Steve Jobs

“Highly competitive personalities like Jordan and Bryant could absolutely kill a team atmosphere with displays of ruthlessness or selfishness. That, that sentence right there. You put, take out Brian and Jordan, and put in Steve Jobs are really a ton of the peo…”

“Like, the Steve Jobs at 25 or 29 could not be, lead the quality of an organization that Apple became when Apple, when Steve came back when, you know, he's in his late forties.”

“They paid half a billion dollars essentially to rehire Steve Jobs, and it was the bargain of the century.”

“Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup depends on the first 10 employees. I agree.”

“Jobs' return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business The creation of new value cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.”

“Steve Jobs himself had decided how he would judge our browser as a product. The focus would be on one thing, speed. Steve wanted our browser to be fast, to be really fast, much faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer, which is the product that we aim to replac…”

“We never waited around for brilliant flashes of insight that might solve problems in one swoop, and we had very few actual eureka moments. Instead, this is the main point of the book. Instead, we move forward in stepwise fashion from problem to design to demo …”

“Vince Lombardi was the Steve Jobs of football coaches.”

“Shallow beauty in products does not serve people. Product design should strive for depth, for a beauty rooted in what a product does. Not merely in how it looks and feels. Form should follow a function, even though this might seem like a strange notion for pix…”

“Three, three weeks or a month before the keynote itself, Steve would start rehearsing with portions of his slide deck. Slowly, day by day, he would build the show by stepping through it As he wanted to present it at the keynote. This was one of Steve's great s…”

“The best one, if you can only read one, and I wouldn't just read one, but if you only had to read one, that'd be Becoming Steve Jobs, which I just read for the second time on episode two 65.”

“At first, Steve attempted to brush off the question, but when Williams pressed him, Steve said, I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful and not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's ne…”

“Steve did not want to sit around and have a bunch of meetings and talk about hypotheticals. He wanted to physically see the work, so they pushed all their work forward through a series of demos, and in many cases, him telling you specifically, hey, what I want…”

“Building a company at the intersection of technology and liberal arts is literally something Edwin Land talked about and did, something Steve Jobs learned from Edwin Land, and then Steve Jobs used it at Apple.”

“One bad experience might undo Dozens are a hundred positive experiences that a customer previously had with your company.”

“The reason that Apple is able to create products like the iPad is because we've always tried to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts to be able to get the best of both. To make extremely advanced products from a technology point of view, but a…”

“Steve Jobs famously disbanded such an organization at Apple, which was called the Advanced Technology Group, shortly after he reasserted control over the company in 1997.”

“He believed that stripping away non-essential features made products easier for people to learn from the start and Easier to use over time. He wanted products and their software to speak for themselves. He realized that nobody would be standing over the should…”

“People just do not care about your product as much as you do. You have to make it simple and easy to use right from the get go. And so this idea of putting yourself in the customer's shoes and even attaching like a specific example of a customer helps you Make…”

“And Ken talks about, hey, when you're doing demos to Steve, this is the price to be in the room. If he feels you have no valuable insight, you're never going to see him again. Ken was able to demo several times. He says you have to make substantial contributio…”

“Instead, Steve argued there was no reason that well-designed, well-made computers, just like Yvonne is arguing here, that well-designed, well-made clothing couldn't command the same market share and margins as a luxury automobile. A BMW might get you to where …”

“I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species living and dead and am totally dependent on them for my life and wellbeing.”

“It's the advice that's in his autobiography and a lot of his writing, that you need to design your product, not for how things are, but how they ought to be.”

“The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament. There's a lot of good people left at Apple that are capable of doing that with proper leadership, which is what has been missing.”

“It is better to have fewer people, even if it means doing less.”

“Steve's enthusiasm kept him writing check after check to Pixar, ultimately investing some sixty million dollars of his own money.”

“They don't do just one great thing. Or if they do one great thing, they do that one great thing for decades after decades. So I like that idea. It's like, we are what we repeatedly do. Aristotle didn't say, we're great if we do one great thing. It's like, no, …”

“How important a product is based on the time that you spend interacting with it.”

“The art of storytelling is very old, and no amount of technology can turn a bad story into a good story.”

