- The speaker is promoting the Founders Podcast and explaining why it exists
- Steve Jobs spent a lot of time studying and learning from other successful entrepreneurs
- The podcast offers the best ideas and mistakes of history's greatest entrepreneurs
- To access full episodes, listeners need to sign up on the website
- The speaker lists several episodes related to Steve Jobs and his influences
- The importance of reading biographies and learning from the past is emphasized
- The speaker recommends specific books on Steve Jobs for further reading

- The video discusses a number of books related to Steve Jobs and his influences.
- The first book mentioned is about Steve Jobs' brain and was written after he returned to Apple but before his death.
- The second book is about Pixar and Steve Jobs' role in building the company.
- The video also mentions two bonus episodes that discuss Steve Jobs and his approach to company building.
- The video then goes on to mention several books about individuals who worked closely with Steve Jobs, including Johnny Ive and Ed Catmull.
- The video also discusses books about Steve Jobs' influences, including Edwin Land, Bob Noyce, and Andy Grove.

- The piece discusses various influential figures in Steve Jobs' life and the books related to them.
- Andy Grove, a Hungarian immigrant and co-founder of Intel, played a significant role in Jobs' decision to return to Apple.
- Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, was one of Jobs' mentors.
- Akio Morita, founder of Sony, influenced both Jobs and Jeff Bezos.
- Walt Disney, known for his dedication to quality and building a lasting company, was a major influence on Jobs.
- J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project, taught Jobs the importance of having talented people on his team.
- Henry Ford, known for his simplicity and innovation, was one of Jobs' favorite entrepreneurs.
- Dave Packard, co-founder of HP, inspired Jobs with his management structure.
- Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, influenced Jobs and Edwin Land in creating groundbreaking products.
- Robert Friedland, a charismatic figure and friend of Jobs, became a billionaire through mining.
- Larry Ellison, Jobs' best friend, also played a significant role in his life.

- Steve Jobs is mentioned as one of the most important people in several books discussed in the video
- Larry Ellison, the subject of the books, is described as a crazy character who has been running his company since the 1970s and has amassed billions of dollars
- The video recommends reading "The Billionaire and the Mechanic" as the top book on Larry Ellison, which details his partnership with a car mechanic to win the American Cup in sailing
- The video also mentions another book called "The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison" and encourages viewers to sign up for the misfit feed to access full-length episodes of the podcast.

The speaker promotes the Founders Podcast, which offers insights from history's greatest entrepreneurs. Listeners can sign up on the website to access full episodes. The video discusses various books related to Steve Jobs and his influences, including his own biography and books about individuals he worked closely with. Other influential figures in Jobs' life, such as Walt Disney and Henry Ford, are also mentioned. The video recommends reading books about Larry Ellison, a billionaire and friend of Jobs, including "The Billionaire and the Mechanic." Viewers are encouraged to sign up for the misfit feed to access full-length podcast episodes.

I'm posting it again in case you missed it because I think it's a great explanation of why Founders Podcast exists and what you would get out of listening to the full episodes.

Most people would be surprised to know how much time and effort Steve Jobs put into learning from great company builders that came before him and how much that studying benefited his career.

I hope listening to this will encourage you to upgrade and start listening to full episodes of Founders.

Apple was founded 45 years ago today and when I read that I had the idea to do just a quick little episode for you that highlights the almost 40 different episodes of Founders that I've done on Steve Jobs or the people that he was influenced by or looked up to.

And the reason I wanted to do that is because I think Steve Jobs is 1 of the best illustrations of why founders podcasts exist.

And that's because Steve, like every single other of history's greatest entrepreneurs, all spent an excessive amount of time studying from and learning from the great people that came before them and then use the ideas that they learned through that practice of study and reading to use those ideas in the company that they wind up building.

If you listen to Founders, you are able to download into your brain the very best ideas of all of history's greatest entrepreneurs and their worst mistakes that you can avoid.

And so the fact that you're hearing this, that means you're not currently on the miss it feed and that means you're only hearing partial episodes of Founders, you just hear about the first 30 minutes of some of the episodes that I've done.

