some groceries or call a relative on the other side of the globe. That is what Macintosh is all about. It’s the first “telephone” of our industry. Ad campaigns are necessary for competition; IBM’s ads are everywhere. But good PR educates people; that’s all it is. You can’t con people in this business. The products speak for themselves. We didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted 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 and nobody will ever see it. You’ll 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, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through. The people in the Mac group wanted to build the greatest computer that has ever been seen.

I read this interview with Steve Jobs right after reading Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters for the fourth or fifth time and something jumped out at me. Something that both Bezos and Jobs had in common is this relentless pursuit to work with the very best people. From his very first shareholder letter, Jeff emphasized the importance of having the very best team. He wrote, Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been and will continue to be the single most important

element of Amazon's success. Bezos' focus on talent is just like this quote from Steve Jobs that happened in an interview Steve gave that very same year. He said, I think I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with. You must find extraordinary people. The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best is at most two to one. But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to one.

Given that you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream, you need to build a team that pursues the A players. And that is exactly what Ramp did. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast and Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible. In the last 12 months, they hired only 0.23%

of the people that applied. That means when you use Ramp, you now have top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24-7 to automate and improve all of your business's financial operations. And they do this all on a single platform. Ramp gives your business easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting and cost control. The longer you use Ramp, the more easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, and cost control. The longer you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes.

In the end of that interview, Steve Jobs added something. He said that a small team of A-plus players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. What kind of products can a team of A-plus players build? A product that creates so much value for their customers that the customers? Never leave ramp is an example of that last year 12,059 businesses signed up for ramp and only eight of the 12,059 businesses decided ramp wasn't for them. That is a success rate of 99.9334%.

I run my business on Ramp and so do most of the other top founders and CEOs that I know make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. So I wanna talk to you about this rare Steve Jobs interview that he gave all the way back in 1985

when he was just 29 years old. Gave the interview to Playboy Magazine. I've probably read the interview, I don't know, 10 times. So I wanna jump right into the introduction and then we'll get into most of, most of what you and I will talk about today will be Steve in his own words. So it says, Apple joined the ranks of the Fortune 500

in just five years, faster than any other company in history. Jobs' company introduced personal computers into the American home and workplace. Apple's rise was meteoric. From sales of just $200,000 the first year in Jobs' garage, the company has grown into a giant firm with $1.4 billion in revenue in 1984. With an estimated net worth of $450 million,

mostly in Apple stock, Jobs was by far the youngest person on Forbes list of the richest Americans for several years running. It is also worth noting that of the 100 Americans named by Forbes, Jobs is one of only seven who made their fortunes on their own. But to hear Jobs tell it, the money isn't even half the story, especially since he does not spend it lavishly and indeed claims to have very little time for a social life.

He is on a mission, preaching the gospel of salvation through the personal computer. He is an engaging pitchman and never loses an opportunity to sell his products, eloquently describing a time when computers will be as common as kitchen appliances and as revolutionary in their impact as the telephone or the internal combustion engine. Again, if you go back and read interviews and media from this time, people made fun of him for this.

And he was dead right on both those accounts. There are now more than 2 million Apple computers or another way to think about this is before Steve Jobs was 30 years old, he sold more than 2 million computers. The Macintosh was released with a $20 million advertising campaign and it was billed as a computer for the rest of us. It was also criticized as being too much of a toy, unsuitable for business use. The interviewer and Steve Jobs were at this party together

in New York City, and the interviewer was talking about the fact that he had all these famous people here, they were all looking at the Apple computers, he had people like Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, and yet he found that Steve was most interested in showing the young kids that were there, specifically the young boy that was there, how to use the computer, and this is a perfect way to end the introduction.

But more revealing was the scene after the party. Well after the other guests had gone home, Jobs stayed to tutor the boy on the fine points of using the Mac. Later, I asked him why he had seemed happier with the boy than with the two famous artists. His answers seemed unrehearsed to me. Older people sit down and ask, what is it? But the boy asks, what can I do with it? So then the interview starts.

