The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [18]
Wertheimer had to interview with thirty different employees there before he was hired. “You basically had to meet everyone in the entire company and they all had to give you the thumbs-up. It really felt like a fraternity. Everyone had to love you. So the feeling you got was that anyone who got through had to be ’the best of the best’—that was the phrase they used. In the early days they had the ability to hire anybody. There was one after another phenomenally talented person. People wanted to be around Steve and be a part of this.” And if the receptionists needed Harvard degrees, the engineers had to be geniuses.
Steve could recruit prodigies seemingly at will. The hires were young and driven by a sense of idealism. Who wouldn’t want to be part of a small group that was trying to change the world, with a leader who had already proved that he could change the world? His pitch was enticing: They were making computers for education, they were trying to give great tools to students, they were taking a powerful lever and placing it right on the fulcrum that had the greatest possible influence on the future of society. Steve liked to say that they were making a radically new machine that might enable some obscure kid to simulate a multimillion-dollar microbiology laboratory on his screen and then . . . find a cure for cancer! “We signed up with Steve because we were going to revolutionize education,” recalls Allison Thomas, who was a consultant to the company. She had gotten to know Steve Jobs in the early 1980s when they worked together on California governor Jerry Brown’s commission on industrial competitiveness. “In the early days at Next, there was a sense of mission and crusade. It was like how he inspired the original Macintosh.”
Dan’l Lewin was Next’s marketing honcho, and he needed to recruit a vice president of sales. Through the circles of Princeton alumni in the Bay Area, he had developed a friendship with Todd Rulon-Miller, who was a star salesman at IBM. Todd was an Australian who had studied Russian history and played football at Princeton.
Dan’l called, speaking in tones that were crisper and more formal than usual.
“Come work for Steve,” he said.
Todd hesitated. “I hear he’s tough to work with.”
“No way. It’s Sculley who’s the asshole.”
Todd agreed to meet Steve. He was curious, lured by the chance to meet a legend.
The salesman came to Deer Park Road and sat in a conference room, waiting for his interview. In the center of the table, he saw a block-shaped object covered by an opaque drape. It had to be the Next computer! Todd was charged with a sense of anticipation and drama. He was going to see it! It was October 1986. For the past year, all of Silicon Valley had been speculating about what the hell Steve Jobs was doing. Next sustained an aura of mystery. Steve insisted on strict secrecy. Hardly any details had leaked out. Near his desk Steve had hung a vintage poster from the World War II era: “Loose Lips Sink Ships.”
And now, Todd thought, I’m going to see what’s under the veil!
Steve made his big entrance, bounding into the room, dressed in old blue jeans with conspicuous holes. Immediately he launched into an energetic half-hour speech about his vision for the company. “He was the most ingratiating, personable guy I’ve ever met in my life,” recalls Todd. Throughout the monologue, Todd kept glancing at the draped object.
Finally, with the timing of a master dramatist, Steve said:
“Are you ready to see what’s beneath the drape?”
Steve pulled off the cloth. He revealed . . . a cinderblock, not a state-of-the-art computer. A cinderblock that was roughly the same size and shape as a computer monitor.
Isn’t it cool? Steve asked.
Todd was baffled. He was looking at a cinderblock propped up on a stand.
Isn’t this a cool new monitor stand? Steve said. It tilts! It’s patented! Isn’t it cool?
After a year of work, Next didn’t have