Becoming Steve Jobs

by Brent Schlender

  From the start, Markkula was an unlikely match for Steve and Woz. A short, trim, dapper guy, he seemed to come straight out of central casting for seventies fashion, with his fast car, long sideburns, full head of hair, and flashy leisure suits. His conversational style could be best described as mumbling. While he was smart and technically adept, he wasn’t forceful or combative, nor did he express strong opinions with any passion. And while he had made a lot of money already and was very interested in making more, he really didn’t want to work all that hard. Later, after Steve left Apple, Markkula would work valiantly to keep Apple afloat. But that was in a crisis. At the point in his life when he met Steve, he was pretty content with his big house and his Intel payout. In a move that clearly reflected his ambivalence, Markkula promised his wife that he would spend no more than four years working with Apple.

  So when Markkula decided that the company should convert its limited partnership into a California corporation and employ a professional chief executive, he made it very clear that he was not interested in that job himself. He recruited Michael “Scotty” Scott, a thirty-two-year-old manufacturing manager from National Semiconductor, as Apple’s first professional president and CEO. Markkula, thirty-four, became chairman of the Apple board. It was February 1977, and Steve, all of twenty-one years old, had turned Apple over to adult supervision. Unfortunately, neither Markkula nor Scotty could ever become the mentor he needed.

  THE COMPANY MOVED out of Steve’s parents’ garage and into real offices on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino. Scotty and Markkula started hiring people and setting up the basics of a corporation. For the first few months, Steve kept doing what he knew how to do best: rally a small crew to produce something wonderful. This time, it was the Apple II—the machine that would really introduce the world to personal computing.

  Once again, Jobs was the impresario and Woz the engineering genius. Steve pushed Woz, cajoling him, berating him, and challenging his thinking. Woz responded by giving his new machine a versatility and instant usefulness never seen before in a microcomputer. It was the most complete computer in a single, manageable box the world had ever seen. All you really needed to add to it was a TV monitor. The Apple II, its innards housed in a sleek, beige plastic case with a built-in keyboard, resembled the consumer-friendly electric typewriters that were popular then. It was designed as a finished product ready for the home, school, or office; the Apple 1, it now seemed clear, could be relegated to the world of soldering irons, oscilloscopes, voltmeters, and other electronic arcana that the average consumer never wanted to worry about.

  The new model had a significantly faster microprocessor than its predecessor and more built-in memory, which also improved performance. It had an audio amplifier and speaker, and jacks for plugging in a joystick for game play or a cassette tape drive for cheap data storage. Since Woz wanted it to be useful to the hobbyist programmer the minute it was plugged in, he also built the BASIC programming language right into the system, loading it into a special chip of its own that was hardwired to the motherboard. Perhaps most important, the computer was designed to accommodate unforeseen future hardware modifications that could either soup up its performance or optimize it for a particular kind of computing task, whether crunching numbers, playing games, building searchable lists, or writing programs. Woz built in eight so-called expansion “slots” that would allow the insertion of special circuit cards—essentially smaller circuit boards—that could work in concert with the microprocessor and memory chips on the motherboard for particular purposes, such as adding a floppy disk drive, or more advanced video graphics, or better sound, or the expansion of memory. This gave the Apple II the potential to become a much more capable computer once professionally designed software applications and special expansion circuit cards were available for it, and they weren’t long in coming.

  As it had in the garage, Steve’s perfectionism and his comfort with being out of synch with conventional wisdom led to conflicts. Steve had opposed adding those expansion slots, for example, because he thought a perfect consumer computer should be so easy to use that no one would ever want to add to the hardware’s capabilities by opening it up. The instinct—to deliver a computer with the simplicity of an appliance—may have been an admirable long-term goal, but it was a profoundly wrongheaded choice for a personal computer in 1977. Business-minded tinkerers had already expressed interest in designing add-in cards that would let the Apple II interact with or control telephones, musical instruments, laboratory instruments, medical devices, office machines, printers, and on and on. Woz understood this, and won the argument.

  But on several other decisions where Steve defied conventional wisdom he was right. You wouldn’t want a truly personal computer to sound like an industrial machine, he reasoned, so he convinced a talented engineer by the name of Frederick Rodney Holt to design a special power supply that didn’t heat up so much that it required a noisy, perpetually whirring fan to keep the machine from melting down. Jobs also pushed for an external shell that looked more like an appliance than a piece of lab equipment, going so far as to visit department stores for inspiration. This insight seems obvious now, but at the time computer hobbyists preferred industrial-looking cases, or even topless machines that showed off the complexity of their insides, and allowed for easy modification. For less hard-core consumers, the Apple II’s design was more inviting and self-contained and presentable, and those qualities alone made it very different from anything else out there at the time. Even though its first significant software application—VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program written by Dan Bricklin and Robert Frankston—wouldn’t arrive until 1979, the $1,295 Apple II was an immediate hit upon its April 1977 introduction. Within one year the company that was accustomed to selling a dozen Apple 1’s every few weeks was selling 500 or so Apple II’s every month.