Before I get to that, I just want to go back and reference a few things that jumped out to me when I was reading this introduction. It was the fact that the interviewer was like, hey, this guy's worth like half a billion dollars. And he doesn't want to talk about money at all. He doesn't seem all that interested in it. I want to tie that to something that you and I talked about last week. Jeff Bezos would bring this up in his shareholder letters.

And so when Jeff was thinking about working with or buying a company, he would always try to assess whether the person leading the company, whether it was a founder or the CEO, are they a missionary or a mercenary? And what Bezos said about this was really interesting because he noticed a paradox. He says, I'm always trying to figure out one thing, first and foremost, is that person a missionary or a mercenary? The mercenaries are trying to flip their stock. The missionaries love their product or their service, and they love their customers and

are trying to build a great service. By the way, the great paradox here is that it's usually the missionaries who make more money. The second part that jumped out, the fact that they said he's an engaging pitch man and Jobs is always, he never loses an opportunity to sell his products. A few weeks before, you and I talked about Bezos, we talked about Ken Griffin who built the most successful hedge fund of all time. Over and over again in that talk, he says, if we're going to eat, someone's got to sell. You are always selling.

And if you don't like to sell, here is my advice. Get over it. You have to sell your customers. You have to sell employees. You have to sell investors. You have to be able to sell your vision. And I think the best founders are also, you'll see a high overlap between really great founders and really great, they're really great salespeople as well.

And then I just wanna pull out one other thing before I move on, where Jobs describes his product will be as revolutionary as the telephone or the internal combustion engine. Great entrepreneurs, great inventors, they're always able to place their inventions in a historical context. James Dyson, who's one of my heroes, talked about this.

He said, I have an interest verging on obsession with the past. For God's sake, did you know that James Dyson wrote a book? The title of that book is called The History of Great Inventions. You will see that trait over and over again. They're able to put their work in historical context. I'm gonna jump right into the interview, and they start with the fact that, you will see that trait over and over again, they're able to put their work in historical context, I'm going to jump right into the interview. And they start with the fact that, you know, you had all this money, you're worth almost a half a billion dollars, this is just remarkable. And jobs is kind of flippant. And he's actually laughing. He's like, I actually lost 250 million in one year when the stock went down, and he starts laughing. And the interviewer is like, wait, you can laugh about this. He's like, I'm not going to let it run my life.

My main reaction to the money thing is that it's humorous, all the attention to it because it's hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that has happened to me in the past 10 years. It makes me feel old sometimes because I go speak at a campus and I find what students are most in awe of is the fact that I'm a millionaire. Jobs' point obviously is what he's most interested in is in the excellence of the invention, the excellence of the product that he is building. And Jobs immediately steers the discussion to what he thinks is most important.

This is one of the most impressive things that he's ever said. And it's remarkable that he is 29 years old. He says, we're living in the wake of the petrochemical revolution of a hundred years ago. The petrochemical revolution gave us free energy, free mechanical energy. It changed the texture of society in most ways. This revolution, the information revolution, is a revolution of free energy as well,

but of another kind, free intellectual energy. It is very crude today, yet our Macintosh computer takes less power than a 100 watt light bulb to run and it can save you hours a day. What will it be able to do 10 or 20 years from now, or 50 years from now? This revolution will dwarf the petrochemical revolution. We're on the forefront. Keep in mind what is most remarkable about that is not only the clear thinking, the remarkable communication skills, the very next section, which I'm skipping over. At this point in history, people didn't even understand what a computer was.

So you literally have to, in every conversation going into with the media, with potential customers, you have to break down what a computer is. Jobs is so early and yet somehow had a very clear understanding of how powerful these tools could be. And that is exactly what he refers to them over and over again. He says humans are tool builders. The computer is the best tool we've ever built. I'm going all in. I'm dedicating my life to doing this.

