“Steve changed,” said Campbell. “Yes, he had been charismatic and passionate and brilliant. But I watched him become a great manager. He saw things others couldn’t see. He dismissed as arrogant the tech leaders in the world who thought we were all stupid because we couldn’t use these devices. He said, ‘We’re stupid if they can’t use these devices.’ ” And then Campbell went on to address the Steve he had known personally. “In the last seven and a half years, as he became more vulnerable, he made sure that those he loved, those who were closest to him, knew it. To those people he exuded the phenomenal warmth and humor he shared. He was a true friend.”
Speaking later, Ive too talked about friendship. “He was my closest and most loyal friend. We worked together for fifteen years,” said the Brit, “and he still laughed at the way I said ‘aluminium.’ ” But mostly Ive talked about work, the pleasures of work, and the pleasures of working specifically with Steve. “Steve loved ideas and loved making stuff, and he treated the process of creativity with a rare and wonderful reverence. He, better than anyone, understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished. His was a victory for beauty, for purity, and, as he would say, for giving a damn.”
The ceremony, which anyone can watch these days on their iMac or iPhone or iPad, or on their Samsung Galaxy or Microsoft Surface if they prefer, was both sober and rousing. “Look right, look left, look ahead of you and behind you,” said Campbell. “You’re it. Results counted. You’re the people who made this happen.” It was an event that celebrated the past, and that also made clear, as Steve would have, that there was much still to be done. “We won’t keep you too long,” said Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, as they launched into a song to close the ceremony. “We know Steve would want you to get back to work.”
Source Notes
Having reported and written about Steve Jobs from 1986 through 2011, Rick and I have literally thousands of pages of our own notes and transcripts, hundreds of hours of recorded interviews, scores of published stories, and who knows how many unrecorded experiences to draw from. We suppose it would have been easier in some ways to simply recycle parts of what I wrote at the time because that was when it was freshest in my mind and when the impressions were most vivid.
But those stories were written with a different and more immediate objective than what we are trying to achieve with this book, which is this: providing a deeper understanding of Steve Jobs’s ever-evolving arsenal of entrepreneurial skills and capabilities, and the deepening of his almost messianic drive to have an impact on his world. We want to show how it was fueled to an unusual degree by his unique gift for being an autodidact, and by genuine idealism as well as his occasionally scary obsessions, his rigid and austere yet consistently well-thought-out aesthetic standards, his often pompous sense of mission. All along, he held a genuine compassion for the anxieties and needs of ordinary people who want to find new tools to empower and improve themselves in a world that grows more complex, cacophonous, and confounding every day.
So for us, this is an entirely new story. One that is in part recycled from the old, but also augmented with fresh observations and reflections from those who were closest to our subject; people who shared particular memories that have had a chance to settle and steep into a deeper understanding of who their friend or colleague or rival Steve Jobs really was. With these source notes, we attempt to provide more specific information about the breadth of sourcing of information and analysis that helped to inform various passages throughout the book.
Prologue
Most of the prologue is based upon my own recollections and notes from my first interview with Steve Jobs, which took place in Palo Alto on April 17, 1986. Other observations were drawn from the cumulative experience of my more than one hundred fifty meetings, interviews, phone calls, emails, and informal conversations with him between that date and his death on October 5, 2011. All the quotations from him throughout this book are from those meetings, phone calls, or email exchanges, unless otherwise noted. Some of the quotations have appeared previously, in whole or in part, in feature articles that I wrote that were published by Fortune or the Wall Street Journal. None of those articles is reprinted or excerpted in any form in this prologue, however, or elsewhere in the book, unless specifically noted.
Steve Jobs’s birthdate is February 24, 1955; mine is April 9, 1954. Both of us graduated from high school in the spring of 1972. Aside from snippets from my own encounters with Jobs, this chapter also drew from an interview with Regis McKenna on July 31, 2012, and another with Ed Catmull on January 16, 2014.
Chapter 1: Steve Jobs in the Garden of Allah
This chapter establishes a baseline from which Steve Jobs would evolve over the rest of his life. The central anecdote of this chapter was provided by Dr. Larry Brilliant, then CEO of the Skoll Global Threats Fund and a close friend of Jobs since the mid-1970s. We interviewed him on two occasions—August 23, 2013, and again on January 17, 2014. We also visited the Garden of Allah in Mill Valley, California, with Brilliant and his wife, Girija, who was a cofounder of the Seva Foundation. Other key interviews included one with Laurene Powell Jobs on October 14, 2013, one with Lee Clow on October 14, 2013, and one with Regis McKenna on July 31, 2012.
Biographical dates and details for the chapter were culled from many published sources, including Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson’s “authorized” biography, and The Little Kingdom, Michael Moritz’s history of early Apple. Details about Stephen Wozniak’s life and contributions to Apple came primarily from his memoir iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It, which he wrote with the help of Gina Smith. This is also a source for many of the details about the collaboration between Wozniak and Jobs on the Blue Box digital telephone dialers.
For background information on the Homebrew Computer Club we relied primarily upon iWoz, by Wozniak with Smith, although we also drew from Moritz’s The Little Kingdom and other sources. I also discussed the club with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs on several occasions during meetings during the past twenty years.
The filing of the prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission for Apple Computer Inc.’s initial public offering on December 12, 1980, provided the statistics about Apple’s early growth—“Apple sold approximately 570, 7,600, 35,100, and 78,100 Apple II computer mainframes during the six-month period ending September 30, 1977, and during the fiscal years ending September 30, 1978, September 30, 1979, and September 26, 1980, respectively.”
We also relied upon the following online sources: The Seva Foundation website at www.seva.org; the Ralston White Retreat (the current official name of the Garden of Allah) website at www.ralstonwhiteretreat.org/history.asp; Fortune’s “Most Admired Company in the World” 2008–2014 compendium, published online at www.time.com/10351/fortune-worlds-most-admired-company-2014; and the Smithsonian Institution’s Oral and Video Histories interview of Steve Jobs on April 20, 1995, posted at http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/sj1.html. Another useful resource for this chapter was a website called foundersatwork.com, www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html, an online adjunct to Klaus Livingston’s book Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days.