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移除书签Steve Jobs in the Garden of Allah
On a cold December afternoon in 1979, Steve Jobs pulled into the parking lot of the Garden of Allah, a retreat and conference center on the shoulder of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, north of San Francisco. He was tired, frustrated, angry, and late. The traffic on 280 and 101 had been at a standstill much of the way up from Cupertino, way down south in Silicon Valley, where the company he’d founded, Apple Computer, had its headquarters, and where he had just suffered through a meeting of Apple’s board of directors, which was chaired by the venerable Arthur Rock. He and Rock didn’t see eye-to-eye on much of anything. Rock treated him like a child. Rock loved order, he loved processes, he believed that tech companies grew in certain ways according to certain rules, and he subscribed to these beliefs because he’d seen them work before, most notably at Intel, the great Santa Clara chipmaker that he had backed early on. Rock was perhaps the most notable tech investor of his time, but he in fact had been reluctant to back Apple at first, largely because he’d found Steve and his partner Steve Wozniak unpalatable. He didn’t see Apple the way Jobs saw it—as an extraordinary company that would humanize computing and do so with a defiantly unhierarchical organization. Rock simply viewed it as another investment. Steve found board meetings with Rock enervating, not invigorating; he had looked forward to a long, fast drive to Marin with the top down to get rid of the stale stench of seemingly endless discussion.
But the Bay Area was shrouded in mist and rain, so the top stayed up. Slick roads made the traffic stultifying, so much so that it took all the pleasure out of the drive in his brand-new Mercedes-Benz 450SL. Steve loved the car; he loved it the way he loved his Linn Sondek audiophile turntable and his Ansel Adams platinum prints. The car, in fact, was a model for what he thought computers should be: powerful, sleek, intuitive, and efficient, nothing wasted at all. But this afternoon the weather and the traffic had defeated the car. Consequently he was about half an hour late to the initial meeting of the Seva Foundation, a creation of his friend Larry Brilliant, who looked like a little Buddha himself, albeit in track shoes. Seva’s goal was pleasingly ambitious: eliminate a certain kind of blindness that affected millions of people in India.
Steve parked and got out of the car. At six feet tall and a trim 165 pounds, with brown hair that touched his shoulders and deep, penetrating eyes, he would have been striking anywhere. But in the three-piece suit he’d worn to the board meeting he looked particularly resplendent. Jobs didn’t quite know how he felt about the suit. At Apple, people wore whatever they wanted. He often showed up barefoot.
The Garden of Allah was a quaint sort of mansion, built on a hillock up Mount Tamalpais, the verdant peak overlooking San Francisco Bay. Nestled into a covey of redwoods and cypress trees, it meshed classic California Arts and Crafts style with the feel of a Swiss chalet. Built in 1916 for a wealthy Californian by the name of Ralston Love White, it had been operated by the United Church of Christ since 1957 as a retreat and meeting site. Steve walked across the lawn of the heart-shaped driveway, climbed some stairs to a broad veranda, and entered the building.
Inside, one look at the crew gathered around the conference table would have told any casual bystander this was not your typical church gathering. On one side of the table was Ram Dass, the Jewish-born Hindu yogi who in 1971 had published one of Steve’s favorite books, Be Here Now, a bestselling guide to meditation, yoga, and spiritual seeking. Nearby sat Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead singer and guitarist—the Dead would be performing a benefit for Seva at the Oakland Coliseum on December 26. Stephen Jones, an epidemiologist from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, was in attendance, as was Nicole Grasset. Brilliant and Jones had worked for Grasset in India and Bangladesh as part of the World Health Organization’s audacious—and successful—program to eradicate smallpox. The counterculture’s favorite trickster philosopher, Wavy Gravy, was there, too, sitting with his wife near Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy, the founder of India’s Aravind Eye Hospital, which eventually would help millions of people with an operation that repairs blindness caused by cataracts, a malady that then plagued the region. Brilliant was hoping to pull off something almost as audacious as wiping out smallpox. His goal for Seva was that it would support the work of people like Dr. V (as Brilliant called Venkataswamy) by setting up eye camps throughout Southern Asia to restore sight to the blind in poor rural areas.
Steve recognized a few of the folks. Robert Friedland, the guy who had convinced him to make a pilgrimage to India in 1974, came up and said hello. And he recognized Weir, of course; he admired the Grateful Dead, even though he thought they didn’t have the emotional or intellectual depth of Bob Dylan. Steve had been invited to the gathering by Brilliant, whom he’d first met in India, five years earlier. After Friedland sent him a 1978 article detailing the success of the smallpox program and talking a bit about Brilliant’s next steps, Steve sent Brilliant five thousand dollars to help get Seva rolling.
It was quite a collection of people: Hindus and Buddhists, rockers and doctors, all accomplished, all gathered in the United Church of Christ’s Garden of Allah. Clearly, this was not the place for your traditional corporate chieftain, but Steve should have fit right in. He meditated often. He understood the search for spiritual fulfillment—in fact, he had gone to India specifically to learn from Brilliant’s guru, Neem Karoli Baba, also known as Maharaj-ji, who had died just a few days before Steve arrived. Jobs felt a deep restlessness to change the world, not just build a mundane business. The iconoclasm, the intersections of different disciplines, the humanity present in that room, all were representative of what Steve aspired to. And yet for some reason he couldn’t settle in.
There were at least twenty people in the room Steve didn’t recognize, and the conversation had not quieted or slowed much when he introduced himself. It seemed to him that many of them didn’t even know who he was, which was a little surprising, especially in the Bay Area. Apple was already something of a phenomenon: the company was selling more than 3,000 computers a month—up from around 70 a month at the end of 1977. No computer company had ever blossomed this way, and Steve was sure the next year would be even more explosive.
