Steve Jobs: How a Dreamer Changed the World

We are delivering today the iPad, the new iMac, the iPod, ioto, MacBook Air, iTunes. It's a revolutionary. He was one of the most creative and daring CEOs, a global icon who shaped the worlds of technology and media for over 30 years. Computers, music, movies, and mobile phones were transformed by Apple's Steve Jobs. He was a brilliant visionary. Few executives in history suffered such painful setbacks. It looks like Jobs was washed up and was a total has-been or enjoyed as much success.

Steve, I love you! And Steve came back and began what I think is the greatest turnaround in the history of corporate America. A very remarkable man, extremely smart, a spellbinding, mesmerizing leader of people. Jobs went from having nearly blown this amazing fortune and bankrupted himself to rising as a billionaire with a brilliant future. Steve Jobs was a true son of Silicon Valley, born in 1955 in San Francisco. He was raised in its freewheeling culture of experimentation and innovation.

Alan Deutman is an author who has written extensively about Jobs and Apple. Steve Jobs, from going back to when he was a teenager, was very influenced by the 1960s and 1970s counterculture. You know, he loved the Beatles, he loved Bob Dylan. He enrolled in Oregon's Reed College but dropped out to travel after just one semester. Robert X. Cringley was Apple computer employee number 12. When I met him, he was I think 19 years old. He had hair down to his waist, and he only ate fruit. He was, you know, clearly a hippie.

When Jobs returned to his childhood home in California, he became interested in what was then an entirely new concept, the personal computer. He joined meetings of The Homebrew Computer Club with a man who would become his partner in founding Apple Computer, Steve Wozniak. People are getting up. These computers are going to revolutionize life, and I felt like, oh my God, I'm a part of this huge revolution that we're talking about. Everybody's going to have a computer in the home, and nobody in the outside world believes us.

Projects that I would design and build very frequently, Steve would say he knew how to sell it. Jobs and Wozniak took time off their day jobs to set up shop in the family garage in Los Altos. We didn't have a telephone to phone the computer stores in the garage; that was in Steve's bedroom. The team's first computer, the Apple One, as the tech industry in Silicon Valley took off, Jobs saw opportunity. The penalty for failure for going and trying to start a company in this Valley is non-existent. There really isn't a penalty for failure, either psychologically or economically, in the sense that if you have a good idea and you go out to start your own company, even if you fail, you're generally considered worth more to the company you left because you've gained all this valuable experience in many disciplines.

To bring their ideas to life, the Apple team needed capital. Jobs convinced angel investor Mike Markkula to invest around $90,000 and a line of credit in the fledgling company. It was exactly what they needed to create their new computer, the Apple 2. What was revolutionary about the Apple 2 was its use of color, the fact it had a built-in keyboard, and it was the first one to look like a consumer device. And so it was a huge success; you know, it was astounding success right from the beginning.

Steve came to me one day and he said, "You realize our stock is worth more than our parents have made in their lifetime?" And I was stunned. What the heck? How can you have so much and then six months later you have ten times more? They were the stars of Silicon Valley and the cover boys for a new industry. Michael Moritz is a former Time Magazine reporter and a legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist. There's always that sense of anxiety and tension associated with the question, "How can we possibly follow this?"

In 1979, in a stock deal reportedly worth $1 million, Steve Jobs was allowed access to Xerox PARC, the company's famed research and development laboratory. Jobs and his team saw the future here, the way computers would be used, including the use of graphics and a small device that had not yet been revealed to the outside world—a mouse. And you see two programs at once, and I was stunned. They see three programs at once, and I thought, oh my God, once you have this machine, you're never going to want to go back. It's a one-way door; computers are going to be this way, and you'll never go back.

Leander Kahney is the editor of the blog Cult of Mac and the author of the book Inside Steve's Brain. Xerox had invented the entire paradigm of modern computing, but they had no idea what they were sitting on. But Jobs did; he wanted to bring the graphical user interface to Apple Computer. But first, he had to deal with a power shift going on inside Apple. The Apple board of directors wanted an experienced executive to be president of the company. Jobs interviewed dozens of candidates before he focused on someone from outside the tech world, Pepsi CEO John Sculley.

