The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [27]
For Andy Cunningham, Next’s public relations consultant, working with Steve was like a master class in self-assertiveness and spine. One day Steve called Andy into the conference room at Deer Creek Road for a meeting with him and Susan Barnes.
“We called you here because we’re not happy with your work and we’re going to fire you,” Steve said.
Fire her? For a smallish startup company that still hadn’t shipped a product or revealed more than the vaguest conception of what it was doing, Next had received a surfeit of publicity. It was the subject of big articles in all the major magazines: Newsweek, Time, Fortune, Business Week. And still, Steve wasn’t satisfied? He was firing her?
Andy looked at Susan Barnes, who nodded but remained silent.
“What about my bills?” Andy asked. Next owed her $25,000, which was a lot of money for her. She was in her twenties and hadn’t been working for herself for very long.
Steve said coolly: We’re not going to pay because we’re unhappy with your work.
Andy was nearly in tears as she left the building and drove home. That night, she asked her husband what she should do.
“Talk to Regis,” he said.
Regis was her old mentor, Regis McKenna, a shrewd, polished Silicon Valley veteran who had been Steve’s marketing guru in the early days at Apple. Andy had learned her profession at Regis’s large p.r. agency before deciding to open her own small firm.
Andy approached Regis.
He said: “You’ve got to think of what you have over Steve Jobs.”
I don’t have anything over Steve Jobs, she thought. I’m just a kid starting out on my own. He’s a powerful person, a legend in the industry.
“If you know something he doesn’t know, you’re in great shape,” Regis advised.
Then Andy finally grasped what she had.
She went back for another meeting with Steve.
She summoned her bravado and said: “I talk to members of the business press fifteen times a day, and they’re always asking me: ’What is Steve Jobs really like?’”
Steve went for his checkbook and paid her the $25,000 right away.
It wouldn’t be long before he would try to hire her back.
• • •
CONFRONTATION was a basic requirement for Steve’s colleagues. So was commitment. Steve’s life was overwhelmed by his work, and he expected the same of his people. At times it seemed that he didn’t realize how hard he was pushing them, or how hard they were pushing themselves. In the autumn of 1986, he assembled the several dozen Next staffers and exhorted them to work nights and weekends until Christmas, when they could take a week off. Someone said: “Steve, we already are working nights and weekends.” Steve would schedule meetings for Saturdays, seemingly unaware that Dan’l Lewin had a wife and young children to be with then. Dan’l would bravely say, “I’m unavailable.”
• • •
FOR THE FULL DECADE of his life since college, Steve’s obsession with his work had put extraordinary stress on his friendships and romances. At twenty-two, when he moved into the Rancho Suburbio house-share with Dan Kottke, his best male friend, and Chris-Ann, the only serious girlfriend he had ever had, Chris-Ann was still in love with him. But by then Steve had been transformed by his newfound sense of destiny. “From the time Apple started, Steve was never interested in Chris-Ann,” recalls Dan. “It was clear to me that he was never emotionally involved with her. He was emotionally involved in his company.”
While he felt wedded to his work, his libido remained healthy. On a visit to the offices of the Regis McKenna agency, Steve met a