In order to access full episodes, you'll need to sign up by tapping the link that's in the show notes of your podcast player or by going to founderspodcast.com.

And once you do that, you get immediate access to 247 full-length episodes that are available nowhere else.

Every episode is ad-free and it takes less than 29 seconds to set up.

I think there's like 37 episodes on this list that are related to either Steve Jobs himself or people he studied.

I will leave all of the episode title and episode numbers in the show notes.

So if you sign up, you can start with these episodes.

Gives you like a fantastic blueprint or fantastic roadmap to start going through this extensive catalog, back catalog of founders.

Because I've spent 4 years, about 6, 000 hours and I've read over 100, 000 pages.

So it's just so I can document and search for the very best ideas in the history of entrepreneurship.

I've distilled what I learned down to roughly about 400 hours.

And by listening to the episodes I'm about to talk to you about it'd be impossible for you to listen to them learn the best ideas from these extremely Talented some of the smartest most productive people ever live and not get a return on your investment when you apply these ideas to your Work, so I'm just gonna start first.

I'm gonna talk about the ones that are Specifically on Steve Jobs And so the very first episode I ever did on Steve Jobs, it was number 5, it was based on Steve Jobs' biography, it was written by Walter Isaacson.

And this is where it really blew my mind, because as I'm reading this book, and Steve is working with the author, with Walter Isaacson, and he knows he's dying.

And in this book Steve introduced me to so many other founders I didn't even know existed.

He goes through at length about all the people he admired, the people he wanted to pick their brain, the 1 he read books about, what inspired him and what ideas of theirs that he used to build Apple.

Number 19, if you could only read, let's say you only had time to read 1 biography of Steve Jobs, this is the 1 I would recommend.

The book is called Becoming Steve Jobs, the evolution of a reckless upstart into a visionary leader.

And it was published after the Isaacson's biography.

So it also builds on some of what Isaacson wrote about.

And what I loved about this book is it shows, in the subtitle, it says, the evolution of a reckless upstart into a visionary leader.

Steve Jobs was not born as 1 of the greatest entrepreneurs to ever live.

He made himself, he built himself into that person.

And so this book spends a lot of time talking about how he, the mistakes he was making in his 20s and 30s and how he corrected.

He had the ability to constantly, he was a learning machine, he had the ability to constantly learn and correct his behavior.

And without making those mistakes and making and learning from his struggles we would have never had things like the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, the iMac, all of the things that now the gigantic Apple empire sits upon.

And the book also has a fantastic introduction written by Mark Andreessen.

If you go and look at the description, I have a quote from Mark Andreessen as the description of why I created Founders.

And it's actually a quote I heard from Mark Andreessen in a different interview and he talks about like why he's read hundreds of biographies even to this day.

He has like this comprehensive historical base of knowledge that helps him succeed in his work.

And this is what Mark said about why he read and continues to read so many biographies.

He says there are thousands of years of history in which lots and lots of very smart people worked very hard and ran all types of experiments on how to create new businesses, invent new technology, come up with new ways to manage, etc.

They ran these experiments throughout their entire lives.

At some point, somebody put these lessons down in a book.

For very little money and a few hours of your time, you can learn from someone's accumulated experience.

There is so much more to learn from the past than we often realize.

You could productively spend your time reading experiences of great people who have come before you and learn every time."

What I loved is when the pandemic happened and everybody was working from home, working remotely, I watched a few interviews that Mark did in his house.

the reason I point out the fact that he's a multi-billionaire

is not to glorify his wealth per se, it's the fact that at that level you can learn from whoever you want.

You can hire the world's experts, you can do whatever you want.

And he chooses, He's showing us by his actions that how valuable reading and learning from biographies is and it's just hilarious.

You'd watch these videos of him and it's just Mark in his house.

Like his book collection has outstripped his shelves.

You just have stacks of books on top of each other.

Throughout his living room and wherever he's doing these interviews.

I'm just like, alright, I'm clearly on the right path.

This is clearly a very high value activity that we need to keep going on.

So anyways, Mark Andreessen wrote the introduction to Becoming Steve Jobs.

It's very helpful to listen to the podcast first and then read the biographies.