“If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent”

“When you have something that doesn't work out, a lot of times people reaction is to get very protective about never wanting to fall on their face again. I think that's a big mistake, because you never achieve what you want without falling on your face a few ti…”

“Teach them to make things. Teach them that they have agency and that they create, and they can create things that other people can use and benefit from.”

“I remember the week before we launched the Mac, we all got together and we said, every computer is going to work this way. You cannot argue about that anymore. You can argue about how long it will take, but you can't argue about it anymore. It is inevitable.”

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should just go do something else wonderful. Not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next.”

“There is something good here worth saving. I don't quite know how to express it, but it has to do with the fact that Apple is the only alternative to windows and that Apple can still inject some new thinking into the equation.”

“The first one was a real belief that there wasn't a hierarchy of ideas that mapped onto the hierarchy of the organization.”

“No one's ever going to say that this guy was motivated by money, right? There's no reading of his career where that's possible, and obviously became incredibly wealthy”

“The only good reason to be a manager is so some other bozo Doesn't be the manager and ruin the group that you care about.”

“The dynamic range of people dramatically exceeds things you encounter in the rest of our normal lives, and to try to find those really great people who really, really love what they do.”

“Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don't see.”

“You need a risk taking creative environment on the product side. And that requires a fiscally conservative environment on the business side.”

“The most successful consumer product of all time came from just the fact that he was just building a product for himself.”

“In my view, that's what friendly companies and friends do for each other. In the long run, these things balance out. I'm sorry you don't feel that way. We will be worse off as a result, and so will the industry.”

“Only when you impose such strict standards on yourself can then you impose them on others.”

“Walt Disney realized many decades ago that animation was so expensive that you couldn't afford to animate 10 times more than what you need. Matter of fact, you don't want to animate even 10% more than what you need, and therefore the only conclusion you can co…”

“If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them either.”

“Many times in a job interview, I will purposely upset someone. I'll criticize their prior work. I'll do my homework, find out what they worked on and say, God, that really turned out to be a bomb. That really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did you work o…”

“The most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices is to remember that I'll be dead soon. I know it sounds a bit dramatic, but it's true, and when I remember this, I realized that all the expectations and standards and restrictions …”

“I don't care about being right. I just want to be excellent. Please continue to challenge me. It's the way we get to the right decisions and I enjoy it.”

“A consumer can barely handle one great new idea, let alone two or even several.”

“Soon after he returned, he slashed the company's product offerings from 17 to four.”

“Part of the CEO's job is to cajole and beg and plead and threaten at times to do whatever is necessary to get people to see things in a bigger and more profound way than they have and to do better work than they thought they could do.”

“Well, it's optimism and passion. Because it's really hard, and if you don't really, really care about what you're doing, you're going to give up if you're a sane person, because it's super hard, and I'm sure it was extremely hard for him at times.”

“If you're gonna make something, it doesn't take any more energy, and rarely does it take more money to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time and a willingness to do so. A willingness to persevere until it's really great.”

“And so I went back there as interim CEO and I decided right up front that I was going to act like I was the permanent CEO.”

“Within six years of Nex's launch, the entire founding team, other than Steve, had resigned”

“To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It's a very noisy world. And we're not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.”

“Make something with a great deal of care and love. From the product that you're making to the company that you're building. It'll be obvious if you actually care.”

“One of his talents was spotting markets filled with second rate products. Same with James Dyson, right?”

“He had about seventy million dollars at that time. Ok, so, if you adjust for inflation in our present day, that's like being 30 years old and having two hundred million dollars today.”

“The way that people describe Tiger's level of focus and intense level of focus is very similar to how Steve Jobs, where Steve would, people around him in Apple would say he was focused so intently on one thing that you could talk, you could snap your fingers, …”

“The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only, only with other A players, which means you cannot indulge B players.”

“He worked with Steve for 26 straight years. Nobody else worked continuously for Steve for that amount of time”

“He used to say regularly that as brilliant as Apple products were, eventually they all ended up in landfills. Pixar movies, on the other hand, would live on forever.”

“At Apple, he had the reputation of being deeply involved in the most minute details of every product, but at Pixar, he didn't believe that his instincts were better than the people here, so he stayed out.”

“Steve's, Steve's rejected Jeffrey's logic that since Disney was investing in Pixar's first movie, it deserved to own our technology as well. You're giving us money to make the film, Steve said, not to buy our trade secrets. What we brought here was our technic…”

“Steve Jobs was the single largest shareholder in Pixar. And after this deal, another interesting fact was that that made Steve Jobs the single largest individual shareholder in Disney.”

