I’m a long-term kind of person.
Fortunately, my training has been in doing things that
take a long time. You know? I was at Apple 10 years. I would have
preferred to be there the rest of my life. So I’m a long-term kind of
person.
I have been trained to think in units of time that are
measured in several years. With what I’ve chosen to do with my life, you
know, even a small thing takes a few years. To do anything of magnitude takes at least five years, more likely seven or eight. Rightfully or wrongfully, that’s how I think.
I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs”
when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell
or go public, so they can cash in and move on.
I’m a tool builder. That’s how I think of myself. I want
to build really good tools that I know in my gut and my heart will be
valuable. And then, whatever happens, is… you can’t really predict
exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we’re
going. And that’s about as close as you can get. Then you just stand
back and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their
own.
If you are willing to work hard and ask lots of questions, you can learn business pretty fast.
On starting Apple with Steve Wozniak: We worked hard, and
in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a 2
billion company with over 4000 employees.
I remember many late nights coming out of the Mac
building when I would have the most incredibly powerful feelings about
my life.
Steve Jobs Sayings On Startups
We used to dream about this stuff. Now we get to build it. It’s pretty great.
The smallest company in the world can look as large as the largest company on the web.
I think this is the start of something really big. Sometimes that first step is the hardest one, and we’ve just taken it.
Another priority was to make Apple more entrepreneurial
and startup-like. So we immediately reorganized, drastically narrowed
the product line, and changed compensation for senior managers so they
get a lot of stock but no cash bonuses. The upshot is that the place
feels more like a young company.
But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this
radical new light – that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t
have to change the world to be important.
One of the keys to Apple is Apple’s an incredibly
collaborative company. You know how many committees we have at Apple?
Zero. We have no committees. We are organized like a start-up. One
person’s in charge of iPhone OS software, one person’s in charge of Mac
hardware, one person’s in charge of iPhone hardware engineering, another
person’s in charge of worldwide marketing, another person’s in charge
of operations. We are organized like a startup. We are the biggest
startup on the planet.
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 goes.
Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.
Most of the time, we’re taking things. Neither you nor I
made the clothes we wear; we don’t make the food or grow the foods 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.
No, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.
There’s something much bigger than any of us here.
We’re trying to use the swiftness and creativity in a
younger-style company, and yet bring to bear the tremendous resources of
a company the size of Apple to do large projects that you could never
handle at a startup.
It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re
really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested
in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don’t really want to build
a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if
you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.
Steve Jobs Sayings On Teamwork
The best ideas have to win.
My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys
who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They
balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the
parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never
done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.
We have wonderful arguments. […] If you want to hire
great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them
make a lot of decisions and you have to, you have to be run by ideas,
not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise, good people don’t
stay.
When you work with somebody that close and you go through
experiences like the ones we went through, there’s a bond in life.
Whatever hassles you have, there is a bond. And even though he may not
be your best friend as time goes on, there’s still something that
transcends even friendship, in a way.
I contribute ideas, sure. Why would I be there if I didn’t?
Steve Jobs Sayings On Vision
We are gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make ‘me-too’ products. For us, it’s always the next dream.
If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.
When we create stuff, we do it because we listen to
customers, get their inputs and also throw in what we’d like to see,
too. We cook up new products. You never really know if people will love
them as much as you do.
There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. I skate
to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. And we’ve
always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very, very beginning.
Part 1. There needs to be someone who is the keeper and
reiterator of the vision. […] A lot of times, when you have to walk a
thousand miles and you take the first step, it looks like a long way,
and it really helps if there’s someone there saying, “Well we’re one
step closer. The goal definitely exists; it’s not just a mirage out
there”.
Part 2. So in a thousand and one little, and sometimes larger ways, the vision needs to be reiterated. I do that a lot.
When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more
room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get
it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look
backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.
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.
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.
Neither of us had any idea that this would go anywhere.
Woz is motivated by figuring things out. He concentrated more on the
engineering and proceeded to do one of his most brilliant pieces of
work, which was the disk drive, another key engineering feat that made
the Apple II a possibility. I was trying to build the company, trying to
find out what a company was. I don’t think it would have happened
without Woz and I don’t think it would have happened without me.
