The great technology CEOs could impose rigor on their companies and yet accept the fact that all this rapid change would eventually disrupt their operations anyway. Mike Scott was not a great CEO. He had the skills and personality of a COO—a chief operating officer. When he didn’t get the stability he so avidly tried to engineer, he became frazzled. And, thanks in great part to Steve, Scotty didn’t achieve a whole lot of stability at Apple.

Steve certainly knew, intellectually, that he needed the orderly and well-oiled basic operations of a corporation to achieve his vision. But he was enamored with instability. His vision was based on destabilizing the existing computer industry. Stability was a quality that IBM had, and Apple, in Steve’s mind, was the anti-IBM.

Needless to say, the arranged marriage between one man who embraced uncertainty and another who craved stability was not destined to last. A harbinger of its eventual demise occurred in the first couple of weeks after Scotty arrived at Apple. He had to assign numbers to the workplace badges everyone wore around the new Stevens Creek Boulevard office. When he decided that Woz would be “Employee #1,” Steve went to him and whined; it didn’t take long till Scotty relented and gave Steve a new, customized tag: “Employee #0.”

IN PART BECAUSE of the way Steve quarreled with Markkula and Scott, in part because he so brazenly asserted his opinions as fact, and in part because, over the length of his career, he neglected to share credit for Apple’s successes in the press, Steve developed a reputation as an egomaniac who wasn’t willing to learn from others. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the man, even during his youngest, brashest, and most overbearing years.

While Steve looked to his elders at Apple for guidance, he also sought it out elsewhere. He didn’t yet have the skills to build a great company, but he admired those who had pulled it off, and he would go to great lengths to meet them and learn from them. “None of these people were really in it for the money,” he told me. “Dave Packard, for example, left all his money to his foundation. He may have died the richest guy in the cemetery, but he wasn’t in it for the money. Bob Noyce [cofounder of Intel] is another. I’m old enough to have been able to get to know these guys. I met Andy Grove [CEO of Intel from 1987 to 1998] when I was twenty-one. I called him up and told him I had heard he was really good at operations and asked if I could take him out to lunch. I did that with Jerry Sanders [founder of Advanced Micro Devices] and with Charlie Sporck [founder of National Semiconductor] and others. Basically I got to know these guys who were all company-builders, and the particular scent of Silicon Valley at that time made a very big impression on me.”

Most of these older men enjoyed sparring with and advising someone this glib, smart, and anxious to learn. Of course, they didn’t work with him, which lowered the stakes on the relationship considerably. Some were heroes whom he only met once or twice, like Edwin Land, the founder of Polaroid. Steve admired many things about Land, among them his obsessive commitment to creating products of style, practicality, and great consumer appeal, like the groundbreaking SX-70, the folding camera that wowed America in the 1970s; his reliance on gut instinct rather than consumer research; and the restless obsession and invention he brought to the company he founded.

Others became lifelong advisers. Grove served as a behind-the-scenes counselor to Steve at several critical moments in his career, despite the fact that Apple—until 2006—was the one major computer company whose machines didn’t run on Intel chips. Jobs deeply respected Grove. A Hungarian Jew who survived a Nazi labor camp, fascism, an aborted revolution, and the prolonged Russian siege of Budapest, who lost most of his hearing at age four from a severe case of scarlet fever, and who made his way to Ellis Island on his own after fleeing the communist regime as a teenager, Grove is as tough and pragmatic as any businessman around. But he is also, just as Steve was, a well-rounded person with wide-ranging interests. At City College of New York he mastered English, including its most scathing expletives, which he could hurl with astonishing venom thanks in part to his Hungarian accent. His combination of pragmatism and expansiveness was something Steve admired, something he aspired to himself.

Grove is the third member—along with Jobs and Bill Gates—of the triumvirate that brought personal computing to the masses. He came into his own after he signed on as the first employee at Intel Corporation, which was founded in 1968 by fellow Fairchild engineers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, the originator in 1965 of Moore’s law. That “law” was an observation about the price and performance of semiconductors that no one before him had noticed: namely that the number of transistors that could be etched on a single chip of a given size doubled every eighteen months or so, without any corresponding increase in the cost. It was Grove who best understood just how intricate and difficult it was to actually make reliable semiconductor components on a scale that computer makers like IBM, Sperry, and Burroughs could count on. In that sense, he was the one who transformed Moore’s law into a business model, allowing the computer industry to expect predictable gains on a fairly regular timetable. Grove was famous for hard-nosed, seemingly counterintuitive strategic decisions, including, famously, abandoning the memory chips that accounted for almost all of Intel’s revenues and switching Intel’s operations over to making microprocessors for the emerging categories of personal computers, engineering workstations, and bigger systems that would come to be known as “file servers.” His flexible, sophisticated approach to management set a high standard for Silicon Valley companies. He even wrote a popular management column for the San Jose Mercury News.

Noyce, the Intel cofounder who pioneered the development of integrated circuits, was another early hero. Jobs and Wozniak presented the Apple II to Noyce and the rest of the Intel board in 1977. While Noyce appreciated the technology, he didn’t appreciate the two young men, with their long hair and shabby attire. But Steve pursued Noyce, and over the years the two became friends. Noyce’s wife, Ann Bowers, was an early investor in the company, and in 1980 she even became Apple’s first vice president of human resources.

Steve’s relationships with outside mentors could be very personal. “Steve wanted that family thing,” remembers Regis McKenna. “He used to come over and just sit at the kitchen table with me and my wife [Dianne McKenna, an urban planner who at one point became mayor of Sunnyvale]. He always wanted to talk to her when he called up. She and I always had the sense that he wanted a family, that he really wanted that. He used to come over from Apple to fix things on my Apple II! I would tell him, Steve, you’ve got more important things to do than that, but he’d insist on coming over. ‘Besides,’ he’d tell me, ‘then I get to chat with Dianne.’ ”

Partly because he is so personable, partly because Markkula asked him to work for Apple as an adviser, and partly because his expertise is in something that Steve found instinctually appealing—marketing—McKenna became Steve’s most significant early mentor. McKenna was expert at presenting a company’s tale, but he was also a master corporate business strategist. Silicon Valley has long depended on marketers nearly as much as it has depended on engineers. Every technological advance must be framed in a beguiling narrative if it’s to get off the workbench and into businesses or homes. These advances often are foreign concepts, after all, with potential that seems opaque if not daunting, so the job of a great marketer is to wrestle the concept back to earth and make it approachable for mere technophobic mortals. McKenna’s consultancy would have a hand in the creation of many of the elite companies in Silicon Valley and beyond, including National Semiconductor, Silicon Graphics, Electronic Arts, Compaq, Intel, and Lotus Software.