Steve Jobs

“Yeah, I mean, he's the closest thing we have to Steve Jobs right now, so.”

“The last person in the world who underplayed it is Steve jobs. Trust me.”

“Yeah, yeah, but in terms of changing the world, there's not too many people who come close to Steve Jobs.”

“The first company I ever worked for when I graduated undergrad was a company called Varian Associates down in Palo Alto. And Steve Jobs' mother Was the office admin in our department, and when she retired, the department had a lunch for her, and Steve came alo…”

“And one time we spent a solid hour talking about naivete, not about you know, craziness, but naivete and how important that ingredient is to successful CEOs achieving outlier performance. And it's, I totally believe him in that regard that if he really knew Ev…”

“Well, storytelling is important in terms of not necessarily being the charismatic person, because not everybody can be a Steve Jobs, but being able to logically and convincingly lay out why this is the right investment opportunity, why it's different than othe…”

“Certainly in technology, if we just sort of focus in on that, one thing that's key is someone who is viscerally understands the product that they're building and the marketplace that product lives in. You know, if you look at someone like Steve Jobs, that's wh…”

“He is a revolutionary, and he's a visionary, and he created incredible products that changed the world, but he, I don't think people loved working for him, and I think that he also has, like, monomaniacal behaviors that I would not want to adopt, because that'…”

“If you have someone who is very good at, very charismatic, but is not believable, It's not going to work either. You need to play your strengths, and my strengths are not like into the I'm not Steve Jobs or these kind of leaders, kind of leader could I be? And…”

“I think the Steve Jobs biographies have done a lot of entrepreneurs a disservice with this notion of a reality distortion field that, you know, you can just, you know, if you believe it hard enough and convince a cult of people around you to believe it, that y…”

“He was hands down the most impressive executive inside a room that I've ever been around.”

“Steve Jobs, who was still running the company at the time, had a pretty strong philosophy that if you have an M&A team who's being judged on how many deals a year they bring in, then you're going to be doing M&A just to do M&A. So what he did is he had the pro…”

“Ken Kosienda's book, Creative Selection, I think it came out a couple years ago or so. My time I spent at Apple actually overlaps with the period he covers in the book, and the book is stunningly accurate in how it portrays how Apple designed and shipped produ…”

“He's no less than my hero these days. Steve Jobs used to be my hero. I would call Elon Musk my hero now. He's so authentically him and so deeply connected to his purpose and not afraid to show up in the world that makes sense to him and is aligned with his val…”

“I keep thinking back that if I had just done nothing, things would probably have been fine.”

“Basically, we had raised money two years earlier for fifty million dollars, and he offered to acquire the company Four or fifty million dollars, so basically no change in valuation since our pre-launch, you know, fundraise,”

“We're going to sell the iPod. It's going to be so awesome that people will buy Macs so they could use their iPod. We're going to sell more Macs because they're going to need to buy one to use an iPod that they're going to have to have. Well, guess what? The fi…”

“Steve said the best marketing, Steve Jobs, the best marketing is just truth telling. As long as the product meets the expectations you set for it, the best marketing is just telling the truth.”

“He was like, well, you guys are a feature, not a product. And now we're gonna have to like compete with you and kill you and you don't have distribution and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.”

“They call them the coach, the trillion dollar coach, because he would, as you know, coach Steve Jobs, who no one in the world thought was coachable, and then he would coach Larry Page and Eric Schmidt and Sergey at Google on two of the most important companies…”

“The best way to describe, you know, working with Steve is perfection. He would Call us at crazy hours of the night, or, you know, or super early in the morning to tell us that, you know, there was something off with some piece of the UI, which no one had possi…”

“For me, probably the most transformative moment is when I reached out to Steve Jobs and John Lasseter and brought them into the Walt Disney Company and made a home for Pixar.”

“For me, probably the most transformative moment is when you know, I reached out to Steve Jobs and John Lasseter and brought them into the Walt Disney Company and made a home for Pixar.”

“If you think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg Elon Musk, none of these folks are just trust that the team will get it done. They're getting very involved in little details. And it's much harder to point to examples of incredible consumer technology s…”

“So back then, I used to own Brightstar. And I had an idea of how could Apple actually double their sales. And after many emails to Steve Jobs, which he wrote me back, no interest. One day he got tired of everybody pinging him that he had to meet me. So he agre…”

“Personal computers are not just going to revolutionize the computing industry, but how we communicate, how we shop, how we entertain ourselves and how we live.”

“It works in the world of like small SaaS businesses where you're trying to make a marginal improvement on a, you know Small, you know, industry, if you're doing workflow software for plumbers, I'm sure that is a, like, reasonable approach. I don't think that E…”

“Jensen is the Steve Jobs of our era.”

“I worked for him in 1984 in the Macintosh division when I was writing assembly language code.”

“And so they got two, two of the greatest minds in Silicon Valley were taken out of the company. This is the greatest value destruction that's happened since firing Steve Jobs at Apple. And it was a massive mistake.”

“You can bucket great founders into three backgrounds. The most common is that you have kind of a messed up childhood. The second most common would be, ah, you're gay, and the third most common would be you were adopted. Look at like a list of all-time greats. …”

“The Steve Jobs quote, A players, higher A players, B players, higher C players, is profoundly true. There should be an asterisk explaining why this is true, and the reason for it is fear.”

“Every single time when one of the leaders at Fuse explains to me why they failed and they couldn't hit their own goal, I sent them this article.”

“Actually, it turns out, in retrospect, they should have done the Steve Jobs thing. They should have swapped them out, got it public, got a cash flow like crazy, and sometime in 22 should have gotten back and said, now, Now is the time to do autonomy”

“Apple brought Steve back. It just creates, created the boundary conditions for more financiers, capital boards to actually just give founders like a longer run, right? Like a long, longer run rate. And so and then the results were pretty good because now you h…”