He sat down and started listening. The decision to create a foundation had already been made; the question now on the table was how to tell the world about Seva, its plans, and the men and women who would implement those plans. Steve found most of the ideas embarrassingly naïve. The discussion seemed more appropriate for a PTA meeting; at one point, everyone but Steve heatedly debated the finer points of a pamphlet they wanted to create. A pamphlet? That’s the best these people could dream up? These so-called experts may have achieved notable progress in their own countries, but here they were clearly out of their league. Having a grand, bold goal was useless if you didn’t have the ability to tell a compelling story about how you’d get there. That seemed obvious.
As the discussion meandered, Steve found his own attention wandering. “He had walked into that room with his persona from the Apple board meeting,” Brilliant remembers, “but the rules for doing things like conquering blindness or eradicating smallpox are quite different.” From time to time he’d pipe up, but mostly to interject a snide remark about why this or that idea could never fly. “He was becoming a nuisance,” says Brilliant. Finally, Steve couldn’t take it anymore. He stood up.
“Listen,” he said, “I’m telling you this as someone who knows a thing or two about marketing. We’ve sold nearly a hundred thousand machines at Apple Computer, and when we started no one knew a thing about us. Seva is in the same position Apple was in a couple of years ago. The difference is you guys don’t know diddly about marketing. So if you want to really do something here, if you really want to make a difference in the world and not just putter along like every other nonprofit that people have never heard of, you need to hire this guy named Regis McKenna—he’s the king of marketing. I can get him in here if you’d like. You should have the best. Don’t settle for second best.”
The room went silent for a moment. “Who is this young man?” Venkataswamy whispered to Brilliant. A handful of people started challenging Steve from different sides of the table. He gave as good as he got, turning the group discussion into a donnybrook, ignoring the fact that these were people who had helped eradicate smallpox from the planet, who were saving the blind of India, who negotiated cross-border treaties so they could perform their good works in multiple, even warring, countries. In other words, these were people who knew a thing or two about getting things done. Steve didn’t care about their accomplishments. He was always comfortable in a fight. Challenges, confrontations: in his limited experience, this was how you got things done; this was how the great stuff broke through. As the conversation heated up, Brilliant finally interjected: “Steve.” And then he yelled, “Steve!”
Steve looked over, clearly irritated by the interruption and anxious to get back to his argument.
“Steve,” said Brilliant, “we’re really glad you’re here, but now you’ve got to stop it!”
“I’m not going to,” he said. “You guys asked for my help, and I’m going to give it. You want to know what to do? You need to call Regis McKenna. Let me tell you about Regis McKenna. He—”
“Steve!” Brilliant shouted again. “Stop it!” But Steve wouldn’t. He just had to get his point across. So he took up his argument yet again, pacing back and forth as if he’d purchased the stage with his five-thousand-dollar donation, pointing directly at the people he was addressing as if to punctuate his remarks. And as the epidemiologists and the doctors and Bob Weir from the Grateful Dead looked on, Brilliant finally pulled the plug. “Steve,” he said, sotto voce, trying to remain calm, but ultimately losing it. “It’s time to go.” Brilliant walked Steve out of the conference room.
Fifteen minutes later, Friedland slipped outside. He returned quickly, and discreetly crept over to Brilliant. “You should go see Steve,” he whispered in his ear. “He’s out in the parking lot crying.”
“He’s still here?” Brilliant asked.
“Yeah, and he’s crying in the parking lot.”
Brilliant, who was presiding over the meeting, excused himself and hurriedly walked out to find his young friend, who was hunched over the steering wheel of his Mercedes convertible, sobbing, in the middle of the parking lot. The rain had stopped, and the fog had begun to settle in. He had put the top down. “Steve,” said Brilliant, leaning over the door and giving the twenty-four-year-old a hug. “Steve. It’s okay.”
“I’m sorry. I’m too wound up,” Steve said. “I live in two worlds.”
“It’s okay. You should come back in.”
“I’m going to leave. I know I was out of order. I just wanted them to listen.”
“It’s okay. Come back in.”
“I’m going to go in and apologize. And then I’m going to leave,” he said. And that is what he did.
THIS LITTLE ANECDOTE from the winter of 1979 is as good a place as any to start the story of how Steve Jobs turned around his life and became the greatest visionary leader of our time. The young man making a hash of his visit to the Garden of Allah that December evening was a mess of contradictions. He was a cofounder of one of the most successful startups ever, but he didn’t want to be seen as a businessman. He craved the advice of mentors, and yet resented those in power. He dropped acid, walked barefoot, wore scraggly jeans, and liked the idea of living in a commune, yet he also loved nothing more than speeding down the highway in a finely crafted German sports car. He had a vague desire to support good causes, but he hated the inefficiency of most charities. He was impatient as hell and knew that the only problems worth solving were ones that would take years to tackle. He was a practicing Buddhist and an unrepentant capitalist. He was an overbearing know-it-all berating people who were wiser and immensely more experienced, and yet he was absolutely right about their fundamental marketing naïveté. He could be aggressively rude and then truly contrite. He was intransigent, and yet eager to learn. He walked away, and he walked back in to apologize. At the Garden of Allah he displayed all the brash, ugly behavior that became an entrenched part of the Steve Jobs myth. And he showed a softer side that would go less recognized over the years. To truly understand Steve and the incredible journey he was about to undergo, the full transformation that he would experience over his rich life, you have to recognize, accept, and try to reconcile both sides of the man.
