#390 Rare Steve Jobs Interview

**David Senra** (0:00)
I read this interview with Steve Jobs right after reading Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters for the fourth or fifth time, and something jumped out at me. Something that both Bezos and Jobs had in common is this relentless pursuit to work with the very best people. From his very first shareholder letter, Jeff emphasized the importance of having the very best team. He wrote, setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been and will continue to be the single most important element of Amazon's success. Bezos' focus on talent is just like this quote from Steve Jobs that happened in an interview Steve gave that very same year. He said, I think I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with. You must find extraordinary people. The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best 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 accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to one. Given that you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream, you need to build a team that pursues the A players. And that is exactly what Ramp did. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast and Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible. In the last 12 months, they hired only 0.23% of the people that applied. And that means when you use Ramp, you now have top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24-7 to automate and improve all of your business' financial operations. And they do this all on a single platform. Ramp gives your business easy to use corporate cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting and cost control. The longer you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. In the end of that interview, Steve Jobs added something. He said that a small team of A-plus players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. What kind of products can a team of A-plus players build? A product that creates so much value for their customers that the customers never leave. Ramp is an example of that. Last year, 12,059 businesses signed up for Ramp and only eight of the 12,059 businesses decided Ramp wasn't for them. That is a success rate of 99.9334%.
I run my business on Ramp and so do most of the other top founders and CEOs that I know make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. So I wanna talk to you about this rare Steve Jobs interview that he gave all the way back in 1985 when he was just 29 years old. Gave the interview to Playboy Magazine. I've probably read the interview, I don't know, 10 times. So I wanna jump right into the introduction and then we'll get into most of, most of what you and I will talk about today will be Steve in his own words. So it says Apple joined the ranks of the Fortune 500 in just five years. Faster than any other company in history. Jobs' company introduced personal computers into the American home and workplace. Apple's rise was meteoric. From sales of just $200,000 the first year in Jobs' garage, the company has grown into a giant firm with $1.4 billion in revenue in 1984
With an estimated net worth of $450 million, mostly in Apple stock, Jobs was by far the youngest person on Forbes' list of the richest Americans for several years running. It is also worth noting that of the 100 Americans named by Forbes, Jobs is one of only seven who made their fortunes on their own. But to hear Jobs tell it, the money isn't even half the story, especially since he does not spend it lavishly and indeed claims to have very little time for a social life. He is on a mission, preaching the gospel of salvation through the personal computer. He's an engaging pitch man and never loses an opportunity to sell his products, eloquently describing a time when computers will be as common as kitchen appliances and as revolutionary in their impact as the telephone or the internal combustion engine. Again, if you go back and read interviews and media from this time, people made fun of him for this and he was dead right on both those accounts. There are now more than 2 million Apple computers. Or another way to think about this is before Steve Jobs was 30 years old, he sold more than 2 million computers. The Macintosh was released with a $20 million advertising campaign, and it was billed as a computer for the rest of us. It was also criticized as being too much of a toy, unsuitable for business use. The interviewer and Steve Jobs were at this party together in New York City, and the interviewer was talking about the fact that he had all these famous people here, they were all looking at the Apple computer, so he had people like Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, and yet he found that Steve was most interested in showing the young kids that were there, specifically the young boy that was there, how to use the computer, and this is a perfect way to end the introduction. But more revealing was the scene after the party. Well after the other guests had gone home, Jobs stayed to tutor the boy on the fine points of using the Mac. Later, I asked him why he had seemed happier with the boy than with the two famous artists. His answer seemed unrehearsed to me. Older people sit down and ask, what is it? But the boy asks, what can I do with it? So then the interview starts. Before I get to that, I just want to go back and reference a few things that jumped out to me when I was reading this introduction. It was the fact that the interviewer was like, hey, this guy's worth like half a billion dollars, and he doesn't want to talk about money at all. He doesn't seem all that interested in it. I want to tie that to something that you and I talked about last week. Jeff Bezos would bring this up in his shareholder letters. So when Jeff was thinking about working with or buying a company, he would always try to assess whether the person leading the company, whether it was a founder or the CEO, are they a missionary or a mercenary? And what Bezos said about this was really interesting because he noticed a paradox. He says, I'm always trying to figure out one thing first and foremost. Is that person a missionary or a mercenary? The mercenaries are trying to flip their stock. The missionaries love their product or their service, and they love their customers and are trying to build a great service. By the way, the great paradox here is that it's usually the missionaries who make more money. The second part that jumped out, the fact that they said he's an engaging pitch man and Jobs is always, he never loses an opportunity to sell his products. A few weeks before, you and I talked about Bezos. We talked about Ken Griffin who built the most successful hedge fund of all time. Over and over again in that talk, he says, if we're going to eat, someone's got to sell. You are always selling, and if you don't like to sell, here is my advice, get over it. You have to sell your customers, you have to sell employees, you have to sell investors. You have to be able to sell your vision, and I think the best founders are also, you'll see a high overlap between really great founders and really great, they're really great salespeople as well. And then I just want to pull out one other thing before I move on, where Jobs describes his product will be as revolutionary as the telephone or the internal combustion engine. Great entrepreneurs, great inventors, they're always able to place their inventions in a historical context. James Dyson, who's one of my heroes, talked about this. He said, I have an interest verging on obsession with the past. For God's sake, did you know that James Dyson wrote a book? The title of that book is called The History of Great Inventions. You will see that trait over and over again. They're able to put their work in a historical context. I'm going to jump right into the interview. And they start with the fact that, you know, you had all this money, you're worth almost a half a billion dollars. This is just remarkable. And Jobs is kind of flippant. And he's actually laughing. He's like, I actually lost 250 million in one year when the stock went down and he starts laughing. And the interviewer is like, wait, you can laugh about this. He's like, I'm not going to let it run my life. My main reaction to the money thing is that it's humorous, all the attention to it, because it's hardly the most insightful or valuable thing that has happened to me in the past 10 years. It makes me feel old sometimes because I go speak at a campus and I find what students are most in awe of is the fact that I'm a millionaire. Jobs' point, obviously, is what he's most interested in is in the excellence of the invention, the excellence of the product that he is building. And Jobs immediately stares the discussion to what he thinks is most important. This is one of the most impressive things that he's ever said, and it's remarkable that he is 29 years old. He says, we're living in the wake of the petrochemical revolution of 100 years ago. The petrochemical revolution gave us free energy, free mechanical energy. It changed the texture of society in most ways.