What I learned from rereading Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs by Ken Kocienda.

The presenting sponsor of this episode is Tiny.

Tiny is the easiest way for you to sell your business.

They provide straightforward cash exits for founders.

And I've told you before that 1 of the best things about making this podcast is that I get to talk to a lot of other founders.

A reoccurring theme on the conversations that I have with other founders is that a large part of our lives is actually searching for your life's work, right?

Something that is unique to us that we can do forever.

And in almost every single case, that means starting more than 1 company.

And this is so common that Tiny has actually built an entire business around buying other businesses.

They know that there's a ton of entrepreneurs and founders that listen to this podcast that are building businesses.

Some of which have a business that they wanna sell today, and some of which will have a business that they wanna sell in the future.

And what I like about Tiny is how they differentiate their offering compared to other people that buy businesses.

You go to their website, you'll see this.

I've also been dealing with them for a while now.

They are super fast and super easy to deal with.

So when a founder goes to tiny.com and says, hey, I want to sell my business, you'll get a response within 48 hours.

There's an offer made within 7 days and they close within a month.

If you're a founder that wants to sell their business now or in the future, go to tiny.com.

And just 1 more thing before we jump into today's episode, please do me a favor, whatever podcast app that you're listening to this, currently search for Invest Like the Best and follow that show.

That is 1 of my all-time favorite podcasts.

I was listening to it for years before I actually met Patrick and became friends with him.

If you wanna hear the episode that I did with Patrick, it's episode 292 of Invest Like the Best.

It is the greatest single conversation I've had on another podcast ever.

I am shocked how many people reached out to me on social media and said, it is the single best podcast episode that they've heard all year.

Listen to it, let me know what you think.

Follow and best like the best in your podcast player and that's episode 292, Passion and Pain.

When Vince Lombardi joined the Green Bay Packers in 1959, the team had gone 11 straight seasons without a winning record.

Upon arriving at training camp as their new head coach, Lombardi made an immediate and indelible first impression.

After leading the players to a meeting room, Lombardi waited in front of

"'Gentlemen, ' he said, "'we have a great deal of ground to cover.

We're going to do things a lot differently than they've been done here before.

We're going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because perfection is not attainable.

But we are going to relentlessly chase it because in the process we will catch excellence." He paused and stared, his eyes moving from player to player.

I'm not remotely interested in being just good, he said with an intensity that startled them all.

Lombardi soon followed up with a clear-cut description of the specific thing they would perfect.

Gentlemen, this is the most important play we have.

It's the play that we will run again and again and again.

This is the power of focusing on and perfecting 1 thing.

You wouldn't think there was so much to say about a single running play, but John Madden described attending a coaching clinic

where Lombardi talked about the power sweep and only the power sweep for 8 hours.

Through practice after practice, drill after drill, game after game, and season after season, the Packers honed and refined Lombardi's power sweep.

Even though opposing teams knew the play was coming, they couldn't stop it.

Lombardi built his victories on an openly declared challenge.

To beat the Packers, you must beat the power sweep.

Over the following 7 years, the Packers won 5 championships,

a step-by-step, year-by-year progression through the ranks from worst to best to legends,

all built on the foundations of 1 humble running play, initially described on the blackboard and then executed exquisitely on the field over and over again.

In any, this sentence is so important, in any complex effort, communicating a well-articulated vision for what you're trying to do is the starting point for figuring out how to do it.

It may seem like a stretch to draw a comparison between winning football games in Green Bay and developing web browser software in Cupertino.

But a significant part of attaining excellence in any field is closing the gap between the accidental and intentional to achieve not just a something or even an everything but a specific and well-chosen thing.

To take words and turn them into a vision and then use the vision to spur the actions that create the results.

Vince Lombardi was the Steve Jobs of football coaches.

That is an excerpt from a book that I've read 3 or 4 times now, and the 1 I'm going to talk about today, which is Creative Selection Inside Apple's design process during the golden age of Steve Jobs, and it was written by Ken Koscienda.

Okay, so before I jump back into the book, I want to tell you why I'm reading this book for the third or fourth time.

So even though this is episode 281, there's actually more than 281 episodes of founders.

There's at least 8 unnumbered bonus episodes and 1 of those unnumbered bonus episodes is an episode that I've previously done on the book that I'm holding in my hand.

And so not numbering the bonus episodes was a giant mistake because I can reference them as you hear over and over again.

I'm constantly referencing past episodes of Founders because I don't think about this as separate episodes.

I just think about this as just 1 giant 400-hour-long conversation on the history of entrepreneurship that you and I are having.

And so I want to jump into the introduction where Ken tells us what this book is about.

This book is about my 15 years at Apple, My efforts to make great software while I was there and the stories and observations I want to relate about those times.

If you want to know what it was like to give a demo to Steve Jobs or what made Apple's products culture special, read on.

Every day at Apple was like going to school.

A design focused, high tech, product creation university.

And he talks about how intense the work environment was and that Steve had unbelievably high standards in everything, which we're going to go into a lot today.

