Chapter 2

“I Didn’t Want to Be a Businessman”

The story of Steve Jobs’s first tenure at Apple Computer is the tale of a young visionary in the adolescence of his career. After playing such a crucial role in making and selling the Apple 1, Steve faced the challenge of moving his vision, intelligence, intuition, and ferocious personality from his father’s garage into a much bigger “space”—the corporate and financial and industrial world of Silicon Valley. Steve may have been a quick study, but he didn’t have an instinctive sense of how to do this. Some young men and women are bred for corporate life—Bill Gates comes to mind. Steve was not.

If Steve was ever going to do something grander than just cook up something cool with the kids in the garage, he had to learn to play with the grown-ups. But it wasn’t going to be easy. As he told me several times: “I didn’t want to be a businessman, because all the businessmen I knew I didn’t want to be like.” Steve’s natural inclination was to position himself as the critic, the rebel, the visionary, the lithe and nimble David against the stodgy Goliath of whatever powers might be. Collaborating with “the Man,” to use the colloquial terminology of his day, wasn’t just problematic, it was tantamount to collusion. Yes, he wanted to play their game, but by his own rules.

ALMOST AS SOON as the young men had started selling the first batches of Apple 1’s, Woz told Steve that he knew he could design a much better machine. As Woz imagined it, the next model would display its results in full color, pack a lot more power and performance onto the same-size “motherboard,” and have multiple “slots” that could be adapted to help the machine perform more tasks. If Steve and Woz were going to have any chance of producing and selling such a snazzy machine, they would have to scrounge up some serious working capital. They needed far more than they could get by continuing to cadge personal loans from friends, parents, and advance payments from proprietors of hobby shops. Not knowing exactly where he could get that kind of money, Steve began to make a real effort to connect with Silicon Valley’s cloistered world of successful entrepreneurs, marketers, and financiers.

In 1976, the route to success in Silicon Valley wasn’t remotely as well mapped as it is today, when entrepreneurs can find the path to financing by simply Googling “venture capital.” Back then the Valley had a much smaller mix of lawyers, financiers, and managers, and most business was conducted face-to-face. But Steve had several qualities that made him a superb networker. “I was really lucky to get into computers when it was a very young industry,” he once told me. “At that point in time there weren’t many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. Wherever they came from they loved it, and there were some incredibly brilliant people involved.” He had no qualms about calling anyone up in search of information or help; heck, he’d been doing that since his phone call to Bill Hewlett when he was fourteen years old. Steve had none of the tentativeness most young men or women might have as they set out to learn the nuances of a complicated new world like the venture capital business. He had such faith in the excellence of his work that he assumed someone would eventually agree to fund. He could be genuinely charming when this confidence didn’t lead him into boorishness.

So he tirelessly navigated the Valley’s network of experts, one phone call and one meeting at time, until he finally found himself connected with Regis McKenna, the marketing whiz who had helped promote Intel, and who would eventually be instrumental in establishing Apple’s iconoclastic, and remarkably resilient, public image.

Steve and Woz met McKenna at his offices. Steve certainly didn’t dress up for this meeting—as usual, his jeans had holes, his hair was unbrushed, he wore no shoes, and he smelled. At this point in his life, he deemed deodorant, footwear, and the like affectations. McKenna was a unique member of the Silicon Valley elite. Well coiffed, with magnetic blue eyes, he was frank, unforgiving, and ubiquitously networked, and had a sly sense of humor and brash self-confidence that matched Steve’s. His business card simply read: Regis McKenna, Himself. He saw past the boys’ nerdy slovenliness to their remarkable intelligence, and found himself liking them. “Steve had breadth,” McKenna remembers, “and a sort of thoughtful way about him that would always be there.” So he and Nolan Bushnell, Jobs’s old boss at Atari, steered Steve to Don Valentine, a founding partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the first venture capital firms to master the art of early-stage investing in high-tech companies.