“And a few months later, as if on cue, Eisner calls, saying that he wants to renegotiate the deal and keep us as a partner. He accepted Steve's offer of a fifty-fifty split.”

“Steve says, if you don't have any problems, you should be very, very worried.”

“And so he actually tries to get Apple before he gets kicked out to buy these guys.”

“Where you have a singleness of purpose. Makes it really easy for other people to understand you, makes it really easy for other people to interface with you, and if they can understand you, and they can interface with you, makes it easier for them to help you.”

“Three times between 1987 and 1991, a fed-up Steve Jobs tried to sell Pixar, and yet despite his frustrations, he could never quite bring himself to part with us.”

“There's a famous quote that I read in one of the biographies of Steve Jobs, where he said, the only time he ever saw an entire company of A players was in the early days of Pixar.”

“Steve Jobs was, this actually is the first thing that makes Steve Jobs a billionaire. He was a billionaire off of Pixar stock, not Apple stock.”

“When Jobs buys the, we'll get there, but when Jobs buys Pixar from George Lucas after George Lucas is going through a divorce, the idea was like, oh, they're going to sell high-end hardware, right?”

“Steve understood that every interaction a customer had with Apple could increase or decrease his or her respect for the company. As he put it, a corporation could accumulate or withdraw credits from its reputation, which is why he worked so hard to ensure that…”

“So they get an offer from, Microsoft's just one of these companies. Steve's like, hey, I want a hundred twenty million for Pixar. And, you know, he just made up the number, and Microsoft will give you ninety million.”

“Steve had a remarkable knack for letting go of things that didn't work. If you were in an argument with him, and you convinced him that you were right, he would instantly change his mind. He didn't hold onto an idea because he had once believed it to be brilli…”

“The wilderness period, you know, when Steve was fired from Apple, and then when he comes back and goes on, it sets the greatest record, in my argument greatest record in entrepreneurship history, and Steve would tell you this himself.”

“Without that 13 years of struggle, he wouldn't have nearly been the leader and the entrepreneur that he was later in his career.”

“The same behavior by Anna is just being described as indomitable and ice queen and bitchy and all these other characterizations, but it is the same behavior. I don't think it is unique to her at all. And everything that Anna does, just like everything Steve Jo…”

“When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10% of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all A players?”

“When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10% of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all A players? If three, three out of the 10 were not so great, why would y…”

“When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10% of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all A players? If three, three of the 10 were not so great, why would you s…”

“If there was a single characteristic that separates Steve Jobs from the mass of employees, it was his passionate enthusiasm. Steve had one full, one speed, full blast. This was the primary reason we hired him.”

“Genuinely with people that get excessively good at what they do. We see that theme over and over again.”

“Because they're so, such domineering personalities is, is back down from them is the worst thing because they're just going to keep abusing you. They're just going to realize, you know, this person soft, this person's weak. I can basically have my way with the…”

“And what's interesting between Michael and Kobe and Steve Jobs is they were about, like, mastering the fundamentals and trying to get, like, they were addicted to, like, simplicity.”

“Steve Jobs, right before he died, he said his favorite quote of all time was that quote by Aristotle where he says, we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit.”

“When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10% of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all A players? If three, three of the 10 were not so great, why would you s…”

“Steve Jobs, one of the ninth employee, if I remember correctly, ninth or 10th employee at Next was an interior designer for the office.”

“One of my favorite things that took me, like I was in the book, like number 10 before somebody smacked me in the face with this was that one of Steve jobs greatest talent was identifying markets full of second rate products. That's exactly what Walt Disney's d…”

“Simple is fast, and I think what the advice that Herb would give you, and I think the advice that Steve would give you, if you feel you're not moving fast enough, narrow your scope, simplify, and then up the intensity”

“So the hearse principle is very simple. You write down on a piece of paper, everything that your competitors are doing, whether in the product design or their distribution, then you draw a giant X across it. You tell yourself you cannot do it the way they're d…”

“And he's like, Hey, what if we gave it away for free? And we just did an ad supported version of Mac OS. And instead of buying them, you can get it for free, but you have to watch an ad every time before you use your computer.”

“I just saw that there's four different versions of the Apple pencil. There's no way that Steve would like that.”