  TWICE NOW, STEVE had proved himself to be a strong leader of a small group of people. The challenge he faced was to figure out how he himself could be led, by Markkula and Scott, as they set out to do something he knew that he could not possibly manage alone: design, build, and steer a growing company to develop, manufacture, distribute, and sell computers. Ceding control had not been difficult at all for Wozniak, who had absolutely no interest in overseeing the details of a burgeoning business. A world-class electrical engineer, he always seemed happiest at his workbench, where he could tinker, invent, and debate with his fellow engineers about wonky details as Apple’s vice president for research and development.

  It was far more complicated for Steve, and not just because he had an adolescent problem with authority. He had seen now that his contrarian thinking was essential for the kinds of breakthrough products he wanted to engineer, and he had also seen that his irascible methods could prod a group of people to deliver that vision. Those were qualities that didn’t mesh easily with the grown-up leadership that Scotty was trying to bring to Apple.

  What Scotty offered were systems. If Apple were a family, Scotty would have handled the nuts and bolts of the household, setting up bank accounts, closing on a mortgage, and so on. Of course, what he did for Apple was far more complicated. An engineer with a strong manufacturing background at National Semiconductor, Scotty was a high-tech dweeb, right down to the plastic pocket protector he really did have in his short-sleeved dress shirts. He came to Apple having already managed hundreds of people and overseen the complex fabrication processes at a chipmaker. At Apple, he provided most of the managerial heavy lifting required to build a sophisticated high-tech company from scratch: leasing office and factory space and equipment, masterminding the design of a reliable manufacturing process, building a sales team, creating quality controls, supervising the engineering, installing management information systems, and putting together an executive staff to handle finance and hiring. He initiated the critical process of developing solid relationships with key components suppliers and software developers. Steve absorbed a lot by watching Scotty handle these tasks.

  A
dding to the complexity of what Scott was trying to manage was the fact that Apple was pioneering a nascent industry that was different from most others in one crucial way: computers were systems that blended three key underlying technologies that all were in a state of perpetual and rapid change—semiconductors, software, and data storage. A company couldn’t simply devise a single great, innovative product, tool up, stamp it out, and then sit back and count the money. That had worked for high-tech companies like Polaroid and Xerox during their first decades. But this was different. As soon as a computer company had breathed life into one new system, it had to buckle down and start all over again in order to outdo itself before some other Promethean company reconfigured newer versions of these ever-improving technologies and stole its fire. And it would have to do so over and over again, generation after generation. In fact, it soon became clear that it was smart business for a company to start work on the product that would render obsolete its latest and greatest offering well before the first one even made it to market. That’s how fast things would change in the tech marketplace that was just beginning to materialize. And each of the system’s three underlying technologies was improving independently at its own breathtaking pace, so there was always more leverage to be had by employing the latest, greatest building blocks as they became available.

  The great technology CEOs could impose rigor on their companies and yet accept the fact that all this rapid change would eventually disrupt their operations anyway. Mike Scott was not a great CEO. He had the skills and personality of a COO—a chief operating officer. When he didn’t get the stability he so avidly tried to engineer, he became frazzled. And, thanks in great part to Steve, Scotty didn’t achieve a whole lot of stability at Apple.

  Steve certainly knew, intellectually, that he needed the orderly and well-oiled basic operations of a corporation to achieve his vision. But he was enamored with instability. His vision was based on destabilizing the existing computer industry. Stability was a quality that IBM had, and Apple, in Steve’s mind, was the anti-IBM.

  Needless to say, the arranged marriage between one man who embraced uncertainty and another who craved stability was not destined to last. A harbinger of its eventual demise occurred in the first couple of weeks after Scotty arrived at Apple. He had to assign numbers to the workplace badges everyone wore around the new Stevens Creek Boulevard office. When he decided that Woz would be “Employee #1,” Steve went to him and whined; it didn’t take long till Scotty relented and gave Steve a new, customized tag: “Employee #0.”

  IN PART BECAUSE of the way Steve quarreled with Markkula and Scott, in part because he so brazenly asserted his opinions as fact, and in part because, over the length of his career, he neglected to share credit for Apple’s successes in the press, Steve developed a reputation as an egomaniac who wasn’t willing to learn from others. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the man, even during his youngest, brashest, and most overbearing years.

  While Steve looked to his elders at Apple for guidance, he also sought it out elsewhere. He didn’t yet have the skills to build a great company, but he admired those who had pulled it off, and he would go to great lengths to meet them and learn from them. “None of these people were really in it for the money,” he told me. “Dave Packard, for example, left all his money to his foundation. He may have died the richest guy in the cemetery, but he wasn’t in it for the money. Bob Noyce [cofounder of Intel] is another. I’m old enough to have been able to get to know these guys. I met Andy Grove [CEO of Intel from 1987 to 1998] when I was twenty-one. I called him up and told him I had heard he was really good at operations and asked if I could take him out to lunch. I did that with Jerry Sanders [founder of Advanced Micro Devices] and with Charlie Sporck [founder of National Semiconductor] and others. Basically I got to know these guys who were all company-builders, and the particular scent of Silicon Valley at that time made a very big impression on me.”