Steve, in those days, he had long black hair and very piercing blue eyes. He looked down at his running shoes, and then he looked up at me and he said, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" And it was like someone just knocked the wind out of my stomach. A few weeks later, I was working at Apple. For Apple Computer to thrive, they also needed another successful product. Jobs thought he had it in a powerful business computer called the Lisa, but the Apple Board of Directors refused to give him the project.

Jobs threw himself into another project, the Macintosh. He felt this would break open the market—or rather to characterize Steve's brain properly—or rather the market ought to break open, you know, if the market had any sense. He set up shop in an outline building in the Apple complex, and his intense drive began to take its toll on the Mac team. People would bring him work to look at. It would be 1:00 in the morning sometimes. Steve said, "I'm not even going to look at it." And they, "Well, Steve, I've worked on this thing for 25 hours." And he said, "I know, but it's not good enough. You know, go back and work on it some more."

Some of them just wound up quitting in disgust. Some of them wound up saying they'd never work for Steve again. They just couldn't. When the exhausted team finished, they had a revolutionary new computer. Many of us have been working on Macintosh for over two years now, and it has turned out insanely great. Guy Kawasaki was the software evangelist on the original Mac. Like 60 seconds after I saw the demo of Macintosh, it was so cool, angels started to sing. I mean, it was a beautiful experience. This was supposed to be the computer that tamed the complexity of everything associated with the world of computing to make it available, as Steve would say, for mere mortals.

The day we came out with his intuitive marketing sense, Jobs unveiled the Mac with a groundbreaking commercial aimed at IBM, the leader in computers. It aired nationally only once on Super Bowl Sunday in January of 1984, but the impact was explosive. We estimated we got $45 million of free publicity of it being run over and over again by television networks all over the world because no one had ever seen a commercial like this before. But the excitement surrounding the Mac launch didn't translate into sales, and Jobs' standing at Apple became the big question. He ran amok at Apple; he cost the company a lot of money.

So Steve was considered to be wasteful. He was considered to be self-indulgent. He was the largest shareholder, but also kind of a brat. The thinking was, "Well, Macintosh had not penetrated a business. We need a more mature leadership, some adult supervision to run the company." By 1985, tension at Apple rose as an internal power struggle threatened to tear the company apart. I said, "Steve, we're a public company, and I have to tell the board where we are in terms of inventory, in terms of sales performance, and we're in trouble."

When it reached the point where he identified Sculley as a rival, he decided he had to take Sculley out. Much to Steve's surprise, the board sided with Sculley. The knee-jerk reaction of conventional people is to elbow what they see as disruptive forces aside, and Steve, the co-founder of Apple, was unceremoniously ushered to the exits. He was fired. It almost destroyed him. They threw him out of his own company; I mean, he thought it was unbearable.

Jobs quickly regrouped, taking five top managers to start a computer company called NeXT. There were all kinds of ideas, and it turned out that he wanted to go back and once again create the most insanely great computer—something that would help change the world. Very modest ambitions. The company struggled to find a market for its expensive new computer. Jobs faced a tough choice—abandon the computer or face bankruptcy.

It was a big deal when they realized that very few people were buying their hardware, but it turned out that their software was just breathtaking. The decision: ditch the highly designed computer and focus instead on selling what makes it run—the company's elegant operating system. I think that period during which he wandered in the wilderness was a period full of adversity, and I think people come back from adversity. If they can return from adversity, they come back harder, sharper, and far more geared for battle.

In a 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, Steve Jobs revealed for the first time some personal details about his early life. My biological mother was a young unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college. This was the start of my life.

He was raised by parents who adopted him. They were blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth people; they were good parents, but they weren't intellectuals. Later in life, he discovered that his biological parents were intellectuals, and his biological sister turned out to be a brilliant novelist, Mona Simpson. In 1991, at age 36, Jobs started his own family when he married Laurene Powell. They had three children in addition to his daughter from a previous relationship. Jobs called these years after Apple his most creative and personally fulfilling.

