#76 Steve Jobs: The Early Years of Apple

**David Senra** (0:00)
I have developed what I hope is a more refined perspective on the extraordinary accomplishments of Steve's business life. One that deserves to be ranked amongst the greatest of any American, living or dead. There is no greater distance known to man than the single footfall that separates a CEO from a founder. CEOs are, for the most part, products of educational and institutional breeding. Founders, or at least the very best of them, are unstoppable, irrepressible forces of nature.
Of the many founders I have encountered, Steve is the most captivating. Steve, more than any other person, has turned modern electronics into objects of desire.
Steve has always possessed the soul of the questioning poet. Someone a little removed from the rest of us, who, from an early age, beat his own path. It's hard now to appreciate the dire straits that Apple was in after it brought Next at the end of 1996 in a desperate effort to revive itself.
The Silicon Valley cynics chuckled at the way Steve was able to sell Next for more than $400 million, even though it had only sold about 50,000 computers.
Steve returned to Apple hardened by years of commercial adversity.
Many are familiar with the reemergence of Apple. They may not be as familiar with the fact that it has few, if any, parallels. When did a founder ever return to a company from which he had been rudely rejected to engineer a turnaround as complete and spectacular as Apple's?
Well, turnarounds are difficult. In any circumstances, they are doubly difficult in a technology company. It is not too much of a stretch to say that Steve founded Apple not once, but twice.
And the second time, he was alone.
Okay, so that is from the updated introduction of the book that we're going to be studying and learning from today, which is Return to the Little Kingdom, Steve Jobs, The Creation of Apple, and How It Changed the World by Michael Moritz. At least I hope that's how you pronounce the last name. So Michael wrote those words in 2009 But what is so special about this book is it was written and published in 1984 So I've done two other biographies of Steve Jobs. One by Walter Isaacson, labeled Steve Jobs, and the other was Becoming Steve Jobs. And Isaacson's, I think, was published in, I think, somewhere around 2011, and I think Becoming Steve Jobs was published in 2016 So it looks at the life of Steve Jobs as a whole, which is fascinating for its own reasons. But what's interesting about this book is this book is about Apple from about 1976 to about 1983, so the very, very beginning of the life of the company. And it goes through early life of Steve Jobs, early life of Steve Wozniak, and all the other people that are integral in starting Apple. But because it has the constraints of basically a seven year period, there's so much detail in this book that I haven't found anywhere else. And what's interesting about Michael Moritz, and I'm going to read this sentence to you, which is fascinating. Because at the time he's writing this book in the 80s, he's a journalist for Time Magazine. And he winds up meeting this guy named Don Valentine. Don Valentine is the founder of Sequoia Capital and an original investor in Apple. And so he appears in the book.
Don winds up giving Mike a job. And then Mike goes on and, as far as I can tell, and I'm no expert in the field by any means, becomes one of the most successful venture capitalists of all time. So Mike's own, maybe I should call him Michael. I don't know if he wants me to call him Mike. Michael's own career is fascinating, going from a journalist for Time Magazine, and I think a few other publications, to becoming a billionaire in his own right. So here's just one sentence I want to start with. It's also in the introduction, but it was just a random sentence that I thought was interesting. And he said, had I not met Steve and Don, I would never have understood why it's best not to think like everyone else. And that sentence was especially important to me because now, as I've gone through 70 something books at the time I'm recording this, that's something I'm picking up, that there's like a pattern that emerges, that the people that we've studied together on the podcast, they do not think like other people. Now, that doesn't mean they're not normal people, and today we're gonna learn a lot about the fact that you can be an incredibly flawed human being, as a young Steve Jobs was, and still build a successful company and a successful product. And I think that lesson is inspiring to anybody because you're not born a great entrepreneur and nobody's perfect. So regardless of where you're at in life, whether you're already running a successful company or you want to one day, or you're just interested in the topic, you could accomplish great things even though you have flaws, just like I do and just like everybody else does. And I think that's a big takeaway I just wanna tell you right up front at the very beginning of the book because the difference between Steve Jobs, let's say circa 2007, 2008, 2009, and Steve Jobs in the late 70s or mid 70s, I mean, it's a completely different person, as you know, of course, with experience, you're going to be a different person. But I guess what I'm saying is what Michael did here was really smart in capturing the first like six to seven years of a company because as he's writing these words, Apple today, we all know the outcome, but it was not sure what was gonna happen back then. And I think somebody going along cataloging and documenting what was taking place as it was taking place is extremely important, especially as you can look back on it 30 or 40 years later. Okay, so with that said, let's go back into the words he wrote in the 80s. I'm back into the book. This is just fascinating to me. Let's see, this is the very beginning of Apple. And it says, within eight years, it had gone from a living room to a yearly sales rate of more than $1 billion, while the stock market had placed a value of more than $2.5 billion on its shares. And this is something I did not know. It took less time to reach the Fortune 500 than any other startup in the history of the index. So moving on, anybody that has ever encountered Steve Jobs obviously knows that he did not lack for confidence. A lot of people considered him extremely arrogant. This is an example of something that I'm a big believer in. I think you should be your own biggest fan.