And he explains why. This is excellent. I hope you read the whole interview. But if not, definitely save some of these highlights and reread them. They're so important. This is what he says. A computer is the most incredible tool we've ever seen. It can be a writing tool, a communication center, a super calculator, a planner, a filer, and an artistic instrument all in one just by being given new instructions or software to work from. There are no other tools that have the power and versatility of a computer. We have

no idea how far it's going to go. That's something he repeats over and over again. I know this is the next big thing. I can't predict, no one can predict how this thing is going to unfold. He says this a few paragraphs later. You don't know exactly what's going to result, but you know it's going to be something very big and very good. And then immediately does the exact same thing. He puts the work that he's doing in historical context. The hard part of what we're up against is that people ask you about specifics and you can't tell them. A hundred years ago, if somebody had asked Alexander Graham Bell, what are you going to be able to do with the telephone? He wouldn't have been able to tell

him all the ways the telephone would affect the world. He didn't know that people would use the telephone to call up and find out the movies while movies are playing the night or to order some groceries or to call a relative on the other side of the globe. And then in the middle of this section Jobs does something that's absolutely brilliant. He's going to turn the conversation and introduce another historical analogy. So his point that he's saying here is, hey, if you think about how wonderful the invention of the telephone was, think about what preceded the telephone. It was the telegraph. Right now, before Apple, the personal computer was in the telegraph stage.

We're going to turn it into the telephone stage. This is remarkable. It says, but remember that the first public telegraph was inaugurated in 1844. It was an amazing breakthrough in communications. You could actually send messages from New York to San Francisco in an afternoon. People talked about putting a telegraph on every desk in America to improve productivity, but it wouldn't have worked. It required that people learn this whole sequence of strange incantations, Morse code, dots, and dashes to use the telegraph. It took about 40 hours to learn. The

majority of people would never learn how to do this. So fortunately in the 1870s Bell invented the telephone. It performed basically the same function as the telegraph but people already knew how to use it. That is an excellent point. If people need 40 hours of instruction before they can use a tool, a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of humans will ever do that. The telephone won out over the telegraph because everyone already knew how to talk and listen. How do I use a telephone? I pick it up and I speak into it. A main theme from Steve Jobs's career from the very first

thing he made when he was 21 up until the day he died. There's a great line from this book called Insanely Simple. I covered it all the way back on episode 349. I think the title of that episode is How Steve Jobs Kept Things Simple. There's a quote in that book that says Steve's most important concern was making things easier for the customer. Less versions to choose from, less prices to consider. Turn it on and it just works. No hassle. If he found a hassle, he would eliminate it. Turn it on and it just works.

Sounds a hell of a lot like a telephone. And he talks about this, the fact that even though not only the machines that we're making in the, you know, at this time, way too complicated, but the software that we're making is way too complicated. One of the most popular software programs at the time was this program called the WordStar. And this is Jobs and the genius way he's able to communicate. He says, the manual for WordStar, which

is the most popular word processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel. And a short while later, the interviewer is picking up on just how good Jobs is at communicating at salesmanship. He says, we were warned about you. Before this interview began, someone said, we're about to be snowed by the best.

It said, Steve Jobs smiled. He says, we're just enthusiastic about what we do. And they talk about the fact that they just launched a new computer and along with a new product, a new computer, Jobs believed in supporting it with massive ad campaigns, great marketing and great education. It says ad campaigns, this is Jobs now, ad campaigns are necessary for competition. Good PR educates people.

That is all it is. You cannot con people in this business. The products speak for themselves. In this interview, I don't think I'm going to include it, but he talks about the fact that jobs had previously flown to Japan, he had spent time with the founder of Sony, one of his heroes Akio Morita, I just covered Akio Morita is autobiography again, a few weeks ago, it sounds exactly what he just said, good PR educates

people. That's all it is. You can't calm people to business products speak for themselves. That sounds like he is parading Morita, Morita talked about marketing is just a form of communication. You must invest in educating the market. Akio believed in this so much that when, you know, he launched a new product, he put a lot of marketing dollars behind it. I've told this story before, but I think it's hilarious.

He was going back and forth, and the guy that was working for him, that was running the product, tried to cut the budget. This went on for several weeks, to the point where Akio couldn't sleep, wakes up in the middle of the night one time, calls the guy and says, if you don't spend $2 million on this, you're fired. That's how important it was to Akio.