  Most of these older men enjoyed sparring with and advising someone this glib, smart, and anxious to learn. Of course, they didn’t work with him, which lowered the stakes on the relationship considerably. Some were heroes whom he only met once or twice, like Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. Steve admired many things about Land, among them his obsessive commitment to creating products of style, practicality, and great consumer appeal, like the groundbreaking SX-70, the folding camera that wowed America in the 1970s; his reliance on gut instinct rather than consumer research; and the restless obsession and invention he brought to the company he founded.

  Others became lifelong advisers. Grove served as a behind-the-scenes counselor to Steve at several critical moments in his career, despite the fact that Apple—until 2006—was the one major computer company whose machines didn’t run on Intel chips. Jobs deeply respected Grove. A Hungarian Jew who survived a Nazi labor camp, fascism, an aborted revolution, and the prolonged Russian siege of Budapest, who lost most of his hearing at age four from a severe case of scarlet fever, and who made his way to Ellis Island on his own after fleeing the communist regime as a teenager, Grove is as tough and pragmatic as any businessman around. But he is also, just as Steve was, a well-rounded person with wide-ranging interests. At City College of New York he mastered English, including its most scathing expletives, which he could hurl with astonishing venom thanks in part to his Hungarian accent. His combination of pragmatism and expansiveness was something Steve admired, something he aspired to himself.

  Grove is the third member—along with Jobs and Bill Gates—of the triumvirate that brought personal computing to the masses. He came into his own after he signed on as the first employee at Intel Corporation, which was founded in 1968 by fellow Fairchild engineers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, the originator in 1965 of Moore’s law. That “law” was an observation about the price and performance of semiconductors that no one before him had noticed: namely that the number of transistors that could be etched on a single chip of a given size doubled every eighteen months or so, without any corresponding increase in the cost. It was Grove who best understood just how intricate and difficult it was to actually make reliable semiconductor components on a scale that computer makers like IBM, Sperry, and Burroughs could count on. In that sense, he was the one who transformed Moore’s law into a business model, allowing the computer industry to expect predictable gains on a fairly regular timetable. Grove was famous for hard-nosed, seemingly counterintuitive strategic decisions, including, famously, abandoning the memory chips that accounted for almost all of Intel’s revenues and switching Intel’s operations over to making microprocessors for the emerging categories of personal computers, engineering workstations, and bigger systems that would come to be known as “file servers.” His flexible, sophisticated approach to management set a high standard for Silicon Valley companies. He even wrote a popular management column for the San Jose Mercury News.

  Noyce, the Intel cofounder who pioneered the development of integrated circuits, was another early hero. Jobs and Wozniak presented the Apple II to Noyce and the rest of the Intel board in 1977. While Noyce appreciated the technology, he didn’t appreciate the two young men, with their long hair and shabby attire. But Steve pursued Noyce, and over the years the two became friends. Noyce’s wife, Ann Bowers, was an early investor in the company, and in 1980 she even became Apple’s first vice president of human resources.

  Steve’s relationships with outside mentors could be very personal. “Steve wanted that family thing,” remembers Regis McKenna. “He used to come over and just sit at the kitchen table with me and my wife [Dianne McKenna, an urban planner who at one point became mayor of Sunnyvale]. He always wanted to talk to her when he called up. She and I always had the sense that he wanted a family, that he really wanted that. He used to come over from Apple to fix things on my Apple II! I would tell him, Steve, you’ve got more important things to do than that, but he’d insist on coming over. ‘Besides,’ he’d tell me, ‘then I get to chat with Dianne.’ ”

  Partly
because he is so personable, partly because Markkula asked him to work for Apple as an adviser, and partly because his expertise is in something that Steve found instinctually appealing—marketing—McKenna became Steve’s most significant early mentor. McKenna was expert at presenting a company’s tale, but he was also a master corporate business strategist. Silicon Valley has long depended on marketers nearly as much as it has depended on engineers. Every technological advance must be framed in a beguiling narrative if it’s to get off the workbench and into businesses or homes. These advances often are foreign concepts, after all, with potential that seems opaque if not daunting, so the job of a great marketer is to wrestle the concept back to earth and make it approachable for mere technophobic mortals. McKenna’s consultancy would have a hand in the creation of many of the elite companies in Silicon Valley and beyond, including National Semiconductor, Silicon Graphics, Electronic Arts, Compaq, Intel, and Lotus Software.

  McKenna quickly saw that Steve was unusually articulate and driven. “He had what I’d call Silicon Valley street smarts,” says McKenna. “You know how certain kids who grow up in the inner city know where to go to get what, and how the power structure of the neighborhood works? Here, you’re likely to live next door to an electrical engineer or a software programmer, and a smart and curious kid can learn a lot just by wandering around and paying attention. From junior high on, Steve was out there figuring things out.”