Steve Jobs

“And so he got the apple going and he came to me and says, I want to start this company and I'm going to be leaving. Do you want to be my first investor? And I'll give you a third of the company for 50,000 dollars.”

“He was opinionated, but he was never wrong in his opinions. You didn't have to worry if you empowered Steve to do something. It happened. I mean, Steve had one speed. It was full on.”

“I was the youngest CEO, and people didn't know what to think about a CEO in their twenties. I mean, that was just off the radar. And I actually feel like I paved the way for Gates and Jobs and some of the idea that you can be young and still a serious business…”

“Yeah, and the reason I was motivated to do it because of them was because they were not married. And they were about 10 years older than I was, and having had the experience that I had as a child with my family, that's what I wanted. I wanted that family. I wa…”

“And so he got the apple going and he came to me and says, I want to start this company and I'm going to be leaving. Do you want to be my first investor? And I'll give you a third of the company for 50,000 dollars.”

“And I actually feel like I paved the way for Gates and Jobs and some of the idea that you can be young and still a serious businessman.”

“He was opinionated, but he was never wrong in his opinions. You didn't have to worry if you empowered Steve to do something. It happened. I mean, Steve had one speed. It was full on.”

“Steve Jobs worked for me, and He was a technician in quality control, and he was really good at it.”

“You know, he said, don't sell to Google. We think you're a great company. We think what you're doing is really interesting. He didn't say, oh, well, Apple, you know, is interested in you, but he did say, is this about money? Because Apple has a lot of money, a…”

“I did, a couple years later, You know, take a little time off and, you know, manage to find a fantastic partner and get married and, you know, have kids and all that, and that's been an amazing part of my life, and I was actually motivated to do this in part b…”

“He was like, alright, well, in so many ways, he's like, well, you guys are a feature, not a product. You know, we're gonna have to build our competitor, and I guess we'll have to get to work on, you know, in so many words, killing you guys.”

“Steve said he's going to spend fifteen million dollars marketing their audio player.”

“Everyone would tell you who was a designer of any kind that in their career they did their best work for Steve. He was the world's best client because he cared so much.”

“And we ended up doing like 50 products for him, and Steve became a close friend and, you know, introduced me to my wife and couldn't have been closer to him. It was really that initial connection to Apple for IDEO, was called David Kelly Design at the time, th…”

“And I think Reed sent an email to Steve Jobs saying, are you guys interested in this? And Steve Jobs replied, no, we're not interested because we hear you're building Hardware that competes with Apple TV. And so why would we ever do business with you? You know…”

“It wasn't almost immediately. It was immediately. You know, the second he said this, I said, I need to build an app that lets me meet guys on it.”

“He walked right up to me and pounded on my chest and said they were gonna sue us out of existence for having a scroll ring on our remote.”

“A couple months after I joined, they asked me if I would take on a new project. And at the time they told me that they couldn't tell me what the project was, but that it would require that for the next, you know, year and a half to two years of my life, I woul…”

“And at the time that we started, it was all about the casual workplace. Steve Jobs is wearing the black mock turtleneck. And a lot of the other companies were making drab colors as a result. And we saw an opportunity in the marketplace to make a tie with color…”