Even a great brand needs investment and caring if it’s
going to retain its relevance and vitality and the Apple brand has
clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years, and we
need to bring it back. The way to do that is not to talk about speed
and fees, it’s not to talk about bits and mega-hertz, it’s not to talk
about why we are better than Windows.
The best example of all and one of the greatest jobs of
marketing that the universe has ever seen, is Nike. Remember, Nike sells
a commodity. They sell shoes. And yet, when you think of Nike, you feel
something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know,
they don’t ever talk about the product. They don’t ever tell you about
their air soles.
What does Nike do in their advertising? They honor great
athletes, and they honor great athletics. That’s who they are, that’s
what they are about.
More important than building a product, we are in the
process of architecting a company that will hopefully be much more
incredible, the total will be much more incredible than the sum of its
parts.
Steve Jobs Lines On Ambition And Changing The World
Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?
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.
I’ll tell you what our goal is: our goal is to make the
best personal computers in the world and to make products we are proud
to sell and recommend to our family and friends, and, we want to do that
at the lowest price we can.
None of the really bright people I knew in college went
into politics. They all sensed that, in terms of making a change in the
world, politics wasn’t the place to be in the late Sixties and
Seventies. All of them are in business now, which is funny, because they
were the same people who trekked off to India or who tried in one way
or another to find some sort of truth about life.
Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world.
We have a major opportunity to influence where Apple is
going. As every day passes, the work fifty people are doing here is
going to send a giant ripple through the universe. I am 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.
We attract a different kind 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 a little over his head
and make a little dent in the universe.
Steve Jobs Lines On Management And Leadership
My job is to say when something sucks rather than sugarcoat it.
What I’m best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them.
What I do all day, is meet with teams of people, and work
on ideas, and solve problems, to make new products, to make new
marketing programs, whatever it is.
The greatest people are self-managing – they don’t need
to be managed. Once they know what to do, they’ll go figure out how to
do it. What they need is a common vision. And that’s what leadership is:
[h]aving a vision; being able to articulate that so the people around
you can understand it; and getting a consensus on a common vision.
Somebody once told me, “Manage the top line, and the
bottom line will follow.” What’s the top line? It’s things like, why are
we doing this in the first place? What’s our strategy? What are
customers saying? How responsive are we? Do we have the best products
and the best people? Those are the kind of questions you have to focus
on.
Don’t get hung up on who owns the idea. Pick the best one, and let’s go.
We’ve got 25,000 people at Apple. About 10,000 of them
are in the stores. And my job is to work with sort of the top 100
people, that’s what I do. That doesn’t mean they’re all vice presidents.
Some of them are just key individual contributors.
When a good idea comes, you know, part of my job is to
move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking
about it, argue with people about it, get ideas moving among that group
of 100 people, get different people together to explore different
aspects of it quietly, and, you know – just explore things.
My job is to create a space for them.
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 a passion about
the products.
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.
My job is not to be easy on people. My job is to make them better.
My job is to pull things together from different parts of
the company and clear the ways and get the resources for the key
projects. And to take these great people we have and to push them and
make them even better, coming up with more aggressive visions of how it
could be.
On why he is brutal to most colleagues: I’m brutally
honest, because the price of admission to being in the room with me is I
get to tell you your full of shit if you’re full of shit, and you get
to say to me I’m full of shit, and we have some rip-roaring fights. And
that keeps the B players, the bozos, from larding the organization, only
the A players survive. And the people who do survive, say, ‘Yeah, he
was rough.’ They say things even worse than ‘He cut in line in front of
me,’ but they say, ‘This was the greatest ride I’ve ever had, and I
would not give it up for anything.’
On meetings: We don’t have a lot of process at Apple, but that’s one of the few things we do just to all stay on the same page.
Fact: Steve was named one of America’s toughest bosses in 1993.
Steve Jobs Lines On Hiring
It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.
I want to see what people are like under pressure.
If they fall in love with Apple, everything else will
take care of itself. They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not
what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or anybody else.
We hire people who want to make the best things in the
world. You’d be surprised how hard people work over around here. They
work nights and weekends, sometimes not seeing their families for a
while. Sometimes people work through Christmas to make sure the tooling
is just right at some factory in some corner of the world so our product
comes out the best it can be. People care so much, and it shows.