See this with Steve Jobs. And you also see with Steve Jobs here, Edwin Land. Go back and listen to the episodes that he did in Edwin Land, how much money he put into the marketing and advertising and launching new products. It'll blow your mind. Now, Steve has asked the question, does it take insane people to make insanely great things? This is his response, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and

adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas. But yeah, the people who made the Mac are on the edge. And he describes this, this is one of the greatest things that Steve has ever said. It's obvious from reading this, and now we know what happened for the rest of his career. He had soul in the game. Excellence was the goal. We didn't build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves.

We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted 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 and no one will ever see it. You'll 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. The aesthetic, the quality has to be carried all the way through.

And so this is one of my favorite things. He's also funny when you read his interviews. And so at the time, his main competitor is IBM and they released this product, which Steve Jobs, I think, affectionately referred to as shit. And it's called the PC Jr. And so he's asked right after he had this beautiful thing, like we're, you know, we're accessible quality

for me to sleep at night. It has to be the best thing I can possibly build. And so the follow asked right after he had this beautiful thing, like we're, you know, we're accessible quality for me to sleep at night. It has to be the best thing I can possibly build. And so the follow-up question, are you saying that the people who made the PC junior don't have that kind of pride in their product? Job says if they did, they wouldn't have made the PC junior. They hoped that if they build it, lots of people would buy them and they'd make lots of money. Those are different motivations.

The people in the Mac group wanted to build the greatest computer that has ever been seen. And then Steve gives some great advice on how to think about building great products. He says, your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record,

and they never get out of them. It's a rare person who etches grooves people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It's a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things. And so Steve would always be like, well, why does it work that way? Is there a way we could do it better? Is there a new technology we can introduce? In fact, I read this interview that James Dyson gave, and there's an excerpt from the

interview that I think is really great. And it's really a description of how James Dyson gave and there's an excerpt from the interview that I think is really great and it's really a description of how James Dyson's mind works and I think the way James thinks is the way that Steve Jobs thinks. I think a lot of founders think this way. And so James says, whenever I look at anything, I wonder how it works and then I wonder how it could work better. Could I make it work better? Is there a technology I could use?

Is there a way I can reconfigure it? Is there a radical breakthrough I could do by lateral thinking that would make a huge difference? So I just think like this all the time. I think Steve Jobs was exactly the same way and the problem he was talking about is like well when you're young and malleable that's why a lot of people come up when they're younger they come up with a lot of interesting and odd you know unique ways and inventions and think ways to look at the world and And as you get old, you don't really see 50 or 60 or 70 year olds inventing new things.

And the same process is the way that a person ages and gets kind of stuck in their ways. Companies do too. And so he actually has a warning about this, which is really interesting because then he's gonna get kicked out of the company because the company is going to kind of calcify and become not the same startup that it used to be and we saw what happened what will happen

over the next 13 years with Apple once he leaves. Companies as they grow to become multi-billion dollar entities somehow lose their vision. They insert lots of layers of middle management between the people running the company and the people doing the work. They no longer have an inherent feel or passion about the products. The creative people who are the ones who care passionately have to persuade five layers of management to do what they know is the right thing. What happens in most

companies is that you don't keep great people under working environments where individual accomplishment is discouraged rather than encouraged. The great people leave and you end up with mediocrity. I know because that's how Apple was built. Apple is an Ellis Island company. Apple was built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies. And then he goes right into talking about one of his favorite troublemakers, Edwin Land, who is the patron saint of founders podcasts.

If there was one person that embodies, you know, what we're trying to do here and who we're trying to admire, it would be the person that Steve jobs admire along many other entrepreneurs. But Steve jobs being the most famous and well-known was obsessed with Edwin land. You know, Dr. Edwin land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time, but more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organization to reflect that. Polaroid did that for some years, but eventually Dr. Land, one of

those brilliant troublemakers, was asked to leave his own company, which is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard. The man is a national treasure. I don't understand why people like that can't be held up as models. This is the most incredible thing to be. Not an astronaut, not a football player, but this. And so he goes into the importance of having a company that makes sure you attract these troublemakers, these really talented people

also says something later on man, I think it was like Much later on he was probably in his 40s or 50s when he said this but the fact that people are packaged deals that you have To learn to take the good with the bad a lot of the talented people are gonna have weird things are gonna be kind of Hard to manage but if you want to work with the most talented people Then you have to deal with the bad that comes along with that. We attract a different type of person. A person who doesn't want to wait five or ten 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 little dent in the universe. We are aware that we are doing something significant. We're here at the beginning of it and we're able to shape how it grows.