He was the leader and public face of the personal computer industry, and yet he was still a kid—just twenty-four years old, still in the early days of his business education. His greatest strengths were inextricably tied to his greatest weaknesses. As of 1979, those failings had not yet gotten in the way of his success.
In the years ahead, however, Steve’s tight bundle of contradictions would unravel. His stubborn strengths would give rise to Apple’s signature computer, the Macintosh, which would debut in 1984. But his weaknesses would lead to chaos in his company and exile for him personally, just one year later. They would sabotage his efforts to create a second breakthrough computer at NeXT, the company he founded shortly after leaving Apple. They would lead him so far from the heart of the computer industry that he would become, in the damning words of one of his closest friends, “a has-been.” They became so ingrained in his business reputation that when he was improbably invited back to run Apple in 1997, commentators, and even industry peers, would call the company’s board of directors “crazy.”
But then he pulled off one of the greatest business comebacks ever, leading Apple to the creation of a series of amazing products that defined an era and transformed a dying manufacturer of computers into the most valuable and admired company in the world. That turnaround wasn’t a random miracle. While away from Apple, Steve Jobs had started to learn how to make the most of his strengths, and how to temper somewhat his perilous weaknesses. This reality runs counter to the common myths about Steve. In the popular imagination, he is a tyrant savant with a golden touch for picking products and equally a stubborn son of a bitch with no friends, no patience, and no morals; he lived and died as he was born—half genius and half asshole.
The unformed youth at the Garden of Allah could never have revived the moribund company he returned to in 1997, nor could he have engineered the slow and deeply complicated corporate evolution that led to the unimaginable success Apple enjoyed during the last decade of his life. His own personal growth was equally complicated. I can’t think of a businessman who grew and changed and matured more than Steve. Personal change is, of course, incremental. As all “grown-ups” come to understand, we wrestle with and learn how to manage our gifts and flaws over a lifetime. It’s an endless growth process. And yet it’s not as if we become wholly different people. Steve is a great object lesson in someone who masterfully improved his ability to make better use of his strengths and to effectively mitigate those aspects of his personality that got in the way of those strengths. His negative qualities didn’t go away, nor were they replaced by new good traits. But he learned how to manage himself, his own personal miasma of talents and rough edges. Most of them, anyway. To understand how that happened, and how that led to the confounding resurgence of Apple later in his career, you have to consider the full range of personal contradictions Steve brought to the Garden of Allah that December afternoon.
STEVEN PAUL JOBS felt deeply entitled almost from the start, thanks to parents who raised him to think that he was every bit as special as they believed he could be. Born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, Steve was given up for adoption by his birth mother, Joanna Schieble, who as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin in Madison had become romantically involved in 1954 with Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian PhD candidate studying political science. Schieble moved to San Francisco after becoming pregnant, but Jandali remained in Wisconsin. Paul and Clara Jobs, a childless working-class couple, adopted Steve just a few days after his birth. When Steve was five years old they moved to Mountain View, twenty-five miles south of the city, and soon thereafter adopted a daughter they named Patty. While some have trotted out Steve’s adoption as a primal “rejection” that explains the irascible behavior he often displayed, especially early in his career, Steve repeatedly told me that he had been loved and deeply indulged by Paul and Clara. “He felt he had been really blessed by having the two of them as parents,” says Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve’s widow.
Neither Paul nor Clara had attended college, but they did promise Schieble that they would send their new son. It was a significant pledge for a lower-middle-class family, and it marked the beginning of their pattern of giving their only son whatever he needed. Steve was whip smart; he skipped sixth grade, and his teachers even considered having him skip two grades. After leapfrogging to seventh grade, however, Steve felt snubbed socially and still unchallenged by his schoolwork. He pleaded with his parents to move him into a better school, and they agreed, despite the considerable cost of the switch. Paul and Clara packed up and relocated to Los Altos, a prosperous bedroom community that had sprung up in what were once plum orchards adjoining the low hills rising to the west above San Francisco Bay. The new neighborhood was then a subdivision within the Cupertino-Sunnyvale school district, one of the best in California. Once there, Steve started to flourish.
Paul and Clara may have let his sense of entitlement blossom, but they also nurtured his perfectionism, especially when it came to the rigor that underlies great craftsmanship. Paul Jobs held many jobs over his lifetime, including repo man, machinist, and car mechanic. He was at heart an inveterate tinkerer and craftsman who made furniture or rebuilt cars most weekends and taught his son the paramount value of taking one’s time, paying attention to details, and—since Paul was anything but rich—putting in the legwork to hunt for spare parts that were a good value. “He had a workbench out in his garage,” Steve once told an interviewer from the Smithsonian Institution. “When I was about five or six, he sectioned off a little piece of it and said ‘Steve, this is your workbench now.’ And he gave me some of his smaller tools and showed me how to use a hammer and saw and how to build things. It really was very good for me. He spent a lot of time with me … teaching me how to build things, how to take things apart, put things back together.” In his later years, as Steve would show me a new iPod or a new laptop, he would remember how his father told him that you had to devote as much care to the underside of a cabinet as to the finish, or to the brake pads of a Chevy Impala as to the paint job. Steve had a deeply sentimental streak, and it came out when he told these stories about his father. They were made more poignant by the fact that Steve gave his father so much credit for instilling his own sense of aesthetic excellence in a medium—digital electronics—that Paul Jobs would never fully understand.
