Steve Jobs

When an Apple software partner pushed back on his dismissal of market research, Steve Jobs answered: "They don't know what they want until I tell them what they want." To the same man he put the point another way: "The only market that matters to you is me. I'm paying the bills. I am your market."¹

Jobs was the co-founder and longtime chief executive of Apple, the American company behind the Macintosh computer, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad. He also owned and ran Pixar, the computer animation studio behind Toy Story. Jobs paired an uncompromising sense of product taste with an ability to turn engineering work by others into commercial products reaching hundreds of millions of people.

Background

Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955, and placed for adoption at birth. His biological mother had asked that he be adopted by college-educated parents; she agreed to Paul and Clara Jobs, a machinist and an accountant, only after they promised he would attend college. The family moved to Mountain View, California, into a tract house built by developer Eichler, whose model of selling clean, modern design to ordinary buyers at low cost stayed with Jobs into adulthood. Paul Jobs taught his son carpentry and electronics at a garage workbench; his lesson that the unseen back of a fence should be finished as carefully as the front became a phrase, "you'd know," Jobs cited for the rest of his life. At twelve he telephoned HP co-founder Bill Hewlett for spare parts, which led to a summer assembly-line job.² In 1972 he enrolled at Reed College in Oregon, dropped out within a semester, and stayed on informally auditing classes, including a calligraphy course taught by a former Trappist monk. In 1974 he traveled to India seeking spiritual teachers and returned practicing Zen Buddhism, an influence he later cited on his taste for simplicity in design.

Getting started

Jobs met Steve Wozniak, an electronics hobbyist five years older than him, around 1971. Their first joint venture was building and selling "blue boxes," illegal devices that spoofed telephone tones to place free long-distance calls; Wozniak built them and Jobs sold roughly 200 units. Jobs later said that without the blue box there would have been no Apple, proof a small group with cheap parts and nerve could make a large institution do something it was never designed to do.² After Reed, Jobs took a technician job at Atari to help fund a return trip to India. Wozniak, meanwhile, had designed a computer for hobbyists and was sharing it for free at the Homebrew Computer Club. Jobs saw the design could be sold as an assembled product rather than a kit and pushed Wozniak to build and market it; Wozniak later said Jobs never wrote a line of code for that machine, but it never would have occurred to him alone to sell it. On April 1, 1976, they and a third partner, Ronald Wayne, signed a partnership founding Apple Computer in the Jobs family garage; Wayne sold his stake back for 800 dollars within two weeks. A local retailer's order for 50 assembled units gave Apple its first production run, and in January 1977 executive Mike Markkula invested 250,000 dollars, insisting on a formal business plan and marketing.²

What he built

Apple's early products, the Apple I and Apple II, established it as a maker of personal computers for a consumer and small-business market that had barely existed. The company went public in December 1980, making Jobs a paper multimillionaire in his mid-twenties. The 1984 Macintosh introduced a graphical, mouse-driven interface and multiple on-screen typefaces, features Jobs tied back to the Reed calligraphy class. A power struggle with CEO John Sculley and the board in 1985 stripped Jobs of operational responsibility; he resigned, founded the workstation maker NeXT, and in 1986 bought Lucasfilm's computer graphics division for about 10 million dollars, renaming it Pixar. Pixar spent years selling graphics hardware and short films before its 1995 feature Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated film, became a hit; Pixar's November IPO made Jobs, who held roughly 80 percent of the studio, a billionaire.² NeXT never reached mass-market scale, but its operating system became the technical foundation Apple lacked, and Apple bought NeXT for about 400 million dollars in December 1996, bringing Jobs back as an adviser; he became interim CEO in September 1997 and later dropped the "interim."² Over the following decade Apple released the iMac, the iPod paired with iTunes, the 2007 iPhone, and the 2010 iPad, each redefining an existing category. Weakened by pancreatic cancer diagnosed in 2003 and a 2009 liver transplant, Jobs took medical leave in January 2011, resigned as CEO that August, and died October 5, 2011, in Palo Alto, at 56.

How he operates

Jobs ran a daily discipline of naming a small number of priorities, typically three, treated as signal, discarding everything else as noise; associates described the standard as unforgiving of anyone who fell below it.¹ He rejected conventional market research, telling colleagues customers could not describe products that did not yet exist and that he served as his own proxy for the market. He extended his father's "you'd know" principle to manufacturing, insisting internal components and packaging be finished to a standard no customer would inspect, including requiring retail boxes cost more than standard cardboard so unboxing itself felt designed.¹ He also believed intuition formed outside narrow technical training, such as a calligraphy class taken with no plan to use it, could resurface years later as a defining product decision.

Where things stand

Apple, under successor Tim Cook, became the first company to reach a 1 trillion dollar valuation and has since far surpassed it, with the iPhone still its largest product line. Pixar, sold to Disney in 2006 in a deal that made Jobs Disney's largest individual shareholder, continues to operate as Disney's animation studio.² Jobs's Apple and Disney holdings remain with his widow, Laurene Powell Jobs.

Key facts

• Adopted at birth; his biological mother required college-educated parents, and Paul and Clara Jobs were approved only after promising he would attend college.
• The Reed College calligraphy class he audited in 1972-73 became, a decade later, the source of the Macintosh's multiple on-screen typefaces.
• Jobs and Wozniak's "blue box" telephone-hacking project, sold at roughly 150 dollars a unit, is the venture Jobs credited as Apple's direct precursor.
• Forced out of Apple in 1985, Jobs returned via Apple's 1996 acquisition of his company NeXT and became CEO again in 1997.
• Pixar's 1995 IPO, following Toy Story, made Jobs a billionaire from his roughly 80 percent stake in the studio.
• Jobs died in October 2011 at age 56, two months after resigning as Apple CEO, following years of treatment for pancreatic cancer.