Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [89]
Yet the image of Intel, which formed the keystone of McKenna’s business, was probably shaped more by public relations than advertising. McKenna had taken pains to step beyond the electronics trade journals and cultivate reporters and editors at magazines like Business Week, Fortune, and Forbes. He had the cunning to make most journalists believe he was confiding secrets, and he was far more patient with journalists than the electronics executives who would invariably find some reason to complain and grumble about reporters and press coverage. Andrew Grove, then the executive vice-president of Intel, said, “He taught us to build relationships with the press rather than firing off press releases and hoping for wonderful things to happen.” McKenna had earned a reputation with reporters for being straightforward and not resorting to subterfuge. He liked to share industry gossip, made no secret of his pet likes and dislikes, and always practiced his wife’s advice: “Don’t pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.” He seemed to gain more satisfaction from seeing a page-long story about one of his clients than an advertisement, but would occasionally sound like a Madison Avenue account executive—as in “We rolled out the Byte Shops with a full page in Business Week.”
By 1976 McKenna already had some experience with marketing microcomputers. His agency was responsible for the general image of the Byte Shops and had also designed some advertisements for Intel’s single-board computers, which featured a young boy with a sunny, all-American look. So when Jobs and Wozniak appeared in his office McKenna was heading an agency that, like some of its clients, had built a reputation far beyond its size. The meeting was uncomfortable. McKenna asked to take a look at an article about the Apple computer that Wozniak was writing for a trade magazine and stressed that it should not be too technical. Wozniak, with all an engineer’s ruffled pride, retorted: “I don’t want any PR man touching my copy.” To which, with a stubborn rush of Irish blood to the face, McKenna replied, “Well, you better both get out.” Jobs played peacemaker and negotiated an uneasy truce.
Apple’s encounter with McKenna revealed a hint of grander plans. But those plans were useless without money. The rest of the microcomputer industry was growing more quickly than Apple, and Jobs didn’t have enough money to match his expanding ambitions. Apple was not in the same league as Processor Technology which was regularly buying five pages of color advertising in magazines like Byte. Jobs returned to Atari and asked Nolan Bushnell for advice about where he should turn for more money. Bushnell gave him a tutorial on the world of venture capitalists, men who would supply money in return for a stake in the company, and told Jobs, “The longer you can go without having to go to those guys the better off you are.” But Bushnell also suggested he call Don Valentine, an investor in Atari.
When he drove his Mercedes Benz from his office in Menlo Park to the Jobses’ garage, Valentine was embarking on one of those inspection trips that usually didn’t pay off. But it was a tribute to his curiosity—as well as to his nose for profit—that Valentine even bothered to make the drive. Valentine was the son of a New York truck driver and a venture capitalist who looked like a weathered version of the frat brother who organized the weekend football pool. He had worked during the sixties as the marketing head of Fairchild, helping sell the virtues of integrated circuits first to the military and then, when the prices started to drop, to commercial customers with military