That combination, of believing that he was special and of wanting to get things just right, was a potent mix given where and when he was raised. The experience of growing up in what wasn’t yet even called Silicon Valley in the late 1960s and early 1970s was unique. The environs between Palo Alto and San Jose were a boomtown of a new kind, attracting highly educated electrical engineers, chemists, optical specialists, computer programmers, and physicists who were drawn to the region’s blossoming semiconductor, telecommunications, and electronics companies. It was a time when the market for high-end electronics had shifted from government and military customers to corporate and industrial America, expanding dramatically the number of potential customers for new electronic technologies of all kinds. The fathers of many other kids in Steve’s neighborhood were engineers who commuted to work at the nearby headquarters of emerging tech giants like Lockheed, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, and Applied Materials.
Living there, a curious child interested in math and science could easily develop a much deeper sense of the leading edge of technology than those growing up elsewhere in the country. Electronics were just beginning to replace hot rods as the passion of young tinkerers. Geeks lived and breathed the fumes emanating from their soldering irons, and traded dog-eared copies of Popular Science and Popular Electronics magazines. They built their own transistor radios, hi-fi stereo systems, ham radios, oscilloscopes, rockets, lasers, and Tesla coils from kits offered by mail order companies like Edmund Scientific, Heathkit, Estes Industries, and Radio Shack. In Silicon Valley, electronics wasn’t just a hobby. It was a fast-growing new industry and just as exciting as rock and roll.
For precocious kids like Steve, the implicit promise in all this was that anything could be figured out—and since anything could be figured out, anything could be built. “It gave one the sense that one could build the things that one saw around oneself in the universe,” he once told me. “These things were not mysteries anymore. You looked at a television set and you would think that, ‘I haven’t built one of those but I could. There’s one of those in the Heathkit catalog and I’ve built two other Heathkits, so I could build that.’ Things became much more clear that they were the results of human creation, not these magical things that just appeared in one’s environment and that one had no knowledge of their interiors.”
He joined the Explorers Club, a group of fifteen kids who met regularly on Hewlett-Packard’s campus in Palo Alto to work on electronics projects and get lessons from HP engineers. This is where Steve was first exposed to computers. It’s also what gave him the outlandish notion to reach out and establish a minor, but fascinating, connection with one of the two men who famously created HP, the first Silicon Valley dynamo out of a garage. When he was fourteen years old, he called up Bill Hewlett at his Palo Alto home to ask personally for some hard-to-find electronic components for an Explorers Club project. He got them, in part, because he already could spin a good tale. In many ways, Steve was a prototypical adolescent geek. But he also was a curious student of the humanities, beguiled by the words of Shakespeare, Melville, and Bob Dylan. Glib and persuasive with his parents, he applied the same skills when dealing with friends, teachers, mentors, and eventually the rich and powerful; Steve innately understood from an early age that the right words and stories could help him win the attention he needed to get what he wanted.
STEVE WAS NOT really a star in this local crowd of budding technologists. But in 1969 a friend named Bill Fernandez introduced him to someone who was: Stephen Wozniak. Stephen Wozniak from nearby Sunnyvale. The son of a Lockheed engineer, “Woz” was an engineering genius. Steve, it turned out, was a great enabler of genius. This would turn out to be the first great collaboration of his career.
Nerdy and shy, Woz was five years older yet far less assertive than Steve. Like Steve, he had learned about electronics from his father and from other neighborhood dads. But he had immersed himself much more deeply into the subject, in school and out, and had even created a rudimentary calculator, made of transistors, resisters, and diodes, when he was just entering his teens. In 1971, before the single-chip microprocessor had been commercialized, Woz designed a circuit board loaded with chips and electronic components that he called the “Cream Soda Computer,” since that was his favorite sugary soft drink at the time. Woz turned himself into an extraordinarily talented hardware designer whose uncanny electronic engineering instincts were coupled with a great software programmer’s imagination—he could see shortcuts both in circuits and in software that others simply couldn’t envision.
Steve didn’t have Woz’s innate talent, but he did have a native hunger to put really cool stuff into the hands of as many people as possible. This unique trait fundamentally separated him from other hobbyists messing around with computers. From the start, he had the natural inclination to be an impresario, to convince people to pursue a goal that often only he could see, and then to coordinate and push them toward the creation of that goal. The first sign of that came in 1972, when he and Woz started in on an unlikely commercial collaboration.
With Steve’s help, Woz developed the first digital “blue box”—a machine that could mimic the tones used by telephone company switches to connect specific phones anywhere in the world. A prankster could hold one of these clever (and illegal) battery-powered gadgets up to the mouthpiece of any telephone and fool Ma Bell’s switching systems into making long-distance or even international calls for free.
Woz would have been happy to just build the circuit and share it—as would be his inclination later with the circuit board that formed the heart and soul of the Apple 1 computer. Steve, however, proposed that they try to make some money by selling completely assembled machines. So while Woz polished his circuit design, Steve pulled together the necessary materials and priced the finished boxes. He and Woz netted some $6,000 selling the illegal devices at $150 a pop, mostly to college students. The two boys would wander dormitory hallways, knocking on doors and asking the occupants if this was George’s room—a fictional George who supposedly was an expert phone phreak. If the discussion prompted interest, they’d demonstrate what the blue box could do, and sometimes make a sale. But business was spotty, and when they went further afield the venture foundered—the boys closed up shop after one supposed customer pulled a gun on Steve. Still, it wasn’t bad for a first effort.
IT MAY SEEM strange to include Steve’s spiritual life as one of the source materials of his career. But as a young man, Steve, with great sincerity, sought a deeper reality, a plane of consciousness beneath the surface. He pursued it with psychedelic drugs, and he pursued it with religious exploration. This spiritual sensibility contributed greatly to the unusual breadth of his intellectual peripheral vision, which eventually led him to see possibilities—ranging from great new products to radically reinvented business models—that escaped most others.
