Steve Jobs: From the Garage to 10 Billion Dollars
The Incredible Story of an Adopted Child Who Changed the World Forever
Some men are born great.
Steve Jobs has died.
But from that beginning – tentative, groping, uncertain – he forged two of the most revolutionary companies in the history of human creativity, remade the way the world talks to itself, and built a legacy so thorough and so permanent that it is almost impossible to conceive of the modern world without him.
This is not an Apple“>Apple story, not just. This is not a story about money, or technology, or brilliant product design.
This is the story of a man who refused to accept that at every turn things had to be the way they were.
The Surprising Start
Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California.
His biological mother, Joanne Schieble, was an unmarried graduate student, and his father was a Syrian immigrant and fellow student, Abdulfattah Jandali. In 1955 it was socially devastating for an unmarried woman to have a child and Joanne made the painful decision to put her son up for adoption.
He was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a working-class couple from Mountain View, Calif.. Paul Jobs was a machinist. Clara an accountant. They were not wealthy. They did not link up. They were just ordinary people who had made an extraordinary promise. They would love this child, and give him every chance they could.
They did it.
Paul Jobs had a workshop in the garage and from a very young age Steve was in there with him learning how things were made, how they worked, how they came apart and came back together. Paul had taught him there was an art to building things right, that the insides of things mattered as much as the outsides, that quality wasn’t something you skimped on even when no one else would see it.
And that lesson would inform everything Steve Jobs ever built.
The Dropout That Never Dropped Out Of Teaching
He enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1972, a decision that immediately put financial strain on his adoptive parents. Reed was costly and Paul and Clara Jobs had been saving for years to send their son there.
Steve lasted six months before he dropped out.
He felt guilty that his parents were spending money on a formal education that he wasn’t sure was giving him what he needed. But dropping out didn’t mean stopping education. He stayed in Portland for another eighteen months, sleeping on floors, eating free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple and auditing whatever classes he fancied.
One of those courses was, in fact, calligraphy.
It seemed completely impractical at the time, a course in the art of beautiful handwriting, with no application in life that Jobs could see. He still loved it. He studied type faces and spacing, the relationships of letters to each other on a page.
That calligraphy class paid off when, ten years later, he was designing the first Macintosh computer. The Mac was the first personal computer with multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced type.
The desktop publishing age was just beginning. It changed how humans interact with written information on screens. “You can’t connect the dots looking ahead,” Jobs would say years later. “They can only be joined backwards,”
The Garage Where It All Began
In 1976, Steve Jobs and fellow student Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer Company in the garage of the Jobs family home in Los Altos, California.
Wozniak was the engineer, a real technical genius who had built a personal computer almost from the ground up. Jobs was a different matter. He was the one who looked at what Wozniak had built and immediately knew not just what it was but what it could mean — who could use it, why they would want it, and how to make them want it.
Their first product was the Apple I . This was sold as a circuit board . Their second, the Apple II, was one of the best selling personal computers of the era. Apple was a publicly traded company by 1980, one of the most successful IPOs in American business history. Steve Jobs was worth more than $200 million at age twenty-five.
But the early success was only the beginning, and the beginning was about to get complicated.
Autumn
In 1985 Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple. Apple, the company he founded, the company that carried his name, the company that made him famous and rich and powerful.
The board backed CEO John Sculley, whom Jobs himself had lured from Pepsi with the famous line: “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
Sculley decided to come to Apple. And a year later helped kick Jobs out of it
.
Jobs was 30 years old. He had just been fired from the company he built from scratch in his parents’ garage.
Most people would’ve given up. Most people would have taken the money, and there was plenty of it, and found a quieter thing to do.
Steve Jobs created two new companies.
NeXT/PIXAR
The first was NeXT Computer, a high-end workstation company targeting the education and business markets. NeXT never really took off commercially, but the software platform Jobs built there – the one he was most proud of, the one that was the most sophisticated expression of his thinking about what computers could do – would become the foundation of Apple’s entire modern operating system.
The second was a small animation studio he bought from George Lucas for $10 million in 1986.
It was named Pixar.
In 1995, Jobs owned and ran Pixar, which released the world’s first fully computer-animated feature film, Toy Story. It was a phenomenon. It changed animation forever. When Disney bought Pixar in 2006, Steve Jobs became Disney’s largest individual shareholder, with a stake worth about $7 billion.
The Return Back
In 1997, Apple was a few weeks from bankruptcy.
The company that once defined personal computing was now hopelessly lost – bloated product lines, confused strategy, tumbling market share. Desperate, Apple bought NeXT and brought Jobs back in the building he was pushed out of twelve years earlier.
Within a year he had reshuffled the whole firm. He cut the product line from dozens of models to four. He brought back the focus, the discipline, the obsessive attention to design that characterized Apple’s best years.
And then he started to build.
The iPod. iTunes iPhone. The iMac. iPad. Each a product that not only competed in an existing market but created new markets altogether. All made with the same philosophy that Jobs learned from his father in that garage in Mountain View: that what is on the inside is just as important as what is on the outside, that quality is something you do not compromise on, that the person using the product deserves something beautiful.
The iPhone, released in 2007, did not just alter the phone industry. It changed life for people. The way they talk, the way they move, the way they absorb data, the way they buy things, the way they photo their lives.
Summary
Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003.
He fought it for eight years, and he was still working, still rolling out products, still on stage introducing the world to things it didn’t know it needed until he showed them to it.
Steve Jobs died October 5, 2011 at his residence in Palo Alto, California. He was fifty-six years old.
The world stood still for a second. Apple stores on every continent put flowers and apples out front. Statements from world leaders. Engineers, artists, designers and ordinary people who had never met him somehow felt they had lost someone who mattered to them personally.
Because they had. In a very real way.
The Never Ending Legacy
By the time Steve Jobs died, he was worth about $10 billion.
But the number is almost meaningless….”
He left a company that was the first in American history to reach a market capitalization of one trillion dollars. His legacy includes products used by billions of people each day. He set a bar for design, quality and user experience that the whole technology industry still compares itself to.
And he left us a story – about an adopted kid from a working-class family in California who dropped out of college, got fired from his own company, came back from nothing, and changed the world not once, but many times over.
He could be difficult. He had not always been a good man. He was demanding and difficult and sometimes cruel, as people who care passionately about quality can be.
but in his heart of hearts he felt the work was worth while. It was the details that mattered. That the people who would use the things he built deserved the best he could give them.
That belief is his real legacy.
It didn’t die with him.
Steve Jobs February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011
Co-Founder: Apple Computer, Pixar Animation Studios, NeXT Net Worth at Death: $10 Billion Apple Market Cap: $1 Trillion+
Changed the world. ” Several times.
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