Valentine came from the chip world. He had worked with the founders of Intel before they abandoned Fairchild Semiconductor to open their own shop, and he had once held a senior position at National Semiconductor. He met with the boys only because McKenna was a friend, and quite literally held his nose to hear Steve and Woz out. After their visit, he called McKenna to ask, “Why’d you send me these renegades from the human race?” Yet he did point the boys toward an individual “angel” investor who would be more apt to work closely with an idiosyncratic startup such as Apple.

That’s how Steve was introduced to A. C. “Mike” Markkula, who would become, for better and for worse, one of Steve’s two primary early mentors at Apple. One day, Markkula decided to drive his gold Corvette over to the garage and let the boys walk him through the wonders of the Apple 1. A former Intel sales executive who also owned an advanced degree in electrical engineering, he had made a lot of money in a hurry but had “retired” in his early thirties when he was passed over for the company’s top sales job. Rather quiet, Markkula was at heart a computer geek, and could do some programming himself. He immediately grasped the potential in the ambitious ideas of Jobs and Wozniak, and he also could see how intelligent, resourceful, and yet malleable they were. After a few meetings he bought in, driving a pretty hard bargain. In one of the greatest angel investments of all time, Markkula ponied up $92,000 out of his own pocket and arranged for a $250,000 line of credit with Bank of America, in return for a one-third stake in Apple.

Markkula insisted that Woz, who was still working at Hewlett-Packard, become a full-time Apple employee. Woz loved working at HP, but he also really did want to create another great microcomputer. So he made one last presentation to HP, to give them a final shot to develop his still rough concept for the Apple II. They weren’t interested. “Big experienced companies and investors, analysts—those kinds of people, that are trained in business and much smarter than we were—they didn’t think that this was going to be a real big market,” Woz remembered. “They thought it was going to be a little hobby thing, like home robots or ham radios, that a few techie people would get into.” So he quit his job and signed on.

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.

Adding 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.”

The two spent many hours in the basement of McKenna’s ranchstyle Sunnyvale home, talking about Steve’s goals for Apple and its wondrous Apple II. Their conversations ranged widely, over design, marketing, product development, and strategy, and how these were intertwined in a healthy business. McKenna was expert at framing a company’s development in a narrative Steve could relate to. “We talked about how your financials are your best marketing tools,” says McKenna. “To get people to sit up and pay notice, especially in the computer business, you need to be a successful financial company.”

McKenna was absorbed and engaged by Steve. “He was very pleasant and enjoyable, and had a lot of depth intellectually. He could talk about a wide range of subjects. We could have real trivial conversations, and then we could talk about Apple and the business. I remember him once asking me if I thought Apple would ever be bigger than Intel. The answer, of course, is that Intel was a component manufacturer, and usually the equipment manufacturers get much bigger in revenue.”

McKenna and Jobs connected on so many levels that Regis got to know Steve as well as anyone during those early years. It helped that he didn’t tolerate any of Steve’s more obnoxious behavior. “He did have that quick, reactive temper, but I never had him shout at me; I never had him upset with me. Did we disagree? Yeah. Did we argue? Yes. But we also got along really, really well,” he remembers. “I had an assistant who told me that Steve called up wanting something, and had yelled and yelled at her, using a lot of four-letter words. Next time I saw Steve, I told him, ‘Hey, don’t ever do that again.’ She said the next time he came to the office, he walked in and said he was really embarrassed and apologized. I was trained in the semiconductor industry under Charlie Sporck and Don Valentine and those guys. If you weren’t strong, they’d just gobble you up. So it didn’t bother me to say, ‘Hey, Steve, shut up.’ He didn’t dominate you to be mean. But when people acted as minions, he let them be minions.”

McKenna and his team worked with Steve to craft a marketing pitch designed to make the Apple II stand out as the friendly computer for more than just computer geeks. The headline of the first promotional brochure McKenna created for the machine asserted, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” It was a concept that went against every industry trend, since most of the existing manufacturers, including Commodore and MITS and Vector Graphic, advertised in the hobbyist rags with endless gray type that alerted obsessive geeks to this or that great new feature. Friendly marketing would distinguish Apple from its competitors for decades.

