Copyright © 2015 by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schlender, Brent.
Becoming Steve Jobs: the evolution of a reckless upstart into a visionary leader / Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. —First edition.
pages cm
1. Jobs, Steve, 1955–2011. 2. Computer engineers—United States—Biography. 3. Businesspeople—United States—Biography. 4. Apple Computer, Inc.—Management. 5. Leadership. I. Tetzeli, Rick. II. Title.
QA76.2.J63S35 2015
338.7′6100416092—dc23
[B] 2014031660
ISBN 978-0-385-34740-2
Ebook ISBN 978-0-385-34741-9
Jacket design by Michael Nagin
Jacket photograph: Doug Menuez/Contour by Getty from Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985–2000
v3.1
For Lorna, my lifesaver, many times over
—BS
For Mari, forever
“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.”
—RT
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
AUTHORS’ NOTE
PROLOGUE
Chapter 1
Steve Jobs in the Garden of Allah
Chapter 2
“I Didn’t Want to Be a Businessman”
Chapter 3
Breakthrough and Breakdown
Chapter 4
What’s Next?
Chapter 5
A Side Bet
Photo Insert 1
Chapter 6
Bill Gates Pays a Visit
Chapter 7
Luck
Chapter 8
Bozos, Bastards, and Keepers
Chapter 9
Maybe They Had to Be Crazy
Chapter 10
Following Your Nose
Photo Insert 2
Chapter 11
Do Your Level Best
Chapter 12
Two Decisions
Chapter 13
Stanford
Chapter 14
A Safe Haven for Pixar
Chapter 15
The Whole Widget
Chapter 16
Blind Spots, Grudges, and Sharp Elbows
Chapter 17
“Just Tell Them I’m Being an Asshole”
SOURCE NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Authors’ Note
The reporting and writing of this book is the work of two authors. The two of us have worked together for years, going back to our time together at Fortune magazine. For Becoming Steve Jobs, we spent three years researching, interviewing, reporting, writing, and editing together. That said, in the narrative you’re about to read, we decided, for convenience’s sake, to use the first-person singular throughout to refer to Brent. Brent is the one who had a relationship of almost a quarter century with Steve Jobs, so using the word I made it much easier to tell our story.
Prologue
“You’re new here, aren’t you?” Those were his first words to me. (His last, twenty-five years later, would be “I’m sorry.”) Already he had turned the tables on me. After all, I was the reporter. The one who was supposed to be asking the questions.
I had been warned about the unique challenges of interviewing Steve Jobs. The night before, over beers, my new colleagues at the San Francisco bureau of the Wall Street Journal had told me to bring a flak jacket to this first meeting. One of them said, only half jokingly, that interviewing Jobs was often more combat than questioning. It was April 1986, and Jobs was already a Journal legend. Bureau lore had it that he had dressed down another Journal reporter by posing this straightforward question: “Do you understand anything at all, anything at all about what we’re discussing?”
I’d had plenty of experience with real flak jackets during my years reporting in Central America in the early 1980s. I’d spent much of that time in El Salvador and Nicaragua, where I’d interviewed everyone from truck drivers motoring through war zones, to American military advisers in the jungle, to Contra commandantes in their hideouts, to presidents in their palaces. On other assignments I’d met with obstreperous billionaires like T. Boone Pickens and H. Ross Perot and Li Ka-shing, with Nobel Prize winners like Jack Kilby, with rock stars and movie idols, renegade polygamists, and even the grandmothers of would-be assassins. I wasn’t easily intimidated. Yet for the full twenty-minute drive from my home in San Mateo, California, to the headquarters of NeXT Computer in Palo Alto, I brooded and fretted about how best to interview Jobs.
Part of my unease came from the fact that, for the first time in my experience as a journalist, I would be calling on a prominent business leader who was younger than I. I was thirty-two years old; Jobs was thirty-one and already a global celebrity, hailed, along with Bill Gates, for having invented the personal computer industry. Long before Internet mania started churning out wunderkinds of the week, Jobs was technology’s original superstar, the real deal with an astounding, substantial record. The circuit boards he and Steve Wozniak had assembled in a garage in Los Altos had spawned a billion-dollar company. The personal computer seemed to have unlimited potential, and as the cofounder of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs had been the face of all those possibilities. But then, in September of 1985, he had resigned under pressure, shortly after telling the company’s board of directors that he was courting some key Apple employees to join him in a new venture to build computer “workstations.” The fascinated media had thoroughly dissected his departure, with both Fortune and Newsweek putting the ignominious saga on their covers.
In the six months since, the details of his new startup had been kept hush-hush, in part because Apple had filed lawsuits trying to prevent Jobs from hiring away its employees. But Apple had finally dropped those suits. And now, according to the publicist from Jobs’s PR agency who called my boss at the Journal, Steve was willing to do a handful of interviews with major business publications. He was ready to start the public fan-dance that would begin to reveal in detail what exactly NeXT was up to. I was thoroughly fascinated, and equally wary; I didn’t want to get taken in by the notoriously charismatic Mr. Jobs.