Everyone here has a sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future. He is talking about having a mission bigger than himself, he's talking about having a mission bigger than Apple, he continues. Neither you or I made the clothes we wear. We don't make the food or grow the food we eat. We use a language that was developed by other people. We use another society's mathematics. Very rarely do we get a chance to put something back into that pool. I think we have that opportunity now. And no, we don't know where it will lead. Remember, he repeats that over and again. We just know there's something much bigger than any of us here. There is one of my favorite

quotes really should print this quote out and hang it on the wall. Because this is the quote that came to mind when I read this section, it says, a human life by its very nature has to be devoted to something or other to a glorious or humble enterprise, an illustrious or obscure destiny. This is a strange but inexorable condition of things. And so then he's asked the question, you're competing directly with IBM, how are you going to be able to beat IBM in the business market?

And again, Jobs has a wonderful answer to this. The business market has several sectors. Rather than just thinking of the Fortune 500, which is where IBM is strongest, I like to think of the Fortune 5 million or the Fortune 14 million. There are 14 million small businesses in this country. I think that the vast group of people who need to be computerized includes that large

number of medium and small businesses. We are going to try to be able to bring some meaningful solutions to them. How? He's asked. Our approach is to think of them not as businesses, but as collections of people. And then we see another demonstration of one of his gifts. He immediately places, this is just an excellent way to place his work in historical perspective

and then tie it back to why you should buy his product and not IBM's because at the time he was being criticized, it's like, why aren't you making apples? This should just be one universal system for computers. You're now splitting this because they should all just be compatible with IBM. That was the basic criticism of what's going on at this point in Apple's history. It says, one of the experts in the field says that for this industry to really flourish and to benefit the consumer, one standard has to prevail. Jobs. That is simply untrue. Insisting that we need one standard now is like

saying that we needed one standard for an automobile in 1920. There would have been no innovations such as the automatic transmission, power steering, and independent suspension if they believe that. The last thing we want to do is freeze technology. With computers, Macintosh is revolutionary. There is no question that Macintosh technology is superior to IBM's. There is a clear need for an alternative to IBM. And then he continues the attack. IBM is full of business people. They don't actually care.

They're number crunchers. They just want to make money. He says, we are a team of missionaries. We love what we're doing. The product vision that drives this company. We think that computers are the most remarkable tools that humankind has ever come up with. And we think that people are basically tool users. So we can just get lots and lots of computers to lots and lots of people, it will make some qualitative difference

in the world. What we want to do at Apple is make computers into appliances and get them to tens of millions of people. That is simply what we want to do. And he sees this as a war, as two very different competing philosophies on shaping the personal computer market. Now you can't get everything right. It's talking about, okay, this is just gonna be a fight between IBM and Apple. No one else is to get to the scale to make computers. He says, I think the scale of the business has gotten large enough, so it's going to be very difficult for anyone to successfully launch into anything new. So he's asked no

more billion dollar companies hatched in garages for making computers that is jobs goes no, I'm afraid not in computers. Listen, you can't get everything right. You and I know this because we just talked about this few weeks ago, Michael Dell's excellent, excellent, excellent autobiography. Dell launched the year before, not in a garage, but in a dorm room. So then he goes back to the computers

that he's working on right now. He says, we wanted to make sure it was great because it may be the last chance that any of us get to make a clean break. He was very intent, in fact, about shaping the industry about playing a role about putting forth what how he feels these things should work, how they should be designed. There's another thing that in addition to rereading and taking notes on this article, there's this if you want

to resource an excellent resource on Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs widow made this thing called a Steve Jobs archiveive and it's just online. You can read it. There's videos. They created a whole book. Everything's for free. And there's a great talk on that website where I think the year after this interview, Steve goes to the Aspen Design Festival and he gives a talk.