Most of my highlights, I'm going to really focus the highlights on just the parts of the book that are about Steve Jobs.

There's a lot of great detail in here for anybody building a product, but most of it is going to be about Steve Jobs today.

With that intensity came an insistence on doing things right.

And without explicitly trying to do so, we developed an approach to work that proved particularly effective.

And so the intensity of Steve Jobs jumps off the pages of this book.

When I got to this section, it made me think of 1 of my favorite quotes by Warren Buffett, and he shares that same intensity.

He says, intensity is the price of excellence.

And so a main theme of the book is that Steve did not want to sit around and have a bunch of meetings and talk about hypotheticals.

He wanted to physically see the work, so they pushed all their work forward through a series of demos and in many cases him telling you specifically, hey, what I want to see next.

So he says there weren't any company handbooks describing these elements.

I skipped over a bunch, but he just naming like, you know, some traits that Apple used to develop their products.

There weren't any company handbooks describing these elements.

So he was just naming, I skipped over a bunch, but he's just naming like, you know, some traits that Apple used to develop their products.

Nobody outlined this list in a new employee orientation.

This happened from the top down, stemming from the unquestioned authority and uncompromising vision of Steve Jobs.

We never waited around for brilliant flashes of insight that might solve problems in 1 swoop, and we had very few actual Eureka moments.

Instead, this is the main point of the book.

Instead, we move forward in stepwise fashion from problem to design to demo to shipping product taking each promising concept and trying to come up with new ways to make it better.

This next section I've thought about for years.

So according to Amazon, I first ordered this book on January 7th, 2019.

I probably read it shortly after I received it.

There's a lot of reasons I admire Steve Jobs, why I consider him the greatest entrepreneur of all time.

When it comes to building products and building a valuable company, he's brilliant.

If I had to say the single trait I admire the most about him and the 1 that I don't even understand how it's capable that he was able to do it is his clarity of thought.

Steve is the clearest thinker out of any single other person that I've covered so far on the podcast.

And when I think of Steve's clarity of thought, I think about this quick story from Ken's book.

He made all the important product decisions.

He used these demo reviews as his chief means of deciding how Apple's software should look and feel and function.

From my standpoint as an individual programmer, demoing to Steve was like visiting the Oracle of Delphi.

The demo was my question, Steve's response was the answer.

While the pronouncements from the Greek Oracle often came in the form of confusing riddles, that wasn't true with Steve.

He would either approve a demo or he would request to see something different next time.

Although Steve's opinions and moods could be hard to anticipate, he would this is such I love this.

He was utterly predictable when it came to his passion for products.

He wanted Apple's products to be great and he insisted on being involved in the process as it went along.

Whenever Steve reviewed a demo, he would say, often with highly detailed specificity, what he wanted to happen next.

He was always trying to ensure the products were as intuitive and straightforward as possible,

and he was willing to invest his own time, effort, and influence to see that they were.

Through Looking at demos, asking for specific changes, then reviewing the changed work again later on and giving a final approval before we could ship, Steve could make a product turnout like he wanted.

Much like the Greek oracle, Steve foretold the future.

And so Ken is going to describe what it was like to demo to Steve Jobs.

This, there's a bunch of highlights over several pages.

This part of the book is absolutely fantastic.

And I love how he's gonna end this section because Steve only speaks 4 sentences.

Goes back to Clare being really easy to understand and there's no ambiguity in what Steve wants to happen next.

And in this case, Ken, previously he'd worked on, he helped create the Safari browser.

This is like, you know, maybe 10 years before where we are in the book.

Worked on the original keyboard for the iPhone.

In this case, he is demoing, this is right very soon before about a year and a half before Steve dies, unfortunately, he's demoing the keyboard on the iPad, which has not been released yet where we are in the story.

And I should tell you, so I was going back through the index of the book after I was done last night with all my my Highlights, and I just went to the index to make sure I hit all the Steve Jobs parts And I thought this was fantastic because this part is this is in the chapter called the demo, right?

The part is not described the demo in the index.

This part is described in the index as the decisiveness of Steve Jobs, which is a perfect description of it, because we're going to go into right now, right?

His look wasn't obviously unfriendly or threatening, But surely he knew his unblinking gaze could intimidate people in my position.

This idea that when Steve would stare at you, he wouldn't blink.

I've heard like dozens of stories about this and you know, the 10 or so books I've read on him.

I saw his look as a signal that he wasn't gonna let me pull the wool over his eyes.

Scott stood up and crossed behind Steve's chair.

He has some tablet keyboard designs to show you.

Continuing the demo introduction, from where Scott left off I said, right, there are 2 designs.

1 has more keys, like a laptop keyboard, and the other has bigger keys, like a scaled-up iPhone.

Steve then slowly swiveled his chair around to the demo table.

In front of him, the iPad was in landscape.

Steve moved his eyes all over the iPad screen, rotating his head slowly in small figure eights in what I took to be an attempt to get a view of every corner of the display.