“Editing your thinking is an act of service and it takes time and effort. That's why people don't do it.”

“Ken Sego, the author. He's the one that came up with the name iMac. And thank God he did, because you know what Steve wanted to call the iMac before it was called iMac? He wanted to call the iMac Mac Man.”

“If you believe that your product will improve the life of your customer, then you have a moral obligation to get good at marketing.”

“If you had a slick presentation internally, Steve suspected that you spent the value, the limited valuable time that you had wrapping the idea, making it beautiful instead of spending the time thinking through the idea itself and getting to its essence.”

“Right before Charlie Munger died, he said something that's so important. And he said that trust is one of the greatest economic forces on earth.”

“So when he was building the first Macintosh, he's in his twenties, he limited the team to a hundred people. If you wanted to add a person, if you say, Hey, we need, you know, this person's help. You act, you first have to find the person that was unnecessary a…”

“You simply cannot mix your messages when selling something new. A consumer can barely handle one great new idea, let alone two Or even several.”

“I've told you in the past, I think he's the clearest thinker, the clearest communicator of every single person I've read about.”

“Social proof leads to more sales, which leads to better distribution, which accelerates the winner take all or winner take most flywheel, which leads to ever greater specialization, which leads to more scale.”

“In fact, in this book, he said that he considered his keynote presentations competitive weapon and he considered a competitive weapon for Apple.”

“You do not sell the product, you're not selling your product, You are selling the improvement that your product makes. People do not care about your product. They care about themselves. They only care about what your product does for them.”

“The best presenters, the best public speakers, will actually practice 90 hours for every one hour they need to be on stage. A 90 to one practice to performance ratio.”

“One of the benefits of having just photos is because you can't, we've all been in presentations where they just read the slides. It's the most boring thing ever, right? But if you just have a picture, you can't read the slide. He can't use the words on the sli…”

“Business is sales, I want to dedicate an entire episode to going over some of his ideas, because think about it. You're selling when you pitch an idea, you're selling when you talk to customers, you're selling when you're trying to recruit people to come work …”

“I think actually the highest order bit It's belief. It's belief in yourself, and it's belief in your idea.”

“It's nearly impossible to overpay for talent. Meaning somebody is the best in the world at what they do. Think about Steve jobs. What Steve jobs said earlier in some fields, the best person is not twice as good. There is a hundred times as good.”

“Steve said this brutally brilliant, insightful thing. He said, no, Johnny, you're just really vain. You just want people to like you. I'm surprised at you. I thought you held the work up as the most important, not how you believe you were being perceived by ot…”

“Like I've read biographies of Christian Dior and Coco Chanel and Balenciaga and Ralph Lauren. They are way more like Steve jobs in their approach. They have a perspective. They have a point of view. They have an idea in their mind's eye that they want to bring…”

“The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is at most two to one. But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplis…”

“Steve, Steve thought annual reviews was the dumbest thing ever. Cause like, I'm giving you feedback constantly. Why would I wait for 12, you know, once a year to give you feedback.”

“The great founders that we've seen over and over again in history, Sam Walton, Jim Casey, you know, Steve Jobs, they want to be told the truth. They want, they respect you more if you push back at them and I think the bad founders or the bad executives just su…”

“People are package deals. You have to take the good with the bad. You can't isolate them.”

“He visited Sony and met Akio when he was when Steve was early on and he loved the uniforms that all the Sony employees were wore. And so he asked Akio, like, who designed these? It wound up being, I think the guy's name is like Izzy Miyake or something like th…”

“Steve Jobs, when he was building the iMac, he was coming up with a name. He didn't have a name. And so he was walking around. He's like, you know what? We're going to call it Mac Man because he was so inspired by Akio's product, Walkman.”

“Talent is likely to be found among nonconformist dissenters and rebels. And there's something Steve Jobs talked about. Steve Jobs was an example of this himself, where people are packaged deals. You have to take the good with the bad. The exceptionally talente…”

“We had to ambush them. What that meant is that we had to go to high traffic locations and put stores there, even if it was more expensive.”

“In my view, that's what friendly companies and friends do for each other. In the long run, these things balance out.”

“The idea is that you should build a company at the intersection of arts and technology. That is Edwin Land's idea. That is an idea that Steve Jobs learned from Edwin Land that Steve used when he was in his twenties, his thirties, his forties, until he died.”

