The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [16]
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AT THIRTY, Steve had a sleek black Porsche and he couldn’t help but show it off, like a teenager with a new hot rod. But in the unwritten code of Old Silicon Valley, an expensive car signaled a character flaw. One of his former mentors, Arthur Rock, wouldn’t have approved of the Porsche. Art was the highly prestigious San Francisco venture capitalist who invested in Apple in the early days. He was a legend in his field. He was the brilliant financier who four decades earlier had helped to form Fairchild Semiconductor, the company that made the first microchips and turned the Santa Clara Valley, a thinly populated expanse of orchards, into what became known as Silicon Valley.
Like Steve Jobs, Art Rock had also appeared solo on the cover of Time. And Art had a rule about the entrepreneurs he was willing to invest in, the ones who seem destined to succeed. If the founder of a startup was driving a fancy, expensive car, the deal was off. Art wanted to entrust his money to guys like Bob Noyce, the cofounder of Fairchild and later the cofounder of Intel. Bob’s colleagues joked about how he drove “the oldest car in the world,” a 1940s Ford that was falling apart. The car was such an embarrassment that they asked him to hide it in the back of the parking lot so it wouldn’t scare off customers who visited. That was the kind of entrepreneur Art Rock idealized: a guy who hated spending money unnecessarily, even once he was already wealthy.
When Steve started Apple, he had the same frugal scrounging mentality. But his mindset was changing. It was most apparent when his five cofounders traveled with him to Austin, Texas, for Educom, a national convention about computers in higher education. Susan Barnes insisted that they economize and all fly together in coach. Steve agreed. But when they were on the plane, he was so frustrated by the experience that he repeatedly complained to the hapless flight attendants, as if they were responsible for the airline.
“Aren’t you embarrassed to serve such shitty food?” he said.
Later, as Dan’l Lewin walked through the cabin, one of the beleaguered crewmates accosted him and said: “We’ve heard that Steve Jobs is on the plane. Who is he?”
Dan’l pointed to the handsome but obnoxious passenger.
The flight attendant was visibly disappointed. “That’s what we were afraid of.”
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STEVE JOBS WAS TRANSFORMING HIMSELF from frugal operator into free-spending aesthete. Was it time for Silicon Valley to change, too? It was no longer a business of engineers making tiny electrical components that they sold to other engineers, an insular technocratic priesthood. Now it was a business of making lifestyle products for millions of ordinary people. It was about design and image as well as efficiency and performance. If he wanted to create the Porsche of computers, a machine that was superior in aesthetics as well as engineering, why shouldn’t he spend a few minutes every day in the Porsche of automobiles? Why couldn’t that be a source of inspiration? He wondered why most personal computers were aggressively ugly with their beige boxes and their disdain for styling. Why couldn’t computers look like pieces of stereo equipment, which were black and sleek and beautiful and functional. It couldn’t be a simple matter of cost, because even a cheap $100 stereo looked so much nicer than a $2,000 personal computer.
Steve wanted to inspire his Next cofounders with his passion for aesthetics, and took them on a junket in the fall of 1985, when they all flew to Pittsburgh to spend a few days at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the most distinguished research centers for computer science. The main purpose of the trip was to meet with professors, recruit the best graduate students, and collect ideas that they could use for the new computer they were conceiving. But then, at the end of the visit, Steve took them on an unusual day trip. He had arranged for them to drive two hours into the Pennsylvania countryside and spend an entire day on a special private tour of Fallingwater, the architectural