Steve Jobs

“I certainly tried to mimic Steve Jobs. I certainly tried to mimic Bezos and Gates, and all of the great ones you know, the very charismatic ones, like Howard Schultz of Starbucks, and, you know, I've learned from all of them, and in a way I've tried to imitate…”

“If you look at all of them, Steve Jobs, Enzo Ferrari, Akio Morita, Sam Walton, Estee Lauder, Coco Chanel, Edwin Land, they do their best work when they're much older. And so I would, I thought a lot about that. I'm like, dang, this is like a reoccurring theme …”

“And I know one of the ways he did it, which was brilliant and that don't get talked about. He actually called up journalists. Sometimes, and tested ideas on them, and like, we might do this kind of thing, and then hear the journalists react to it, and it's lik…”

“You could always, almost say nobody hardly invents anything, because they're always taking some other ideas and putting them together in interesting new combinations.”

“Marita bought Sony, bought Columbia Records, bought Columbia Pictures. He saw the distribution, the hardware, the software, he saw it all. But Steve took it, not literally, but it was part of the inspiration behind his chain of thinking, right?”

“He said, I don't want to do headphones. You do them. So we went out to a restaurant once. I'll never forget it. We went to this Greek restaurant and this was it was after he was sick and but we went out to a restaurant and it was one of those restaurants where…”

“He gets it, you know, and most of the people I meet in that world know how to do what they're doing, but as far as the particular thing that Steve had, I haven't met another one that has that. I really, not that they're bad people or anything, they just, they…”

“I helped him get the licenses for iTunes.”

“To get kind of the holy grail of the large scale organization that's still innovating, either you need two people involved who are able to balance each other. And by the way, you could say this is like Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, you know, would be a canonical ex…”

“And so Bob Noyce was 100% the Steve Jobs of his time.”

“Jim's like a true, he's like an Elon, he's like a true Elon, Steve Jobs level guy. And so like incredibly creative, incredibly bright, incredibly charismatic, but like he's volatile.”

“The only answer I've come to as I've spoken to people there is that it actually has to do with tenure of leadership, which is one of the principles I've also tried to internalize Spotify. So they have very long tenure at the senior leadership, which means that…”

“This is the Spotify story of access versus, versus ownership, for example, which is, by the way, why I would also love Steve Jobs to be around, but also not because, you know, he tried to kill us many times.”

“In that 10 year period, Steve fired two members of the board of directors at Pixar. The reason he fired them was that they never disagreed, and he said, if they don't disagree with me, then they aren't bringing any value to the company.”

“Steve had such a powerful voice that it didn't matter when he spoke, Ed Catmull: He was going to have this extremely strong effect on the dynamics of the room, and he understood that. Ed Catmull: So, it was the reason he didn't come. Ed Catmull: I said, you…”

“Michael Eisner was testifying against without knowing what the term actually meant. So it was upsetting to Steve.”

“We had to get another outside force, and the outside force was Steve Jobs.”

“No. I think some people think he did, and I, that was interesting there, but no, he didn't. He was very, we talked about this. He was very clear about it. Like any project, you know, when you work on something, there are a lot of people around that are working…”

“There was nothing that Steve ever said that had not been said by some of the, somebody else before in one of those meetings.”

“There's another reason why you didn't go to the brain trust meetings, is that in order to get the dynamics right, that the people with power, either real or perceived power, need to shut the hell up for the first 10 to 15 minutes. David Senra: And he couldn't…”

“Michael Eisner was still the CEO, and he would not have continued with Michael Eisner. So, since we were getting into the contract, he started discussions with other studios which would mean, you know, them doing the distribution.”

“Bob Iger starts the conversation by saying, I've got a crappy hand, can we talk? And for him, it's like, that's a show of honesty that's unusual. David Senra: Usually you don't start a negotiation by saying, hey, other party, you have all the leverage here. …”

“What people didn't understand, and I think they didn't know, was that years of 91 to 95 was when Steve made this major transformation.”

“Steve walked away feeling like it was one of the worst deal he's ever struck.”

“It's actually when he showed us the first iPhone when it was a secret. And we're on this bridge between the one building and there's a bridge over that goes between another tall building next to it. And the secret lab is where they're designing it. And he told…”

“I consulted for years for him on Pixar when he first had the idea, and it was some of the best times I ever had because he's whip smart, unbelievable memory, totally unstoppable with an idea,”