Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [2]
Jobs’s critics will say he can be willful, obdurate, irascible, temperamental, and stubborn—but show me someone who has achieved anything meaningful who, from time to time, doesn’t display these characteristics, who is not a perfectionist. There is also the mischievous, calculating, suspicious twinkle of the souk about Steve. He is an insistent, persuasive and mesmerizing salesman—about the only man I know with the audacity to adorn bus shelters nationwide with advertisements for a product as mundane as a wireless mouse. But he is also a man who, decades ago, was kind enough make visits to a hospital to visit a CEO felled by a stroke and who, recently, in an avuncular fashion, has offered younger Silicon Valley CEOs generous advice.
About the time I entered the venture business, Apple’s board fired Steve in favor of a man from the East who was a creature of convention. Characteristically, Steve sold all but one share of his holdings in the company and, at Sequoia Capital, we shook our heads as we watched him shape the company that he came to call NeXT. He raised money from investors (including Ross Perot) at a massive valuation and I remember visiting its headquarters, which bore all the hallmarks of a fiasco-in-waiting. There was a logo designed by Paul Rand and a floating staircase in the lobby—echoes of which are visible in the staircases that you can see today in many Apple stores.
NeXT took Steve out of his natural milieu. He was trying to sell computers to large companies—entities not swayed by products with visceral appeal. It also meant he was removed from the fray of the consumer business at a time when computer companies were beginning to demonstrate that, thanks to their edge with software and silicon, they had a natural advantage over consumer companies struggling to become computer companies. Steve persisted at NeXT when weaker beings would have thrown in the towel, but eventually when the death rattle started to emanate from the company, it appeared that he too would be consigned to occupy a footnote in history.
It’s hard now, twelve years later, to appreciate the dire straits that Apple was in after it bought NeXT at the end of 1996 in a desperate effort to revivify itself. The Silicon Valley cynics chuckled at the way Steve was able to sell NeXT for more than $400 million even though it only had sold about 50,000 computers. Steve returned to Apple hardened by years of commercial adversity.
Many are familiar with the re-emergence 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 the company from which he had been rudely rejected to engineer a turnaround as complete and spectacular as Apple’s? While 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.
For anyone who would like to gain a better sense of Steve, I suggest going to YouTube and watching the commencement speech he gave at Stanford in 2005—which must rank as one of the more forthright and meaningful addresses ever given to a collection of young people. Among the sentiments he conveyed was the opportunity we all have to make our mark, do something special and, above all, follow our own path. He ended that talk with the admonition, borrowed from the final edition of the Whole Earth Catalog, to “Stay Hungry. Stay foolish.” This, I have discovered, also happens to be wonderful advice for anyone who wants to spend their life investing in young companies.
—Michael Moritz,
San Francisco, 2009
INTRODUCTION
Writing about companies can be a perilous occupation. For like people, companies are never what they seem