“I think the person that was most influential on how he managed when he came back to Apple was actually the time he spent with Ed Catmull. Seeing how Ed Catmull actually ran Pixar.”

“The art of storytelling is very old, and no amount of technology can turn a bad story into a good story.”

“To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It's a very noisy world. And we're not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.”

“The cure for Apple is to innovate. It's way out of its current predicament. There's a lot of good people left at Apple that are capable of doing that with proper leadership, which is what has been missing.”

“I've never been able to think of my work and my life as different things. They're the same thing.”

“I don't care about being right. I just want to be excellent. Please continue to challenge me. It's the way we get to the right decisions, and I enjoy it.”

“He had about seventy million dollars at that time. Ok, so, if you adjust for inflation in our present day, that's like being 30 years old and having two hundred million dollars today.”

“One of his talents was spotting markets filled with second rate products.”

“I have no problem with their success. I have a problem that they make really third rate products. Their products have no spirit to them. They are very pedestrian. They are McDonald's.”

“So this is one of those cases where you hire the right people. They don't always listen to you in key moments in time.”

“If Apple comes up with a dozen innovations in a year, we can maybe advertise four or five of them. We can't advertise more than that, because even if we had all the money in the world, the customer would get very confused with all these messages coming at them…”

“Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don't see.”

“It's optimism and passion because it's really hard. And if you don't really, really care about what you're doing, you're going to give up if you're a sane person because it's super hard.”

“If you're gonna make something, it doesn't take any more energy, and rarely does it take more money to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time and a willingness to do so. A willingness to persevere until it's really great.”

“The first one was a real belief that there wasn't a hierarchy of ideas that mapped onto the hierarchy of the organization.”

“There is an irrational love for the way, like, he approached the product that he made and the company that he built, and then ironically, these type of craftsmen usually wind up with the money anyways.”

“Everything that makes up what we call life was made by people no smarter and no more capable than we are, that our world is not fixed. And so we can change it for the better.”

“And so in about a year, he raised Apple's market cap to four billion from 1.8 billion.”

“And so I went back there as interim CEO and I decided right up front that I was going to act like I was the permanent CEO.”

“The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans is the career.”

“There is something good here worth saving. I don't quite know how to express it, but it has to do with the fact that Apple is the only alternative to Windows, and that Apple can still inject some new thinking into the equation.”

“Part of the CEO's job is to cajole and beg and plead and threaten at times to do whatever is necessary to get people to see things in a bigger and more profound way than they have and to do better work than they thought they could do.”

“We actually got rid of 70% of the stuff on the product roadmap.”

“There is a lot of ways to be as a person. And some people express their deep appreciation in different ways. But one of the ways that I believe people express their appreciation to the rest of humanity is to make something wonderful and put it out there. And y…”

“The best example of all, one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen is Nike. Remember, Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes. And when you think of Nike, you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, …”

“If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them either.”

“Every time we convince people that we've accomplished something at one level, they come up with something new. I used to think this was a bad thing. I thought, oh geez, when are they ever going to believe that we're going to be able to turn this thing around? …”

“Only when you impose such strict standards on yourself can then you impose them on others.”

“How important a product is based on the time that you spend interacting with it.”

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should just go do something else wonderful. Not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next.”

“I believe Apple's brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it, and I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.”

“Many times in a job interview, I will purposely upset someone. I'll criticize their prior work. I'll do my homework, find out what they worked on and say, God, that really turned out to be a bomb. That really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did you work o…”

“I remember the week before we launched the Mac, we all got together and we said, every computer is going to work this way. You cannot argue about that anymore. You can argue about how long it will take, but you can't argue about it anymore. It is inevitable.”

“I believe that if we turn ourselves into managers instead of doers, both our schedule and the greatness of our product will suffer. Let's not let this happen. It is better to have fewer people, even if it means doing less.”

“I spend 20% of my time one day a week, even now recruiting.”

“You need a risk-taking creative environment on the product side, and that requires a fiscally conservative environment on the business side.”

“Jack looked the other way when I was staying on campus without paying. He looked the other way when I was taking classes without being a formal student and paying the tuition. And oftentimes when I was at the end of my rope, cause Steve was flat broke at this …”

“Steve jobs said that victory in our industry is spelled survival. It's very clear from his actions that Bill Gates agreed.”