He says something's very similar that's in this interview that the market is demanding personal computers, that the market will be satisfied and will be filled no matter what. The market's pull's so strong. And so the machines, even if the machines are inferior and ugly, the market will demand, like they will be bought, they will be created. And he goes to the Aspen Design Festival to ask for help.

He's like, I want to make these beautifully, easy to use, beautiful to look at, beautiful to use, easy to use. And he says we have the opportunity to shape the direction of entire industry. And I think it's very similar to what he's saying in this interview. We wanted to make sure it was great because it may be the last chance that any of us get to make a clean break. So then he goes into some formative experiences he had when he was a young man. How influential were your parents in your interest in computers? They encouraged my interest. My father was a machinist,

and he was sort of a genius with his hands. He can fix anything and make it work and take any mechanical thing apart and get it back together. That was my first glimpse of this. I started to gravitate more towards electronics, and he used to get me things I could take apart and put back together.

He was transferred to Palo Alto when I was five. That is how I wound up growing up in the valley. That circumstance was beyond his control. The fact that when he was five years old, he grows up, he lives in Palo Alto in the valley, that changes the trajectory of his life. And he knows that because he knows the history of the area. And he starts talking about some of the important things he learned from studying this. Before World War Two, two Stanford graduates named Bill Hewlett and David Packard created a very innovative electronics company, Hewlett Packard. Then the transistor

was invented in 1948 by Bell Telephone Laboratories. One of the three co-inventors of the transistor, William Shockley, decided to return to his hometown of Palo Alto to start a little company called Shockley Labs. He brought with him about a dozen of the best and brightest physicists and chemists of his day. Little by little, people started breaking off and forming competitive companies, like those flowers or weeds that scatter seeds in hundreds of directions when you blow on them. And that's why the valley is here today. The follow up question to that is what was your introduction to computers? A neighbor down the block named Larry Lang was an engineer at Hewlett Packard. He spent a ton of time with me, teaching me stuff.

The first computer I ever saw was at Hewlett Packard. They used to invite maybe 10 of us down every Tuesday night and give us lectures and let us work with the computer. I was maybe 12 years old the first time. I remember that night. They showed us one of their new desktop computers and let us play on it. I wanted one badly. And he's asked why? Like, did you have a sense of its potential?

It wasn't anything like that. I just thought they were neat. I just wanted to mess around on one. And then there's a famous story that jobs actually went and got a job, a summer job at Hewlett Packard when he was like 12 or 13, they're like, well, how did this happen? And job says when I was 12 or 13, I wanted to build something and I needed some parts. So I picked up the phone and I called Bill Hewlett.

He was listed in the Palo Alto phone book. He answered the phone and he was real nice. He chatted with me for like 20 minutes. He didn't know me at all, but he ended up giving me some parts and he got me a job that summer working on the Hewlett-Packard line, assembling frequency counters. And then he continues to recount some events

from his early life. He does say something here that was really interesting. I've heard him talk about this in other interviews. He believed the fact that he had a broad set of life experiences that actually made him make better products. In fact, that was one of his criticisms of Bill Gates, the fact that he thought Microsoft made unbelievably ugly and just not well-designed products.

And he thought that because Bill Gates lived a very narrow life where Steve had a much broader, in Steve's opinion, had a much broader set of experiences and he talks about this. He's high school college age around this time. I wasn't completely in any one world for too long. There was so much going on between my sophomore and junior years I got stoned for the first time. I discovered Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, I read Moby Dick and I went back and started taking creative writing classes. By the time I was a senior, I'd gotten permission to spend about half my time at Stanford taking classes.

California has a sense of experimentation and a sense of openness. Openness to new possibilities. And so then Steve starts talking about the fact that when he was a teenager, he built this friendship with Steve Wozniak. I think Wozniak was about five years older, he's really gifted engineer. And Wozniak would take him to this thing called homebrew computer club, where these computer hobbyists would meet, they would compare notes, they would share how the stuff that they're building. And Jobs made this observation, the clubs are based

around a computer kit called the Altair. It was so amazing to all of us that someone had actually come up with a way to build a computer. You could own yourself that had never been possible. Remember when we were in high school, neither of us had access to computer mainframe. We had to drive somewhere and have some large company take a benevolent attitude towards us and let us use the computer.