After several long moments of study, he reached out to tap the Zoom key to switch the keyboard to my bigger keys design.

No reaction, no hint of what he was thinking.

Steve was like an expert high stakes poker player checking his whole cards for the first time after receiving them from the dealer.

Now that the screen looked different, Steve started his study all

He took his time, taking a solid 30 seconds to absorb every detail on the screen.

Steve was still looking at me and so with a half shrug I said, yeah, uh, I guess so.

Steve sized me up a little and then asked, which 1 do you think we should use?

A simple question clearly directed at me and only me.

Steve didn't shift in his chair or motion toward anyone else in the room.

It was my demo and he wanted me to answer.

the past few days and I've started to like the keyboard layout with the bigger keys.

I think I could learn to touch type on it and I

There's a picture, all these cool drawings in

the book and 1 of this is just Steve staring directly at you on the previous page and this is what I think of

It's what I think of when when when Ken's about

Steve continued looking at me as he thought about my answer.

He never moved his eyes to anyone or anyone else.

There he was, seriously considering my idea about the next big Apple product.

He thought for a few seconds, then he announced the demo verdict.

Before I read a few more sentences, go back to what the index describes this part.

Remember this when Ken compares and contrasts the way Apple builds products, relying on the taste and judgment of the founder with how Google makes their products.

So then once he says the demo was over, Scott walked a couple of steps towards the door, giving me the cue that it was time for me to go.

And Ken talks about, hey, when you're doing demos to Steve, this is the price to be in the room.

If he feels you have no valuable insight, you're never going to see him again.

He says you have to make substantive contributions to the discussion to discussion with him as a way.

That's the way to earn future invitations.

Can you make substantive contributions to the discussions on the products and help push them forward, help make them better?

I'm going to go to the punch line, which happens a few pages later.

He's describing, Ken is describing, again, a main theme of the book, why these demos are so important.

Apple must make great software to get there.

They use a series of iterations in the form of demos.

Now, Ken says demo served as the primary means to turn ideas into software.

This statement includes the assumption that Apple made making great software an important goal to begin with.

We did and that came straight from Steve.

He set the company's priorities and he stressed in public statements and internal communications that making great software was a core corporate focus.

What's more, Steve wasn't merely interested in paying lip service to this goal.

And so the software team produced demos in a steady stream.

And whenever there was interesting new work, Steve found the time to attend a demo review so he could see it.

1 of the best maxims that I've ever come across.

He's showing through his actions what's important.

I'm reviewing on a very micro level what all parts of this product are going to look, feel and operate like.

Steve found the time to attend a demo review so he could see it.

His involvement kept the progress and momentum going.

All of this, everything I'm reading to is happening over many, many pages after the demo because we're learning like what can learn from this demo with Steve.

2 things he's going to pull out that was important to Steve.

You have to put yourself in your customer's shoes and you have to hack away the unessential.

Steve looked carefully at the software and asked me succinct questions to see if the work could be made simpler.

Even though he was a high tech CEO, Steve could put himself in the shoes of customers, people who cared nothing for the ins and outs of the software industry.

He never wanted Apple software to overload people, especially when they might already be stretched by the bustle of their everyday lives.

This is something Steve talked about over and over again from the time he was a young man in the 1980s till right before he died.

Consider a mom who is they just people just do not care about your product as much as you do.

You have to make it simple and easy to use right from the get go.

And so this idea of putting yourself in the customer's shoes and even attaching like a specific example of a customer helps you make better product decisions.

Consider a mom who's busy with her daily routine.

On a day, she was worried about her 16 year old son who was homesick from high school and was taking care of himself.

She was running a few minutes late getting to the office because there was bad traffic on the road.

She had a report due later in the afternoon and she was trying to fit in 1 more email reply as she headed down the hallway towards the next meeting.

Steve believed she would do better with a product that wasn't loaded down with everything a mob the product designers could dream up This is hacking away the unessential.

This is some Bruce Lee shit right here he believed that stripping away non-essential features made products easier for people to learn from the start and easier to use over time.

He wanted products and their software to speak for themselves.

He realized that nobody would be standing over the shoulder of a person who is having their first experience with software, carefully describing every nuance of every feature.

So what they're talking about there is like, hey, let's say you're the 1 coming up with the demo, you're the programmer.

Steve's not gonna let you sit there and describe your thinking behind it.

Cause you're, are you going, and he uses this example.

1 time he called, I read this book called Insanely Simple.

And it was a guy that worked on the ads for Apple.

And Steve did this exact same thing with him too.

In meetings, he would try to say, okay, this is the thing behind this ad campaign.

Steve's like, shut up, just show me the ads.

He, and he says something like, are you going to be there when I see this in a magazine or on a billboard?

I'm going to experience it like the customer is going to experience.

He's like, he realized that nobody would be standing over the shoulder of a person who's having their first experience with software, carefully describing every nuance of every feature.

And so his point is, wouldn't it be better if software was clear and intuitive right off the bat?

See all Founders transcripts on Applepodcasts

#281 Working with Steve Jobs