His professional life was also changing dramatically. Right after his ouster from Apple, Jobs bought a company from Lucasfilm that would become a household name: this little animation company called Pixar. He hired John Lasseter, an animator from Disney. Their goal was to create fully computer-animated feature films, and Hollywood was interested. Pixar made a deal with Disney to work together to make Toy Story. I actually made the deal with him at the time he came into the movie business. His instincts were impeccable; he put his money up, his own personal money. He was on the line.

In 1995, Jobs' investment in Pixar was about to pay off in a big way. "I am Buzz Lightyear. I come in peace!" "Oh, I'm so glad you're not a dinosaur!" Toy Story, Pixar's first feature film, was a blockbuster and became 1995's highest-grossing U.S. movie. Pixar really created probably the most successful genre in the movie business today, which is CG animation. When Pixar went public, Steve Jobs became a billionaire. It had been more than ten years since Steve Jobs had been fired from Apple, and the drama and turmoil at the company continued to get worse.

After Steve left, the company lost its compass, lost its mission, lost its founding spirit. Its products got old and stale, and during that whole period, Microsoft had gotten stronger and stronger. Computers running Windows accounted for nearly 80% of the market. Apple's market share could not break 11%, and their exiled co-founder was sitting on an operating system that could save them. They wanted NeXT's operating system. In an ironic and stunning turn of events, Apple Computer bought NeXT for over $400 million.

"We're going to be building our next-generation operating system on NeXT technology!" Selling NeXT to Apple was genius. You just have to say, "Wow, Steve!" Steve Jobs returned to the company he helped create and became interim CEO, and so they began what I think is the greatest turnaround in the history of corporate America. It was his finest hour, really. He hauled ass and brought things back together again around a cohesive vision.

Because he came in as the rainmaker, he called a big meeting in this big meeting room, and he says, "You know what's wrong with the company?" And everyone's too scared to answer; no one will say anything. And he goes, "The products suck! They've got no sex in them!" The comeback included a remarkable announcement. Bill Gates, who had long been considered Jobs' main rival, would invest in Apple Computer. Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple to help save the day.

That must have been the low point for Apple. I happen to have a special guest with me today via satellite downlink, and if we could get him up on the stage right now. [Applause]. Very excited about the new release we're building. This is called Mac Office 98. Once back at Apple, Jobs' characteristic flair for marketing came back in full force. Ken Segall worked with Jobs on a breakthrough advertising campaign that defined their new direction. "Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes." Think different became the line that launched Apple's rebirth.

Steve was aware of every detail. I mean literally every word, every image. One of the reasons why I thought the words were so perfect is I think you literally could have hung a sign that said "Think different" in the garage when Wozniak and Jobs created their company. It would have been appropriate then, you know, as it is today. But the company was still in trouble and needed a hit. It found it in a redesign of the bulky beige box.

There was a, you know, kind of a gasp from around the room because, keep in mind, that no computer had ever looked anything like that. It was transparent! You can see the guts of it; you know, looked like it came out of the Jetsons or something. The iMac was an astounding success. The thing was the biggest selling computer of all time: 6 million units sold! And it really sort of set the stage for Apple's comeback. If that hadn't been a hit, Apple and Steve Jobs would be history. It gave them enough money and enough momentum to start coming out with other products.

Soon after, he saw the future, and it was not a personal computer. "This is the best thing I think we've ever done!" In October 2001, Jobs unveiled something that, even for Apple, was groundbreaking: the iPod. It went from concept to market in about 8 months, but the iPod itself was only one part of a much bigger plan. I think the genius of the iPod was iTunes, not iPod. Jobs was going after a music business under siege by piracy and file sharing.