They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, are they going to fall in love with Apple?
All we are is our ideas or people. That’s what keeps us
going to work in the morning, to hang around these great bright people.
I’ve always thought that recruiting is the heart and soul of what we do.
The secret of my success is that we have gone to
exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world. And when
you’re in a field where the dynamic range is 25 to 1, boy, does it pay
off.
Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack.
We do it ourselves and we spend a lot of time at it. I’ve
participated in the hiring of maybe 5,000+ people in my life. So I take
it very seriously.
You can’t know enough in a one-hour interview. So, in the
end, it’s ultimately based on your gut. How do I feel about this
person? What are they like when they’re challenged? Why are they here? I
ask everybody that: ‘Why are you here?’ The answers themselves are not
what you’re looking for. It’s the meta-data.
My number one job here at Apple is to make sure that the top 100 people are A+ players. And everything else will take care of itself.
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 exactly been 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 is never fun.
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 bomb.
That really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did you work on
that?…”.
I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief, and pride in what they did.
Steve Jobs Lines On Money
Well, they’re just yardsticks, you know.
You should never start a company with the goal of getting
rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a
company that will last.
I think money is a wonderful thing because it enables you
to do things, it enables you to invest in ideas that don’t have a
short-term payback and things like that.
It’s very interesting, I was worth about over a million
dollars when I was 23 and over 10 million when I was 24 and over a
hundred million when I was 25 and it wasn’t that important because I
never did it for the money.
But especially at that point in my life it was not the
most important thing, the most important thing was the company, the
people, the products we were making, what we were going to enable people
to do with these products so I didn’t think about it a great deal, and I
never sold any stock, just really believe that the company would do
very well over the long term.
Bottom line is, I didn’t return to Apple to make a fortune. I’ve been very lucky in my life and already have one.
When I was 25, my net worth was $100 million or so. I
decided then that I wasn’t going to let it ruin my life. There’s no way
you could ever spend it all, and I don’t view wealth as something that
validates my intelligence.
I’m not going to let it ruin my life. Isn’t it kind of
funny? You know, my main reaction to this money thing is that it’s
humorous, all the attention to it, because it’s hardly the most
insightful or valuable thing that’s happened to me in the past ten
years.
It makes me feel old, sometimes, when I speak at a campus
and I find that what students are most in awe of is the fact that I’m a
millionaire.
I still don’t understand it. It’s a large responsibility to have more than you can spend in your lifetime, and I feel I have to spend it.
If you die, you certainly don’t want to leave a large amount to your
children. It will just ruin their lives. And if you die without kids, it
will all go to the Government. Almost everyone would think that he
could invest the money back into humanity in a much more astute way than
the Government could. The challenges are to figure out how to live with
it and to reinvest it back into the world, which means either giving it
away or using it to express your concerns or values.
It was giant! We did about $200,000 when our business was
in the garage, in 1976. In 1977, about $7,000,000 in business. I mean,
it was phenomenal! And in 1978, we did $17,000,000. In 1979, we did
$47,000,000. That’s when we all really sensed that this was just going
through the rafters. In 1980, we did $117,000,000. In 1981, we did
$335,000,000. In 1982, we did $583,000,000. In 1983, we did
$985,000,000, I think. This year, it will be a billion and a half.
Well, they’re just yardsticks, you know. The neatest
thing was, by 1979, I was able to walk into classrooms that had 15 Apple
computers and see the kids using them. And those are the kinds of
things that are really the milestones.
None of those people care about the money. I mean, a lot
of them made a lot of money, but they don’t really care. Their
lifestyles haven’t particularly changed. It was the chance to actually
try something, to fail, to succeed, to grow.
Steve Jobs Lines On Marketing
To me, marketing is about values.
It’s a very complicated world. It’s a very noisy world.
And we not gonna get a chance to get people to remember much about us.
No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to
know about us.
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.
You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try
to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want
something new.
You saw the 1984 commercial. 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 now
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. It’s
called Macintosh and it is so much better.
We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. We just want to make great products.