But now for the first time you could actually buy a computer. That is the holy shit moment. That's going to lead to the founding of Apple. Holy shit. You can actually own your own computer. And so he talks about Wozniak and what he built. He ended up buying a microprocessor and hooking it up to a terminal and made what was to become the Apple One. Woz and I laid out the circuit board ourselves.

That was basically it. Follow up question. The idea was to just do it? Jobs? Yes, sure. And to be able to show it off to your friends. So then he's asked what triggered the next step of manufacturing and selling them to make money. A guy who started one of the first computer stores told us that he could sell them if we could make them. It had not dawn on us until then. The Apple One was built for hobbyists. We sold only about 150 of them ever. It wasn't that big a deal, but we made about $95,000. And I started to see it as a business

besides just something to do. There's another interview that Jobs does in his last years when he's building Next in between, you you know leaving Apple and coming back and I saved this quote and I reread the quote all the time and I think it's a perfect illustration of where we're on this story That is really important and it just really demonstrates this idea of asking for help as a superpower He says I've never found anybody that didn't want to help me if I asked him for help I called up Bill Hewlett when I was 12 years old. He answered the phone himself I told him I wanted to build a frequency counter and asked him if he had any spare parts I could have. He laughed and laughed. He gave me the parts. He gave me a summer job. I have never found anyone who said no or hung up the phone. I just asked. Most people never

pick up the phone and call and that is what separates the people who do things versus the people who just dream about them. You have to act. And so when Steve Jobs is telling the story of this part of his life, remember he's a 29 year old man. He's only looking, it's a decade, but he's only looking back 10 years. He remembers what it was like. I don't know how to run a company.

I don't know how to raise money. I don't know how to recruit people. I don't know how to get parts. I don't know how to sell anything. Here's a question. Were you both thinking how big it could get and how computers would be able to change the world? Steve's answer, no, neither of us had any idea that this would go anywhere.

I get asked a lot. People are always like, hey, out of all the people that you study, do they know how big things would get? The answer I have is almost exactly like the one that Steve Jobs just gave. No, neither of us had any idea that this would go anywhere. And if you look at the numbers and the immediate success, how could you possibly expect him to be able to predict this? Steve says, we did about $200,000

when our business was in the garage. That was 1976. In 1977, we did 7 million. And I thought that was phenomenal. And in 78, we did 17 million. In 79, we did 47 million. In 1980, we did 117 million. In 81, we did 335 million.

In 82, we did 583 million. Last year, we did 985 million, and this year will be 1.5 billion. And then he spends a bunch of time talking about what a computer is today, what it can do, how to think about it. But this is one of my favorite sections, because he has a deep understanding,

maybe better than almost anybody else at this point in his industry at this time in history. And so from there, if you just thought about it a lot, you kind of have an idea, it's like, okay, well, I can kind of see the horizon of what might be possible. So he's asked, where do you see computers and software going in the future? He says, thus far, we've been pretty much using

our computers as good servants. We ask them to do something, we ask them to do some operation like a spreadsheet, we ask them to take all of our keystrokes and make a letter out of them. And they do that pretty well. And you'll see more and more perfection of that computer as servant. But the next thing is going to be computer as guide or agent. And what that means is that it's going to do more in terms of anticipating what we want and doing it for us, noticing connections and patterns in what we do.

Computers will take certain actions and then inform us after the fact. And to be able to take advantage of that as a company, he knew. Those ideas are highly likely to come from people outside the industry, people not working in Apple for 10 or 15 years, people that have a different way of looking at things. And it's so hard for an established successful company to have the patience and build the culture to have these small and fragile ideas grow into the next big thing. And he talks about that. I think that's one of Apple's challenges. When two young people walk in here with the next thing, are we gonna embrace it and say this is fantastic?