Larry Kenville and other music executives were called up to Apple's Cupertino offices to negotiate terms that would define the future of the music industry. The negotiation was classic Steve Jobs. He simply said, "If I can't sell it for $9 on my store, I am not selling it! That's it—no discussion!" In business, you're used to a lot of give-and-take. That's not Apple's way. Apple's way is they get what they want. When iTunes became available on Windows as well as Macs, the music industry realized just who had a gold record, a complete monopoly of retail online.

Both Apple and the music business have come out ahead because of Apple's entry, but Apple has made a whole lot more money because they're selling hardware for hundreds of dollars, and the music business is selling 99-cent products. Over 350 million iPods have been sold since its release in October of 2001. The company's product launches became huge events. Anticipation and speculation grew to a fever pitch with every new product.

"Good morning, and welcome to Macworld! We got a lot of great stuff for today! We went into the holiday quarter with the best lineup of music players on the planet. We believe that the personal computer is undergoing a rapid evolution to be the center of our digital lives, and we have never been more excited about this stuff!" Jobs' signature approach is known as the reality distortion field. The reality distortion field is where he says, "And it only costs $1,800," and people applaud. And when they get home, they say, "Yeah, but the computer that I have now cost $900. Why is it good that it only costs $1,800?" And we're still, "Why did I buy one on the way out?"

You're not talking about numbers; you're not talking about, you know, anything rational. You're talking about emotion. In the summer of 2004, Apple Computer was thriving, but its leader was not. Jobs revealed in an employee email that he had been diagnosed with what he said was a treatable form of pancreatic cancer. He wrote that he underwent successful surgery for the deadly disease and expected a full recovery.

In 2007, after a frightening health scare, Steve Jobs was back—back on stage for one of the most important launches in Apple's history. It was a product Apple had been secretly developing for years: a revolutionary mobile device. There was so much buzz about that that it was estimated to be worth $400 million. That's all you could read about from October through January. There wasn't a goat farmer in Afghanistan that hadn't heard about the iPhone.

"Steve, I love you!" It was far more than a film; this is handheld computing. A year later, at an iPhone event in June of 2008, Jobs was noticeably thinner and frail. Speculation spread that the cancer he was treated for four years earlier had returned. Jobs jokingly shrugged off the rumors, but after missing his first Macworld since his return, he finally disclosed that his health problems were more complex and announced a medical leave of absence. Day-to-day operations were turned over to Apple's Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook.

After a liver transplant in September 2009, Jobs returned in his trademark outfit to his familiar mark on stage. "So I now have the liver of a mid-20s person who died in a car crash and was generous enough to donate their organs, and I wouldn't be here without such generosity. I'm vertical! I'm back at Apple, loving every day of it!" The next year, he revealed yet another extraordinary device with his typically less than subtle script. "It's phenomenal! Fantastic! It's the best device I've ever seen, and we'd like to show it to you today for the first time!" [Applause] "We call it the iPad!"

It was another giant success for Jobs, but the celebration was short-lived. In January 2011, with Apple surging to all-time highs, Steve Jobs announced his third and final medical leave. He finally encountered a foe he could not outrun. True to form, Jobs had anticipated this moment at Stanford in 2005 and what some now consider one of the best commencement addresses of all time: "Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, and most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

Ever a child of the 60s, he signed off with words from a favorite source: "The Whole Earth Catalog: Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish." Thank you all very much! He missed time. Ryan, play a song for him. [Music]

Steve Jobs died on October 5th, 2011, at his home in Palo Alto. He was 56 at the time of his death. Apple Inc. was the most valuable company in the world. "Crown of creation!" So, and you could say, "What's the big deal? Anyone could have done the Macintosh, anyone could have done the iPhone, anyone could have built CD-ROMs into computers, anyone could have put FireWire; anyone could have done any of this." The reality is, nobody else did it. And so, that’s the genius of Steve.

I think "visionary" is one of those words that gets abused, and particularly in Silicon Valley, when anyone wearing spectacles can be called a visionary. Steve is one of the very few people. I think there are probably only a handful of people in Silicon Valley since World War II. Maybe you can count them on the fingers of one hand who deserve that moniker. Steve is one of them.