As he brainstormed with Jony, and as Fadell’s team started to get going on a real design, Steve became increasingly confident. Creating a wholly new kind of mobile phone wouldn’t be easy. In fact, it would turn out to be even more daunting than the original Macintosh project. But Steve was certain he could negotiate a good deal with a telephone company, now that he’d gained some experience from the ROKR deal. He felt sure that his team could master the software and engineering challenges. He began to have the sense that if it all panned out, this new gadget might be the biggest-selling electronic product of all time. It wasn’t just going to be a phone, nor was it going to be a phone that was a media player. It was going to be a full-blown computer, too. That meant it would also be a smartphone, one that was perpetually connected to the Internet. The easiest part was coming up with a name for it: iPhone, of course.

Chapter 13

Stanford

On the morning of June 16, 2005, Steve woke up with butterflies in his stomach. In fact, says Laurene, “I’d almost never seen him more nervous.”

Steve was a natural performer who elevated business presentations to something close to high art. But what made him fidgety this day was the prospect of addressing the Stanford University graduating class of 2005. University president John Hennessy had broached the idea several months earlier, and after taking just a little time to think it over, Steve had said yes. He was offered speaking engagements constantly, and he always said no. In fact, he was asked to do so many commencement addresses that it became a running joke with Laurene and other friends who had college or graduate degrees: Steve said he’d accept one just to make an end run around them and get his PhD in a day, versus the years and years it had taken them. But in the end, saying no was simply a question of return on investment—conferences and public speaking seemed to offer a meager payoff compared to other things, like a dazzling MacWorld presentation, working on a great product, or being around his family. “If you look closely at how he spent his time,” says Tim Cook, “you’ll see that he hardly ever traveled and he did none of the conferences and get-togethers that so many CEOs attend. He wanted to be home for dinner.”

Stanford was different, even though speaking there would not turn Steve into Dr. Jobs—the school did not offer honorary degrees. For starters, he wouldn’t have to travel or miss dinner, since it was possible for him to drive from his house to the university in just seven minutes. More important, the university was deeply tied into the Silicon Valley tech community in a way he admired. Its education was first-rate and the professors he’d met through the years, like Jim Collins, were top caliber. Despite being a dropout, he always enjoyed spending time around smart college students. “He was only going to do one commencement speech,” says Laurene, “and if it was going to be anywhere it was going to be at Stanford.”

Getting around to writing the speech proved to be something of a bother. Steve had talked to a few friends about what to say, and he had even asked the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin for some thoughts. But nothing came of all that, so finally he decided to write it himself. He wrote up a draft one night, and then started bouncing ideas off Laurene, Tim Cook, and a couple of others. “He really wanted to get it right,” says Laurene. “He wanted it to say something he really cared about.” The language changed slightly, but its structure, which summed up his essential values in three vignettes, remained the same. In the days before the event he would recite it while walking around the house, from the bedroom upstairs to the kitchen below, the kids watching their dad spring past them in the same kind of trance he’d sometimes enter in the days before MacWorld or Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Several times he read it to the whole family at dinner.

That Sunday morning, as the family got ready to leave for Stanford Stadium, Steve spent some time looking for his keys to the SUV, which he couldn’t find anywhere, but then he decided he didn’t want to drive anyway—he’d use the short ride to rehearse once more. By the time the family piled into the SUV, they were late. Laurene drove as Steve tweaked the text yet again. Steve was sitting shotgun, with Erin, Eve, and Reed piled into the backseat. As they made their way toward the campus, Steve and Laurene fumbled through their pockets and Laurene’s handbag, looking for the VIP parking pass they’d been sent. They couldn’t find it anywhere.

As they neared Stanford, it became apparent that they should have built in more time—twenty-three thousand people were descending on the stadium that morning. The stadium is usually easy to get to, since it sits just off El Camino Real, but many roads were blocked off to accommodate the heavy pedestrian traffic of graduates and their families. When they finally got into the eucalyptus grove on the outskirts of the campus that doubled as a parking lot for the stadium, Laurene had to navigate around one roadblock after another. Steve was getting tense—he thought he might miss the only graduation speech he’d ever agreed to give.

Finally the family arrived at what seemed to be the last roadblock before the stadium. A policewoman standing by the sawhorse waved at Laurene to stop. She walked slowly over to the driver’s side of the car.

“You can’t go this way, ma’am,” she said. “There’s no parking here. You’ll have to go back to Paly [Palo Alto High School], across El Camino. That’s where the overflow lot is.”

“No, no, no,” Laurene said. “We have a parking pass. We just lost it.”

The policewoman stared at her.

“You don’t understand,” Laurene explained. “I have the commencement speaker here. He’s right here in the car. Really!”

The officer dipped her head and looked in through Laurene’s window. She saw the three kids in the back, the elegant blond driver, and a man in the shotgun seat wearing tattered jeans, Birkenstocks, and an old black T-shirt. He was fiddling with a few pieces of paper in his lap as he looked up at her through his rimless glasses. The officer stepped back and folded her arms.

“Really?” she said, raising her eyebrows. “Which one?”

Everyone in the car broke out laughing. “Really,” said Steve, raising his hand. “It’s me.”

WHEN THEY FINALLY reached the stadium, Steve, who had donned a cap and gown, headed for the dais with President Hennessy, while Laurene and the kids accompanied his daughters to a luxury booth above the football field. The scene was the typical Stanford mix of solemnity and frivolity. Some students marched around dressed in wigs and Speedos, participating in what’s known as the “wacky walk,” while others simply sported the regular graduation gowns. A handful dressed up as iPods. Hennessy spent a few minutes introducing Steve. He spoke of Steve as a college dropout who, ironically, could serve as a model of the kind of broad thinking needed to change the world for the better. The students were thrilled with Hennessy’s choice of commencement speaker. Steve seemed so much more accessible than the stuffed shirts who typically address graduating classes. After he tucked away his bottled water in a shelf under the speaker’s podium, Steve launched into the fifteen-minute speech that would become the most-quoted commencement address of all time:

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.