TWO KEY IMPROVEMENTS to the Apple II sent its sales skyward. First, the company incorporated a floppy disk drive that made loading software much easier. Then, in 1979, VisiCalc became the very first massive software hit. VisiCalc was a relatively simple financial modeling spreadsheet, and its existence suddenly gave nongeeks a concrete reason to own a computer, as they realized how much time they could save handling accounting chores, managing inventory lists, and trying out business scenarios. Suddenly Apple enjoyed an unprecedented, meteoric rise. It manufactured computers that cost more than $1,300 a pop, so when unit sales quickly ramped up into the tens of thousands per month, Apple became the electronic equivalent of a gusher. Sales rose from $7.8 million in 1978 to $47 million in 1979 and all the way up to $117.9 million in 1980, the year of its initial public offering (IPO, in Wall Street parlance). No other company had ever grown that fast. The mainstream media began to take note, with publications like Esquire, Time, and BusinessWeek starting serious coverage. Inc. went so far as to put Jobs on its cover, with the hosanna of a headline “This Man Has Changed Business Forever.”
But the rosy picture obscured the many problems within Apple, problems that were inherent in the company’s motley mix of leaders.
Each of Steve’s informal outside mentors had been able to cleverly exploit his own idiosyncratic talents in a corporate setting. Edwin Land was a pioneer whose inventions were dismissed, and yet he’d created a great company by dint of pure stubbornness. Robert Noyce was charismatic and forward-thinking and had only been able to start Intel after leaving the shadow of the most imposing figure in semiconductor history, William Shockley. The systems that Andy Grove put in place were more complex and rigorous than anything Mike Scott had ever seen, and yet Grove had also been able to make his company one of the most creative places in Silicon Valley. And Regis McKenna became so adept at deftly navigating the constant shifts and tremors of Silicon Valley culture that he would wind up writing several books explaining how others could do the same. These were well-rounded, complicated, deep, and fascinating men. They were comfortable with change, and they lived where Steve wanted to live himself—at the intersection of technology and something that was more like the liberal arts. They were people who played the corporate game by rules of their own devising.
It’s impossible to say what would have happened next if Steve had had someone like these men as his boss at Apple. Maybe they would have been able to channel his bundle of contradictions to good purpose. But you don’t get to replay the experiment. What he had instead was Scotty and Markkula. And they, it would now become clear, could not control him. They could barely even channel his creative energy toward useful purposes. The encounter between young Steve Jobs and the broad, real world around him was about to become something more like a slow-motion collision. It would cost him friends, it would cost him his job, and it would leave him without the company he had created.
Chapter 3
Breakthrough and Breakdown
Every cliché is built on some truth. The cliché that Steve Jobs was half genius, half asshole is based largely on his actions during the nine years that constituted his first tenure at Apple. This is when his highs would shine most famously, and when his lows were reprehensible. It was the period when he most sought the limelight, and when he was most out of control. He developed followers and he created enemies. This is when his bundle of contradictory qualities unraveled, leaving him, and his company, at loose ends. These years provide a baseline for the rest of his career.
Steve’s personal life, which had been chaotic in the scattered, sloppy way of most twenty-somethings—especially those throwing themselves at a career without regard for sleep, social life, or family—spun out of control in 1978, when he denied the paternity of his own child. Chrisann Brennan, who had been his girlfriend for some time, gave birth to their daughter, Lisa, in May 1978. She was born in Oregon, at Robert Friedland’s orchard, and three days after her birth Steve flew north to be with her and Chrisann. But for months afterward, Steve denied he was Lisa’s father and refused to pay child support. He even resisted when a court-ordered paternity test established the likelihood that he was the father at 94.4 percent; it was as if the mere fact of his denial would negate the proof. When he finally starting paying child support of $385 a month, he continued to protest that he might well not be Lisa’s father. He saw her rarely, letting Chrisann raise Lisa on her own in a small house in Menlo Park.
It would take years for Steve to bring Lisa into his life in any significant way, and later he would repeatedly express deep regret over his behavior. He knew he had made a terrible mistake. The event obviously crossed the line of what anyone would consider acceptable behavior. Lisa has spoken about the distance she felt from her father, and the confusion and instability she felt as a child. Chrisann has spoken and written about this, too, creating a picture, albeit one-sided, of a careless, indifferent, and cruel lover and father. When people debate whether Steve was a “good” or “bad” man, this is the strongest indictment against him. He was twenty-three years old when Lisa’s birth presented him with a clarion call to accept adult responsibility. He rejected the call as fully as he rejected her.
Colleagues he worked with closely knew about Lisa, and heard Steve deny his paternity and complain about being pursued by Chrisann. Arthur Rock would later describe Steve’s behavior as “delusional.” Especially for someone as unsentimental as Rock, Steve’s behavior tied in to a pattern of irresponsibility that was developing at Apple. Whether working with his ostensible superiors, such as Rock, or making decisions that widely affected subordinates, Steve could seem indifferent to the impact of his choices. He conveyed a lack of empathy.
This behavior only worsened in the year after Steve’s visit to the Garden of Allah, when Apple made a big splash by going public. Several years later, Jobs told Susan Barnes, a financial manager at Apple and at NeXT, that December 12, 1980—the date of Apple’s IPO—was the most important day of his career, because only then was he sure that the folks who had driven Apple’s early success would make serious money. But Steve had specifically excluded people like Bill Fernandez and Daniel Kottke, an engineer whom he’d met at Reed, from the options bonanza, even though they had been instrumental in getting Apple started during that summer of 1976 in his parents’ garage. Jobs had a bureaucratic rationalization for doing so: they were hourly employees, and therefore not guaranteed the “founder’s stock” that helped make three hundred longtime salaried employees millionaires. But Steve’s lack of generosity was reflective of something that was starting to seem part of a broader character trait.
“He had this incredible bandwidth,” explains Lee Clow, the Chiat\Day ad director who would become Steve’s close friend after working on the famous “1984” television ad, “but he devoted almost all of it to work.” Prioritizing things in this way, especially as an immature young man, made most people in his life replaceable. Fernandez and Kottke, for example, had been important to Steve three years earlier, but to Steve’s way of thinking they had not kept up. They were not key contributors to Apple, and therefore to Steve’s life, anymore. The bigger priority was to reward the people who were improving Apple at present. It was a cold evaluation by a young man whose work life was exploding into something much bigger than he had ever anticipated. But his logic carried an emotional cost the young man didn’t even consider. Kottke and Fernandez and others like them felt snubbed and unappreciated. Steve’s behavior isolated him within the company. He had little sense at this point of how important it can be to have true allies in a corporate setting. It was a blind spot that would catch up to him eventually.