Are we gonna try to explain it away? And then I absolutely love what he says here. He's asked a question, and thinking about your success, did you ever get to the point where you slapped your head and asked yourself what was happening? He says, I used to think about selling a million computers a year,

but it was just a thought. When it actually happens, it's a totally different thing. So it was a holy shit. This is actually coming true. This does not feel like overnight for me. Next year will be my 10th year. I've never done anything longer than a year in my life. Six months for me was a long time when we started Apple. So this has been my life since I've been sort of a free willed adult. Each year has been so robust with problems and successes and learning experiences and human experiences that a year is a lifetime at Apple.

So this has been 10 lifetimes. So then he's asked the question, do you know what you wanna do with the rest of this lifetime? And keep in mind, we know how this ends Steve when he was 29 years old did not know that unfortunately. He only had 25 years left He only had 25 years left of life from this point And so he says there's an old Hindu saying that comes to mind for the first 30 years of your life You make your habits for the last 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.

As I'm going to be 30 in February, the thought has crossed my mind. And I'm not sure. I'll always stay connected with Apple. I hope that throughout my life, I'll sort of have the thread of my life and the thread of Apple weave in and out of each other, like a tapestry. There may be a few years when I'm not here. But I'll always come back. And that is where I'll leave it highly, highly recommend. Like I said before, I probably read this

interview 10 times. I'll leave a link you should read the entire thing. I'll also leave my highlights. I probably made I don't know like 20 highlights. If you want to read through my highlights as well, leave them in the show notes and they'll be available at founders podcast.com. I really like doing these rare interview episodes. So if you're looking for something else and you haven't listened to them yet, highly recommend you listen to episode 374 rare Jeff Bezos interview and 355 rare

Bernard O'Kno interview. And that is 390 books down 1000 to go and I'll talk to you again soon. There's something in this interview that Steve Jobs said that wasn't in the episode you just heard but is related to this tool that I built and he talks about what's really incredible about a book is that you can read what Aristotle wrote. You can read exactly what Aristotle wrote. This is all Steve Jobs words by the way. That direct transmission of thoughts and ideas is one of the key building blocks of why we are where we are as a society but the problem with the book is that you can't ask Aristotle a question. I think one of the potential of the computer is somehow to capture the

fundamental underlying principles of an experience. So I would consider this what me and you are doing at Founders. We're trying to capture the fundamental underlying principles of how these big people built their businesses and their lives. Back to what Job said, what computer programming can do is to capture the underlying principles, the underlying essence, and then facilitate thousands of experiences based on that underlying principle. And he continues, what if we could capture Aristotle's worldview, the underlying principles of his worldview, then you could eventually ask Aristotle a question. Someday we can capture an Aristotle or an Einstein or

an Edwin Land. Imagine what that could be like for us. That is the end of Steve Jobs quote. And when I read that, that sounds a lot like this tool that I built for myself. Founders Notes has all of my notes and highlights for every single book that I've read for the podcast. Almost, you know, I'm going to hit 400 biographies and autobiographies read soon. And all of the transcripts for every episode that I've ever made.

And, you know, that's going to be almost 400 episodes as well. So then I put everything into this giant searchable database, and then I built an AI assistant on top of that, that it lives in Founders Notes that I call Sage. And Sage answers questions for me based on all those notes, all those highlights and all those transcripts. So asking Sage a question is like asking me a question, but Sage has better memory and makes connections that I can't even make sometimes.

In fact, many times when my friends will call me or text me and they'll ask me something about something they heard on the podcast or about a person that I've covered in the past or a problem that they have in their business and they ask like how would history, some of history's greatest entrepreneurs handle that, I now tell them just to ask Sage.

So if you want access to this tool, the same, the very same tool that I use, in fact that the version of Sage and Founders Notice that you see is the very same tool that I use. In fact, that the version of Sage and Founders Notes that you see is the exact same version that I see is the same version that I use myself. You'll hear me reference it on many podcasts all the time where I'm like, Oh, I was reading something book. Then I asked Sage to elaborate on this.

And then I just read from Sage into the podcast. So if you want access to the exact same tool that I use, you can go to foundersnotes.com and subscribe. Founders Notes will give you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. I highly recommend that you use it to supplement the decisions that you make in your work. You can get access by going to foundersnotes.com that is founders with an S just like the podcast. Thank you very much for the extra support and thank you very much for listening and

I'll talk to you again soon.