McKenna also helped Steve understand the value of presenting this image across every platform the company touched. Early on, he convinced Steve that since there was nothing remotely quaint about Apple’s computers, the company would need an unmistakably modern visual identity, rather than Ronald Wayne’s archaic etching, which was more appropriate for a Berkeley head shop than a company that hoped to lead a global revolution in computing. The replacement was the now-famous apple with the bite taken out and five exuberant rainbow stripes—each fitting perfectly atop the other, as Steve insisted. It seemed sharp and modern, and seemed to promise that computing from Apple would be something much more fun and easy than those mainframes from IBM, with its sober, stratified, white initials against a deep blue palette—almost like a pin-striped suit laid sideways. As Steve explained at the time: “Our whole company is founded on the principle that there is something very different that happens with one person, one computer. It’s very different than having ten people to one computer. What we’re trying to do is remove the barrier of having to learn how to use a computer.”

Like McKenna, Steve had the gift of being able to explain profoundly complicated technology in simple, clear, and even rhapsodic terms. McKenna and Jobs knew this was a profound asset for Apple, especially given the company’s other nondescript leaders. There’s a long and wonderful extemporaneous quote from a New Yorker piece in late 1977 that offers rich proof of Steve’s fully formed verbal mastery. Written at a time when the average reader knew so little about computers that a writer could delight in titillating terminology like “naked computer” and get away with obvious puns using the words “byte” and “Apple,” the magazine’s reporter encountered Steve manning the Apple Computer booth at a computer fair. “I wish we’d had these personal machines when I was growing up,” Jobs tells him, before continuing on for a total of 224 words:

“People have been hearing all sorts of things about computers during the past ten years through the media. Supposedly computers have been controlling various aspects of their lives. Yet, in spite of that, most adults have no idea what a computer really is, or what it can or can’t do. Now, for the first time, people can actually buy a computer for the price of a good stereo, interact with it, and find out all about it. It’s analogous to taking apart 1955 Chevys. Or consider the camera. There are thousands of people across the country taking photography courses. They’ll never be professional photographers. They just want to understand what the photographic process is all about. Same with computers. We started a little personal-computer manufacturing company in a garage in Los Altos in 1976. Now we’re the largest personal-computer company in the world. We make what we think of as the Rolls-Royce of personal computers. It’s a domesticated computer. People expect blinking lights, but what they find is that it looks like a portable typewriter, which, connected to a suitable readout screen, is able to display in color. There’s a feedback it gives to people who use it, and the enthusiasm of the users is tremendous. We’re always asked what it can do, and it can do a lot of things, but in my opinion the real thing it is doing right now is to teach people how to program the computer.”

Before moving on to a booth where a bunch of kids were playing a computer game called Space Voyager, the reporter asks if Steve “would mind telling us his age. ‘Twenty-two,’ Mr. Jobs said.”

Speaking off-the-cuff to a passing journalist from a decidedly nontechie publication, Steve finds so many ways to demystify for the average person the insanely geeky device that he and Woz had created. He understands their fundamental fear that computers may take over too much of modern life (a fear he would capitalize on repeatedly, most notably in the Orwellian imagery of Apple’s famous “1984” commercial). He sympathizes with their ignorance. He offers several analogies to comforting examples they will understand: Chevys, typewriters, cameras. Indeed, he makes using a computer seem no more complicated than taking a photograph, going so far as to call the Apple II “domesticated.” And yet he elevates both his company and its computer into something aspirational. He links this machine made a few months ago by some disheveled California misfits to Rolls-Royce, the seventy-three-year-old paragon of sophisticated industrial manufacturing and elite consumer taste. He even calls Apple a world leader, an absolutely unprovable claim that rockets the little company into the same league as IBM and DEC and Burroughs, which were then the industry’s giants. He was an extraordinary extemporaneous speaker, and McKenna helped him wield that tool to great effect.

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.