#36 Finding The Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Keep, and Nurture Talent

**David Senra** (0:00)
I want to tell you about a one-time only limited event that I don't think you're going to want to miss. I am doing a live show with Patrick O'Shaughnessy from the Invest Like The Best podcast in New York City on October 19th. Patrick has interviewed over 300 of the world's best investors and founders for his podcast. I've read over 300 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs for my podcast. We'll be talking about what we learned from seven years of podcasting, sharing our favorite ideas and stories and doing a live Q&A. There will also be special event-only swag. If you live in New York City, I think it's a no-brainer, but if not, I think it's a great excuse to fly in. I've already heard from a bunch of people that bought tickets, they're flying in from other cities. Some people are flying in from other countries. That's setting the bar really high, so I will have at least four shots of espresso or four energy drinks before or during the show so we can make it a night that you'll never forget. If you're interested in attending this unique live event, I will leave a link down below. I highly recommend you get your tickets today, and I hope I get to see you in New York on October 19th. In 1980, business at my company, Chuck E. Cheese, was thriving, and I was feeling flush. So I bought a very large house in Paris. At six stories, it spanned 15,000 square feet and featured marble staircases and a swimming pool in the basement. At the time, my wife and I didn't have any furniture, so we thought, why not fill it up with people instead? We threw a huge party, inviting everyone I knew at Chuck E. Cheese and my other company, Atari, and all my old friends as well.
At around nine p.m., I looked up and noticed that my former Atari employee, Steve Jobs, was at the door.
I smiled, and Steve rolled his eyes. I think he was a little taken aback at the size of the place.
While I was going through a grandiose period, Steve was the same as ever. Not really a grand kind of guy.
I asked how long he'd be in town, and he said a few days. Let's have breakfast tomorrow then, I offered, and he agreed.
At this time, his new company, Apple, was already quite successful, probably doing a little less than $100 million in sales, but nothing close to what Atari or Chuck E. Cheese was earning. In 1980, Atari was bringing in around $2 billion in revenue, and Chuck E. Cheese some $500 million. I still didn't feel too bad that I had turned down a one-third ownership of Apple, although I was beginning to think it might turn out to be quite a mistake. Steve Jobs offered Nolan a third of Apple for $50,000.
Steve and I spent the next day together. We sat for hours and talked about creativity. We then walked around the city for hours. I continued to point out my favorite places to visit, but Steve was most interested in two things, all the creativity he sensed and the architecture.
The computer is going to allow even more people to be creative, Steve said. Around this time, Steve had started to regard the computer as the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.
If you look at the fastest animals, human beings aren't among them, he said, unless you give them a bicycle, and then they can win the race.
The city's architecture fascinated him as well. He saw a simplicity and uniformity of design in the buildings, so many of them seven or eight stories tall and made of similar yellow stone, exuding an elegance and consistency that instilled a sense of harmony in the brain.
I was having a hard time thinking of Paris as having such simplicity and uniformity, but Steve's point was that you could parachute anywhere into the city and realize you were nowhere but Paris. There aren't many cities where you can do that, he pointed out. The architecture here creates a unique signature for the entire city.
That Parisian simplicity was something he wanted Apple to emulate. I asked him how he thought Apple was doing, and he confessed he was worried that the company wasn't being innovative enough. He wasn't happy with the current products, and he wondered what the next wave of computers was going to look like, and what new innovations would come along. How in the world do you figure out what the next big thing is, he asked.
Steve was totally preoccupied with the evolution of Apple products. How do we keep ahead of the game, he wanted to know.