Just as Silicon Valley was the environment that birthed and nurtured Steve’s technological optimism, the 1960s was the decade that fueled an inquisitive teen’s natural impulse to search for deeper truths. Like so many other young people of the time, Steve embraced the questioning and yearning of the counterculture movement. He was a baby boomer who experimented with drugs, drank deeply of the insurgent lyrics of musicians like Dylan, the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, the Band, and Janis Joplin—even the radical, more abstract sonic musings of Miles Davis—and delved into the works of people he considered philosopher kings, spiritual thinkers like Suzuki Roshi, Ram Dass, and Paramahansa Yogananda. The messages of the time were clear: question everything, especially authority; experiment; hit the road; be fearless; and work to create a better world.
Steve’s own grand quest began immediately after graduating from Cupertino’s Homestead High School, when he headed off to Reed College in Portland, Oregon. It didn’t take long before the headstrong freshman was only attending the classes that fascinated him, and after just one semester, he abruptly dropped out, without even telling his parents. He spent a second semester auditing classes, including one calligraphy course that he would cite in later years as the inspiration for the Macintosh’s ability to produce a diverse panoply of typographical fonts. He also delved more deeply into Asian philosophy and mysticism, and dropped acid with greater frequency, at times almost as a spiritual sacrament.
The next summer, after returning, flat broke, to live with his parents again in Cupertino, he spent considerable time commuting back and forth to work at an Oregon apple orchard that doubled as a sort of commune. Eventually he landed a job back home as a technician at Atari, the video game company started by Nolan Bushnell, the inventor of Pong. He proved adept at repairing game machines that had gone on the fritz, and was able to convince Bushnell to let him fix some coin-operated kiosks in Germany, as part of a deal to pay his way to India, where he would join his pal Robert Friedland, the charismatic owner of that Oregon orchard.
It was all part of a romantic search for a way of life that had real meaning, at a time when the culture smiled on such quests. “You’ve got to keep Steve in the context of the time,” says Larry Brilliant. “What were we all looking for? There was a generational split then, a split that was far deeper than the left-right split we have now, or the fundamentalist-secular split. And even though Steve had wonderfully supportive adoptive parents, he would get letters from Robert Friedland and other people who were in India, who had gone there seeking peace and believed they’d found something. That was what Steve was looking for.”
Steve ostensibly went to India hoping to meet Neem Karoli Baba, known as Maharaj-ji, the famous guru who was an inspiration to Brilliant, Friedman, and other seekers. But Maharaj-ji died shortly before Steve’s arrival, to his lasting disappointment. Steve’s time in India was splintered, as unfocused as the searches of many young people seeking a broader vision than the one they were handed as children. He went to a religious festival attended by ten million other pilgrims. He wore flowing cotton robes, ate strange foods, and had his head shaved by a mysterious guru. He got dysentery. For the first time he read Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, a book that he would return to several times throughout his life, and that would be given to everyone who attended the reception following Steve’s memorial service at Stanford University’s Memorial Church on October 16, 2011.
Early in his stay, according to Brilliant, “Steve had been flirting with the idea of being sadhu.” Most Indian sadhus live a monklike existence of deprivation as a way of focusing solely on the spiritual. But Steve was obviously too hungry, too driven, and too ambitious for that kind of life. “It was a romance,” says Brilliant, “with the idea of being a renunciate.” But that doesn’t mean he came back to the United States disillusioned, or that he dismissed Eastern spiritualism altogether. His interests migrated toward Buddhism, which allows for more engagement with the world than is permitted ascetic Hindus. It would enable him to blend a search for personal enlightenment with his ambition to create a company that delivered world-changing products. This appealed to a young man busy trying to invent himself, and it would continue to appeal to a man of infinite intellectual restlessness. Certain elements of Buddhism suited him so well that they would provide a philosophical underpinning for his career choices—as well as a basis for his aesthetic expectations. Among other things, Buddhism made him feel justified in constantly demanding nothing less than what he deemed to be “perfection” from others, from the products he would create, and from himself.
In Buddhist philosophy, life is often compared to an ever-changing river. There’s a sense that everything, and every individual, is ceaselessly in the process of becoming. In this view of the world, achieving perfection is also a continuous process, and a goal that can never be fully attained. That’s a vision that would come to suit Steve’s exacting nature. Looking ahead to the unmade product, to whatever was around the next corner, and the two or three after that one, came naturally to him. He would never see a limit to possibilities, a perfect endpoint at which his work would be done. And while Steve would eschew almost all self-analysis, the same was true of his own life: despite the fact that he could be almost unfathomably stubborn and opinionated at times, the man himself was constantly adapting, following his nose, learning, trying out new directions. He was constantly in the act of becoming.
None of this was readily apparent to the outside world, and Steve’s Buddhism could befuddle even his closest friends and colleagues. “There was always this spiritual side,” says Mike Slade, a marketing executive who worked with Steve later in his career, “which really didn’t seem to fit with anything else he was doing.” He meditated regularly until he and Laurene became parents, when the demands on his time grew in a way he hadn’t anticipated. He reread Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind several times, and made the intersection of elements of Asian spiritualism and his business and commercial life a regular subject of the conversations he and Brilliant enjoyed throughout his life. For years, he arranged for a Buddhist monk by the name of Kobun Chino Otogawa to meet with him once a week at his office to counsel him on how to balance his spiritual sense with his business goals. While nobody who knew him well during his later years would have called Steve a “devout” Buddhist, the spiritual discipline informed his life in both subtle and profound ways.