“In 1983, 27 years before Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad. Peterfi invented the first handheld trading computer.”

“If you do something and it turns out pretty good, Then you should just go do something else wonderful and not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next.”

“The further that you get away from one, the more complexity you invite in.”

“And part of the reason I think he's able to do that is because of his incredible communication skills. He doesn't just express ideas. He makes them memorable. It reminds me a lot of Charlie Munger, reminds me of Elon Musk, reminds me of Steve Jobs.”

“Steve Jobs has the best advice when, you know, somebody asks, like, what do you do when you accomplish something? He's like, well, you make something wonderful, and then you just go and do it again.”

“George was cash strapped from a thirty-five million divorce settlement and was threatening to fire the division's entire team if no buyer emerged.”

“Steve respected talented people who could fight. You had to be willing to push back against Steve. Your ideas would only survive if you could evangelize them and convince all the smart people around that this was the best option.”

“When Nexus factory schedule, inevitably slipped rather than blaming his own indecision. Steve took out his frustration on Linda, and he fired her, and the entire company gets stuck in this loop for months and years.”

“The whole pricing discussion took five minutes.”

“The most important thing you're competing with is not another company, but it is your own ability to execute.”

“The founder of B walks in and he pursued a different approach. He hadn't brought anyone else from his team. He wasn't carrying a laptop. In fact, he had prepared no presentation whatsoever because the two teams had been kept separate.”

“And by this time, they'd already poured a hundred and forty million dollars into the company. And Steve says, if you don't deposit another check for twenty million dollars by Monday, I'm going to shut the doors. In exchange for the twenty million dollars, Cano…”

“If you don't treat talented workers right, they can go get another job in 10 minutes. So a strange thing happens, which is the sort of the hierarchy of power inverts and the CEO is actually at the bottom. So I sort of feel like I work for most of these people …”

“In November, the first cubes finally shipped by the end of the year. Next had shipped a measly 205 computers.”

“The team reported sales figures by determining the number of units given to distributors, not sales to final customers. Distributors didn't have to pay right away. They got the machines on credit. Next then immediately counted these as sales, even though no mo…”

“And so he convinces Canon to put a hundred million dollars into next in return for their a hundred million dollars. They get 16.67% stake in the company.”

“Between now and when you have a product, you are the product, my friend, and so you better be nice to people.”

“His company's burning through a million dollars a month.”

“Ross is going to put twenty million dollars into next for a 16% stake in the company. He becomes the company's largest outside shareholder. But as one prerequisite of the deal is that Steve has to have more skin in the game. So he asked Steve to put in another…”

“That year, the company achieved its first profit of a million dollars on revenues of almost fifty million. After nine years of losses, Next was finally stepping into the black.”

“In fact, Ed Catmull told this great story where Steve was talking about that he had fired two people from Apple's board, and the reason Steve gave Ed surprised Ed, and Steve said, is because they didn't ever disagree with me.”

“IBM agreed to Thirty million dollars on signing the contract and another thirty million dollars on shipping and then royalties on every copy they ship. A total investment of sixty million, which is three times how much Ross Perot put in and a windfall that bro…”

“When you have too much money, you just don't have that hunger. And you start spending money on floating staircases and 10,000 dollar chairs.”

“Steve had too much money. He had too much personal money, and he got way too much money from his investors, and so he stopped watching his costs.”

“Steven Ross has struck a second secret deal. It would never appear in any press release or regulatory filing. They didn't even write the terms down to sell the next computer. Ross was willing to mobilize his high level government networks and his sales force f…”

“When Steve spoke to Paul for the first time, he asked if Paul could present him with a few options for Next logo. No, Paul said, I will solve your problem and you will pay me. Paul's price, a 100,000 dollars, whether or not Next ended up using the logo. It was…”

“Years later, he confided in Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull That he had learned a lesson from the collapse of the IBM deal. Never overplay your hand.”

“And so he winds up poaching his co-founders. I think there's like four or five co-founders of next directly from Apple. This causes Apple to sue Steve jobs.”

“They intentionally targeted non-motorcycle users in the way that Steve Jobs intentionally targeted non-technical users with the Apple II.”

“When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10% of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all A players? If three were not so great, why would you run a company wher…”

“The creation of new value cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.”