Steve Jobs on Business Philosophy

Steven Paul Jobs, born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955, and raised by adoptive parents in what became Silicon Valley, built the defining founder arc of the personal computer age. With Steve Wozniak he co-founded Apple Computer in 1976 to sell the Apple I, gained fame and wealth with the mass-produced Apple II, and pushed graphical computing into the mainstream with the 1984 Macintosh. The board removed him in 1985, and in exile he founded NeXT and bought the Lucasfilm graphics unit that became Pixar. Apple, near bankruptcy, acquired NeXT in 1997, returning Jobs to the company he had co-founded; as chief executive he revived it with the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, App Store, and iPad, and by 2011 it stood among the world's most valuable publicly traded companies. He resigned as chief executive in August 2011 and died of a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor in Palo Alto that October, at fifty-six.

Around 1971, Wozniak read an Esquire article on the blue box, an illegal tone-generating device that tricked the telephone network into free long-distance calls, and designed a low-cost digital version. Jobs decided the pair should sell them and split the profit, and the clandestine sales went well enough that Jobs later credited the episode as the seed of Apple: without the blue boxes, he argued, there would have been no Apple at all, because the experience proved two young men could take on large companies and beat them. The episode fixed a division of labor that recurred at Apple — Wozniak as the inventor of elegant, minimal engineering, Jobs as the salesman who found the market, set the price, and captured the value. It also marked his first exercise of pricing power and margin thinking applied to somebody else's brilliant circuit design, skills he would spend four decades scaling from gadgets to global product lines.

In September 1972 Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, an expensive school he insisted on although his parents could ill afford it, drawn by its countercultural intensity. After a single semester he dropped out without telling them, unwilling to spend their money on an education that seemed meaningless, but stayed months longer auditing whatever interested him, including Robert Palladino's calligraphy course. In the 2005 Stanford commencement address he described sleeping on friends' dorm-room floors, returning Coke bottles for food money, and walking seven miles across town each Sunday for a free Hare Krishna meal. The audited calligraphy course resurfaced a decade later, when the Macintosh shipped with multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts that no rival machine offered, a connection Jobs treated as the clearest proof that dots can only be connected looking backward. The dropped-out-but-still-around posture became permanent parts of his founding mythology.

Jobs's design aesthetic drew on the Zen Buddhism he studied in India and under Kobun Chino Otogawa, and on his stated ambition, echoing Edwin Land, to stand where humanities meet sciences. Wozniak insisted Jobs never coded and did no original engineering; early employee Daniel Kottke likewise cast Wozniak as the innovator and Jobs as the marketing mind. Yet Jobs is named as inventor or co-inventor on 346 United States patents and applications spanning devices, touch interfaces, keyboards, adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, and packaging, with roughly 200 shared with design chief Jonathan Ive, and his contributions concentrated on the look and feel of products rather than utility-patent engineering. Even hospitalized and terminally ill he sketched devices to hold an iPad in a hospital bed and redrew an oxygen monitor for simplicity. Since his death he has been granted 141 further patents, bringing his total beyond 450.

Observers on both sides described Jobs's power of persuasion as a reality distortion field, on fullest display in the keynote addresses nicknamed Stevenotes at Macworld Expos and developer conferences. He wore a daily uniform of an Issey Miyake black mock turtleneck, Levi's 501 jeans, and New Balance sneakers, telling biographer Walter Isaacson he liked the daily convenience and the signature style of a personal uniform. He closed his January 2007 Macworld keynote by quoting hockey star Wayne Gretzky's line about skating to where the puck is going to be rather than where it has been, and applied it to Apple's whole history. His long public feud with Michael Dell ran from a 1987 jab about un-innovative beige boxes through Dell's 1997 advice to shut Apple down and return money to shareholders; when Apple's market value passed Dell's in 2006, Jobs emailed staff a short, gleeful note that Dell had proven imperfect at predicting the future.

Delivered at Stanford Stadium on June 12, 2005, Jobs's commencement address is remembered by the Steve Jobs Archive as one of the most influential commencement speeches in history, watched more than 120 million times and reproduced in media and school curricula around the world. The Archive's twentieth-anniversary essay notes the talk's improbable afterlife: LeBron James played a clip of it in the Cleveland Cavaliers locker room before a critical game of the 2016 NBA Finals comeback. Its ingredients were unpromising — a fifteen-minute address by a college dropout to graduates of a top research university, a talk aimed at twenty-two-year-olds that warns they will gradually become the old and be cleared away, a text shadowed by the speaker's cancer diagnosis. Yet the speech became the canonical statement of the Jobs philosophy of work and mortality, endlessly quoted for its closing admonition to stay hungry and stay foolish.

Stanford was not Jobs's audience's first choice; the students had wanted comedian Jon Stewart, who had given a popular address the year before, with Arnold Schwarzenegger third. The Archive recounts that in the six months between president John Hennessy's invitation and commencement, Jobs sent himself notes, outlines, and drafts; he ignored the suggestions of Apple's public-relations staff, requested ideas from the four senior class co-presidents and never replied, and asked friends for advice. In the final weeks before graduation he wrote the speech himself, working in close consultation with his wife Laurene. On a scorching day, in jeans, a black shirt, and Birkenstocks under his robe, he showed one sign of nerves only to those who knew him well: he read the text verbatim. Days afterward the class co-presidents emailed their thanks, and Jobs replied that it had been really hard to prepare for, and that he had loved it, especially when it was over.

The Archive frames the address as Jobs's humanist manifesto delivered as something disarmingly plain — three stories drawn from his own life. Beneath the plain structure — dropping out of Reed, being fired from Apple, facing a cancer diagnosis — the essay finds fundamental truths that make us human: love, death, fear, authenticity, hope. It observes that the speech is by a technology founder who scarcely mentions technology, and connects this to an interview Jobs gave a few years earlier, in which he complained that the whole computer industry wants to forget about the humanist side, insisting that people forget they are unique, with unique feelings and perspectives. The three stories, culminating in the report of his diagnosis and the reflection that remembering death is the best defense against the trap of living someone else's life, form the closest thing Jobs left to a written credo.