WHEN STEVE RETURNED to America in the fall of 1974, he landed back at Atari, mainly doing hardware-related troubleshooting tasks for Nolan Bushnell’s pioneering—and poorly managed—company. Atari was such a loose, strange organization that Jobs could still comfortably disappear for a couple of weeks to pick apples at Robert Friedland’s orchard and not get fired, or even be missed, really. Meanwhile, Woz was working at Hewlett-Packard, in a safe, well-paying, but not particularly challenging gig. Nothing about Jobs’s life at this time would have suggested that he would achieve extraordinary success in business, computer technology, or anything else, for that matter. But unbeknownst even to himself, Steve was about to begin the real work of creating his life. In the next three years, he would morph from a scruffy, drifting nineteen-year-old into the cofounder and leader of a revolutionary new American business.
Steve was blessed to live at a moment that was ripe and ready for someone with his talents. It was an era of change on so many fronts, and especially in the world of information technology. In the 1970s, big machines called mainframes defined computing. Mainframes were enormous, room-sized computing systems sold to customers like airlines, banks, insurers, and large universities. The programming required to get a result—say, to calculate a mortgage payment—was beyond cumbersome. At least it seemed that way for anyone studying computer science in college, which is where most of us had our introduction to making a mainframe actually do something. After settling on the problem you wanted the machine to solve, you would painstakingly write down, in a programming language like COBOL or Fortran, a series of line-by-line, step-by-step instructions for the exact, logical process of the calculation or analytical chore. Then, at a noisy mechanical console, you would type each individual line of the handwritten program onto its own rectangular “punch card,” which was perforated in such a way that a computer could “read” it. After meticulously making sure the typed cards were arranged in the right order—simple programs might need a few dozen cards that could be held by a rubber band, while elaborate programs could require reams that would have to be stacked carefully in a special cardboard box. You would then hand the bundle to a computer “operator,” who would put your deck in the queue behind dozens of others to be fed into the mainframe. Eventually, the machine would spit out your results on broad sheets of green-and-white-striped accordion-folded paper. More often than not, you would have to tweak your program three, four, or even dozens of times, to get the results you were looking for.
In other words, computing in 1975 was anything but personal. Writing software was a laborious and slow process. The big, expensive, high-maintenance computers were manufactured and sold, appropriately enough, by a handful of big, bureaucratic technology companies. As it had been since the 1950s, the computer industry in 1975 was dominated by International Business Machines (IBM), which sold more mainframes than all of its other competitors put together. In the 1960s, those also-rans were called “the Seven Dwarfs,” but during the 1970s, both General Electric and RCA gave up, leaving a stubborn group of manufacturers referred to as the “BUNCH”—an acronym for Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data Corporation, and Honeywell. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) dominated an upcoming segment of somewhat cheaper and less-powerful “minicomputers” used by smaller businesses, and by departments within larger corporations. There was one outlier at each end of the cost spectrum. At the high end, Cray Research, founded in 1972, sold so-called supercomputers used primarily for scientific research and mathematical modeling. These were the most expensive computers of all, costing well north of $3 million. On the cheap end of the scale was Wang, which was founded in the early 1970s and made a task-specific machine known as a “word processor.” It was the closest thing to a “personal” computer that existed, since it was designed for a single person to use in the preparation of written reports and correspondence. The computer industry then was primarily an eastern establishment. IBM was headquartered in the bucolic suburbs north of New York City; DEC and Wang were based in Boston. Burroughs was headquartered in Detroit, Univac in Philadelphia, NCR in Dayton, Ohio, and Cray, Honeywell, and Control Data all hailed from Minneapolis. The only notable early computer maker in Silicon Valley was Hewlett-Packard, but its primary business was making scientific test and measurement instruments and calculators.
This industry bore little resemblance to today’s entrepreneurial, innovative, and rapidly iterative tech world. It was a stodgy enterprise most similar to the capital equipment business. Its universe of potential customers could be counted in the hundreds, and these were companies with deep pockets whose demands focused more on performance and reliability than on price. No surprise, then, that the industry had become cloistered and a little complacent.
Out in California a significant number of the people who would have a hand in flipping that industry on its head started meeting regularly as a hobbyist group called the Homebrew Computer Club. Their first get-together occurred shortly after the publication of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics, which featured a cover story about the Altair 8800 “microcomputer.” Gordon French, a Silicon Valley engineer, hosted the gathering in his garage to show off an Altair unit that French and a buddy had assembled from the $495 kit sold by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS). It was an inscrutable-looking device, about the size of a stereo component amplifier, its face sporting two horizontal arrays of toggle switches and a lot of blinking red lights. The clunky thing couldn’t do too much, but it demonstrated the feasibility of having a computer to yourself, one that you could program twenty-four hours a day if you wanted to, without having to wait in line or punch any cards. Bill Gates read the article, and shortly thereafter famously dropped out of Harvard to start a little outfit called Micro-soft to design software programming languages for the Altair.
Woz knew the MITS machine wasn’t all that much more advanced than the Cream Soda Computer he’d created four years earlier, in 1971, when he had to use much less sophisticated components. Spurred by a geek’s natural competitive instincts, he roughed out some new designs for what he knew would be a better microcomputer, one that would be easier to program, control, and manipulate. Flipping toggle switches and counting flashing lights was like using flag semaphore and Morse code, he thought. Why not input commands and data values more directly with a typewriter keyboard? And why not have the computer project your typing and results onto an attached television monitor? And for that matter, why not plug in a cassette tape recorder to store programs and data? The Altair had none of these features that would make computing far less intimidating and far more approachable. This was the challenge Woz decided to tackle. In the back of his mind he hoped that his employer, HP, might want to manufacture a version of his concept.