5 great quotes on marketing:
Best way to sell something – don’t sell anything. Earn the awareness, respect, & trust of those who might buy. Rand Fishkin
The culture is your brand. Tony Hsieh
Make your marketing so useful people would pay you for it. Jay Baer
The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. Tom Fishburne
The consumer is not a moron; she is your wife. David Ogilvy
Fact 1: ‘Empathy, Focus, and Impute‘. Those were the 3 goals of the initial ‘Apple Marketing Philosophy‘ released in 1977.
Steve Jobs Words On Technology
We have no idea how far it’s going to go.
Humans are tool builders. We create things to amplify
ourselves. The computer will rank at the top -it’s the most awesome tool
ever.
What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that
we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our
minds.
We think basically you watch television to turn your
brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your
brain on.
I think everybody in this country should learn how to
program a computer, should learn a computer language because it teaches
you how to think.
Talking about bicycles: Human are tool builders, and we
build tools that can dramatically amplify our innate human abilities. We
actually ran an ad like this early at Apple that the personal computer
is the bicycle of the mind and I believe that with every bone in my body
that all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near,
if not at the top, as history unfolds and we look back.
It is the most awesome tool that we ever invented (the
computer). And I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place
in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time historically where this
invention has taken form.
A computer is the most incredible tool we’ve ever seen.
It can be a writing tool, a communications 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.
Right now, computers make our lives easier. They do work
for us in fractions of a second that would take us hours. They increase
the quality of life, some of that by simply automating drudgery and some
of that by broadening our possibilities. As things progress, they’ll be
doing more and more for us.
These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch
people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect
and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get
medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can
profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.
I think it’s brought the world a lot closer together, and
will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are
unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of
technology that I’ve ever seen is called television – but then, again,
television, at its best, is magnificent.
On how will the Web impact our society: We live in an
information economy, but I don’t believe we live in an information
society. People are thinking less than they used to. It’s primarily
because of television. People are reading less and they’re certainly
thinking less.
I don’t see most people using the Web to get more information. We’re already in information overload. No matter how much information the Web can dish out, most people get far more information than they can assimilate anyway.
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, asking us if this is some sort of generic thing
we’d like to do regularly, so that we’re going to have, as an example,
the concept of triggers.
We’re going to be able to ask our computers to monitor
things for us, and when certain conditions happen, are triggered, the
computers will take certain actions and inform us after the fact.
The point is that tools are always going to be used for
certain things we don’t find personally pleasing. And it’s ultimately
the wisdom of people, not the tools themselves, that is going to
determine whether or not these things are used in positive, productive
ways.
I do feel there is another way we have an effect on society besides our computers.
They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home.
Steve Jobs Words On Apple
One of the things that made Apple great was that, in the early days, it was built from the heart.
And boy, have we patented it. (First announcement of the iPhone, Macworld 2006)
The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations. The world doesn’t need another Dell or Compaq.
You know, everybody has a cell phone, but I don’t know
one person who likes their cell phone. I want to make a phone that
people love.
What if Apple didn’t exist? Think about it. Time wouldn’t
get published next week. Some 70% of the newspaper in the U.S. wouldn’t
publish tomorrow morning. Some 60% of the kids wouldn’t have computers;
64% of the teachers wouldn’t have computers. More than half the
Websites created on Macs wouldn’t exist. So there’s something worth
saving here. See?
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 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 that make a difference, and not
just to get a job done.
Apple’s the only company left in this industry that
designs the whole widget. Hardware, software, developer relations,
marketing.
Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.
It’s very fortunate if you can work on just one of these in your
career. Apple’s been very fortunate in that it’s introduced a few of
these.
What we want to do is make a leapfrog product that is way
smarter than any mobile device has ever been, and super-easy to use.
This is what iPhone is. OK? So, we’re going to reinvent the phone.
I had this idea of being able to get rid of the keyboard,
type on a multi-touch glass display, and I asked our folks, “Could we
come up with a multi-touch display?
We designed iMac to deliver the things consumers care about most: the excitement of the Internet and the simplicity of the Mac.
It’s not about charisma and personality, it’s about
results and products and those very bedrock things that are why people
at Apple and outside of Apple are getting more excited about the company
and what Apple stands for and what its potential is to contribute to
the industry.
Talking about the iPod Nano: We’re in uncharted territory. We’ve never sold this many of anything before.
