Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [1]
In the three decades since, I have sometimes wondered about the quirks of fate that have connected me with Steve. Had I not been in my twenties, Time would probably never have posted me to San Francisco, where I happened to be of the same generation that was starting computer, software and biotech companies. Had I not met Steve, I would not have encountered Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia Capital, and an original investor in Apple. Had I not met Don, I would never have found myself interviewing to become the lowest man on Sequoia Capital’s short totem pole. Had I not written about Apple, where I became obsessed with the then-unchronicled tale of its very early days, I would never have thought hard about the traits and accidents that shape a company. Had I not started learning the ropes of the venture trade in the mid 1980s, I would never have had the good luck that has flowed my way. And, had I not met Steve and Don, I would never have understood why it’s best not to think like everyone else.
I’m sure that when Steve was a teenager, growing up in Los Altos, California, he could never have imagined that some day he would be at the helm of a company whose headquarters, according to Google maps, is three street turns and 1.6 miles from the front gate of his high school, that has sold over 200 million iPods, a billion iTunes songs, 26 million iPhones, and over 60 million computers since 1996; or that his face would have adorned the front cover of Fortune on twelve occasions; or that, almost as a sideline, he would single-handedly finance and help shape Pixar, the computer animation company that has rung up more than $5 billion in cumulative box office sales from ten immensely popular movies. He might wonder too about those twists and turns that helped make him what he is: the fact that his boyhood was spent in an area that, back then, had not even been labeled Silicon Valley; that Apple’s co-founder, Stephen Wozniak, was a boyhood chum; that he worked one summer as a lab technician at Atari, the maker of Pong, the first popular arcade video game; that Atari’s founder, Nolan Bushnell, had raised money from Don Valentine; and that Nolan was one of the people who steered Steve towards Don. Such are the haphazard breadcrumbs strewn along the trail of life.
These days, thanks to the rough and tumble experiences of almost twenty-five years in the venture capital business, 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.
Steve is the CEO of Apple but, much more importantly (even though his business card does not say this), he is a founder of the company. As the history of Apple shows, 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, irrepressable forces of nature. Of the many founders I’ve encountered, Steve is the most captivating. Steve, more than any one 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. Had he been born at a different time, it’s easy to see how he would have hopped freight cars and followed his star. (It is not a coincidence that he and Apple helped underwrite Martin Scorcese’s No Direction Home, the absorbing biopic of Bob Dylan.) Steve was adopted and raised by well-meaning parents who never had much money. He was attracted by Reed College, a school