Enter Steve Jobs, the budding opportunist and junior impresario. He didn’t think Woz needed HP. He thought he and Woz could develop a business of their own. Steve knew that Woz was so uniquely talented that any computer he would design would be cheap, usable, and easy to program—so much so that the other hobbyists at Homebrew might want one, too. So during the fall and winter of 1975 and early 1976, as Woz perfected his design, Jobs started to conjure how they might pool their resources to purchase the components they needed to make a working prototype. Every couple of weeks, they would take the latest working version of the computer to the Homebrew meetings, to show off a new feature or two to the toughest audience in town. Steve persuaded Woz that they could make the club members their customers by selling them the schematics, and perhaps even printed circuit boards. Club members could then buy the chips and other components themselves, and assemble them into the guts of their very own working microcomputer. To raise the cash to pay a mutual friend to draw a “reference design” for the circuit boards, Steve sold his treasured Volkswagen minibus, and Woz unloaded his precious HP-65 programmable calculator. After spending $1,000 on designing the board and contracting to have a few dozen made, Jobs and Wozniak made their money back and then some by selling them to fellow Homebrew members for $50 apiece, netting them a nifty $30 for each circuit board.
It wasn’t much of a business, but it was enough for two young men who were coming to believe that these microcomputers could change everything. “We felt it was going to affect every home in the country,” Woz explained years later. “But we felt it for the wrong reasons. We felt that everybody was technical enough to really use it and write their own programs and solve their problems that way.” Steve decided that their new company should be called Apple. There are different tales about the origin of the name, but it was a brilliant decision. Years later, Lee Clow, Steve’s longtime collaborator on Apple’s distinctive brand of advertising, told me, “I honestly believe that his intuition was that they were going to change people’s lives by giving them technology they didn’t know they needed, that would be different from anything they knew. So they needed something friendly and approachable and likable. He took a page out of Sony’s book, because Sony was originally called Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, and [cofounder] Akio Morita said they needed something much more approachable.”
Indeed, adopting the name Apple foreshadows the expansiveness and originality Steve would bring to the creation of these new machines. It’s suggestive of so much: the Garden of Eden, and the humanity—both good and bad—resulting from Eve’s bite of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge; Johnny Appleseed, the great sower of plentitude from American myth; the Beatles and their own record label, a connection that would lead to litigation years later; Isaac Newton, the plummeting apple, and the spark of an idea; American as apple pie; the legend of William Tell, who saved his own life and that of his son by using his crossbow to pierce an apple perched on the son’s head; wholesomeness, fecundity, and, of course, the natural world. Apple is not a word for geeks, unlike Asus, Compaq, Control Data, Data General, DEC, IBM, Sperry Rand, Texas Instruments, or Wipro, to mention some less felicitously named computer companies. It hints at a company that would bring, as it eventually did, humanism and creativity to the science and engineering of computers. As Clow suggests, settling on Apple was a great, intuitive decision. Steve was innately comfortable trusting his gut; it’s a characteristic of the best entrepreneurs, a necessity for anyone who wants to make a living developing things no one has ever quite imagined before.
Of course, Steve’s gut could also betray him, as it did when he fell in love with Apple’s first corporate logo. It was a pen-and-ink drawing, detailed in the way of an etching, of Isaac Newton sitting beneath an apple tree. It was the kind of overworked, precious image that a young calligraphy student might find enchanting, but far too esoteric for a company with big mainstream ambitions. This graphic rendition was drawn by Ronald Wayne, a former Atari engineer whom Steve had recruited to join the team. Wayne would have acted as the wise, elder tiebreaker if Steve and Woz ever came to loggerheads. The three signed a partnership agreement that gave Steve and Woz each 45 percent of the equity, with Wayne taking the remaining 10 percent. But Wayne quickly decided he wasn’t prepared to risk his future on this pair of neophytes. In June 1976, he sold back his stake for $800 to Jobs and Wozniak, who a year later would commission a new logo. In the tradition of Pete Best of the Beatles, Wayne would miss out on the ride of his life.
SHORTLY AFTER REGISTERING Apple as a California business partnership on April Fools’ Day, 1976, Steve and Woz made one more trip to the Homebrew Computer Club to show off the finished, fully assembled version of their new computer. Woz had met every challenge. On a circuit board measuring 9 inches by 15.5 inches, he had assembled a microprocessor, some dynamic random access memory chips, a central processing unit, a power supply, and other parts in such a way that once you connected it to a keyboard and a monitor, you could do a couple of radically new things: write computer programs on your own machine, in your own home, without being tied into a remote mainframe; and for the first time on a microcomputer, you could type your commands on a keyboard and see them immediately displayed on a black-and-white TV monitor, making them easier to edit than ever before. Both steps were radical departures from past practice. Woz had also written a version of BASIC, the simplest and most important hobbyist programming language, to run on the Motorola 6800 microprocessor that functioned as the brains of what he and Steve were starting to call the Apple 1. Woz didn’t fully appreciate it, but he had created the first truly personal computer. Steve, however, understood the magnitude of the achievement, and the power of the term personal computer in the context of an industry that had historically been anything but personal. So that was exactly the term he used whenever people asked him what it was that Woz had dreamed up.
The reaction from most club members, however, was tepid. Most were tinkerers who believed that half the fun of computing was in designing and building their own machines. That’s why they called it the Homebrew Computer Club, after all. With an Apple 1, however, all you had to do was set it up, connect it to a keyboard and a monitor, plug it in, and turn it on. Others beefed that Steve was flouting the club’s community spirit and its history of sharing ideas freely by asking them to pay for a prebuilt machine.
It was Steve’s nature to be out of synch with this kind of groupthink. He was a singular free-thinker whose ideas would often run against the conventional wisdom of any community in which he operated. He and the Homebrewers were cut from different cloth. Their spirited debates often bored him. While a few had broader business ambitions and eventually founded microcomputer companies of their own, most were obsessively focused on electronic intricacies, like determining the most efficient way to link memory chips to microprocessors, or imagining how you might use a cheap computer to play games like the ones they played on mainframes back in school. Steve liked knowing enough to be conversant about electronics and computer design, and later in his life he would boast about his own supposed skill as a programmer. But even in 1975, he didn’t fundamentally or passionately care about the intricacies of computers in and of themselves. Instead, he was obsessed by what might happen when this powerful technology got into the hands of many, many people.
Through the years, Steve would be the beneficiary of a fair amount of luck, some of it outrageously good, and of course some of it mortally bad. Pixar’s Ed Catmull likes to say that since you can’t control the luck itself, which is bound to come your way for better and for worse, what matters is your state of preparedness to deal with it. Steve had a kind of hyperawareness of his surroundings that allowed him to leap at opportunities that presented themselves. So when Paul Terrell, the owner of the Byte Shop computer store in nearby Mountain View, introduced himself to Steve and Woz after the presentation and let them know he was impressed enough to want to talk about doing some business together, Steve knew exactly what to do. The very next day he borrowed a car and drove over to the Byte Shop, Terrell’s humble little store on El Camino Real, Silicon Valley’s main thoroughfare. Terrell surprised him, saying that if the two Steves could deliver fifty fully assembled circuit boards with all the chips soldered into place by a certain date, he would pay them $500 a pop—in other words, ten times what Steve and Woz had been charging club members for the printed circuit boards alone. Without missing a beat, Steve happily promised delivery, even though he and Woz had neither the wherewithal to buy the components nor anything like the “factory space” or “labor force” necessary to build anything.
From this point forward, Steve’s opportunism and drive would define the contours of his relationship with Woz. Woz, who was five years older, taught Steve the intrinsic value of great engineering. His accomplishments reinforced Steve’s sense that anything was possible when you had technological genius on your side. But it was Steve’s ability to manipulate Woz that drove the partnership, and not always for the better. Back in 1974, when Atari had been trying to develop a new version of its big hit, Pong, Nolan Bushnell had asked Jobs to create a prototype, offering a considerable bonus if he could reduce the number of chips required for each circuit board. Steve brought Woz in on the project, promising to split the fee. Woz’s design was more economical than Bushnell had thought was even possible, and so Steve was paid a bonus of $5,000 on top of the base $700 fee. According to Woz, Steve only paid him $350, not the $2,850 he should have earned. Walter Isaacson, Steve’s official biographer, wrote that Jobs denied shortchanging Woz. But the accusation rings true, because it fits with a few other instances in which Steve took shortcuts with people who were close to him.
Still, like several other close collaborators who later grew disenchanted with Steve, Woz admits that he would never have succeeded so brilliantly without Steve. Terrell’s order for $25,000 worth of computer motherboards was about $25,000 higher than anything Woz imagined he might ever sell.
The two young men had created a nice little market for their “blue boxes,” but that was trivial compared with this. They had never manufactured multiple units of anything at such a significant scale. They had never formally financed a business. Nor had they ever really sold anything of any real value. None of this dissuaded Jobs. He set about taking care of the details of production. For a makeshift factory, he commandeered a bedroom in his parents’ house. He roped his adoptive sister, Patty, into fitting and soldering the semiconductors and other parts into their marked spaces on the circuit board. When Terrell ordered up another fifty, Steve moved the operation into his parents’ garage after his father cleared out the cars he was fixing up for resale. He hired Bill Fernandez, the very guy who back in high school had first introduced him to Woz. And he brought in other neighborhood kids to accelerate the process. He signed up an answering service and rented a post office box. He did, in other words, whatever it took.
The garage became home to an assembly line in miniature. In one area, Steve’s sister and some friends soldered chips into place. Woz had his own workspace nearby where he could vet the assembled boards as they were finished. On the other side of the garage they took turns testing the “stuffed” boards for hours under heat lamps to verify their durability. Steve’s mother answered phone calls. Everyone worked nights and weekends. And Steve was more focused than anyone. He prodded the team ceaselessly. When things went wrong, he moved fast; after an old girlfriend failed to solder a few chips correctly, he made her the team’s bookkeeper. His temper was short and he never hesitated to belittle their work when something went wrong. As a child, Steve had rarely been given any reason to hold back his honest feelings. Now he began to learn one of his first management lessons, namely that his temper, properly targeted, could actually be a very effective motivational tool. It was a lesson that would prove hard to undo.
Sure enough, under Steve’s gimlet eye, his motley team delivered all the circuit boards Terrell ever ordered. The product didn’t exactly fly off the shelf—fewer than two hundred Apple 1’s were ever sold. Even so, that summer in the legendary garage represented the first time Steve rallied a group of people to dig down deep and deliver something that was innovative and miraculous, and that they weren’t even sure they could create. It wouldn’t be the last time he would pull off such a trick. After an aborted stint at college, a picaresque pilgrimage to India, some revelatory travels on LSD, and an internship of sorts at Atari, Steve had discovered his true mission. And now he was totally locked in.