A lot of people that listen to Founders do that, and they say that it really adds to their understanding and it makes the ideas that they're learning stick even more.

And don't worry about if you don't remember all these numbers, like I said, I'll list it down below as well.

It's called Return to the Little Kingdom, Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apples.

So Apples was founded in 1976, 45 years ago today, like I said.

At the time, Michael Moritz was a journalist for Time Magazine.

the podcast, you'll see, they're very, very old books.

That's another advantage that Founders gives you.

Very few people are, like, you just have a complete edge.

Because everybody's focused on, like, what's happening now, what are entrepreneurs doing now?

Not why are you doing that, but like the greatest people in history studied the people that came before them.

It's not that they don't pay attention to what's going on now, but like if you have to choose a machine, let me listen to a podcast interview with an entrepreneur that's operating today or let me study a great entrepreneur in the past, it's no question.

The greatest entrepreneurs will tell you, choose the history first.

You can do both and you should do both, but without question, You should be building your own historical base of knowledge first.

that this is interesting is because the book is, first

of all, very, very old, and it shows at the end of

Steve Jobs had not been kicked out of Apple yet.

We don't know what Apple's going to turn into.

And then there's also an interesting point where Michael Moritz he winds up after that book he winds up transitioning from a journalist and a reporter to a venture capitalist and fast forward to today and he's actually a billionaire because he was really successful at investing in technology companies because that's what he was studying.

this is Steve Jobs and the Next Big Thing.

This is also an important book and also a very old book because it's another snapshot in Steve Jobs' career And it only covers the 13 years between when he got kicked out of Apple and when he returns.

These are known and referenced as Steve Jobs' wilderness years.

The reason this book is important, the podcast is important to listen to and the book is important to read is because you have what is arguably 1 of, if not the greatest entrepreneur to ever live, making 1 bad decision, 1 stupid decision after another.

I think on the podcast it's like Bizarro Steve Jobs.

All the other books are like, copy these ideas because Steve—they're genius ideas.

This is learn these lessons and do the opposite.

It is crazy how you can have somebody so smart and so talented.

I think it's important for all of us to remember that no one's perfect, right?

This book is just fantastic because—let me give you 1 example.

Steve talks over and over again about how important it is to make sure you have the highest talent level, especially at the beginning of your company because When you're starting a company, when the company's small, it is affected by the quality of talent that it has more than a large company is.

Because let's say you have 10 people and you hire 2 bad apples, well 20% of your company sucks.

Steve Jobs, 1 of the first 10 hires at Next,

had nothing to do with software, nothing to do

He hired an interior designer for his office.

That's not that's not a joke That's a gigantic mistake The book is again Fantastic very old book very few people now like Your competitors are probably not reading that book.

This book was written after he came back to Apple the second time but before he died.

Not just to read a book once or listen to a podcast once, but you go back and you re-read great books.

You go back and you re-listen to podcasts or great podcasts, that is, because the book stays the same, the podcast stays the same, but you change as a person.

In between reading this book the first time, it was number 5, this is number 214.

books I read that adds and knowledge compounds just like money does.

the page haven't changed, but I've changed drastically.

You start to notice things you didn't notice.

Then number 235 is to Pixar and beyond my unlikely journey with Steve Jobs to make entertainment history.

Most of what I focus on is the fact that the building of Apple, right?

But Steve Jobs became a billionaire not from Apple.

The first time he became a billionaire was from Pixar.

He dumped $50 million into Pixar before it made a dollar.

So this book is written by the first CFO of Pixar.

He talks about what it was like to build that company into an asset, a business that was good enough to sell to Disney a couple years later for almost $8 billion.

And the fact is we learn a lot about Steve's approach to company building in that book.

And 1 of the craziest things is when Steve hires the guy who's Pixar's first CFO and he writes the book after he leaves Pixar obviously.

a minute, we're losing money every month and Steve Jobs has put in $50 million of his own money.

He had somewhere between $70 and $80 million to thereabouts.

This is not an exact number when he left Apple.

He put almost all of it and he was at next at the

time So his company was it wasn't doing well, right?

Just before he went back to Apple put all of it almost all

of into Pixar and he just had the patience and a belief That what that he had a small group of geniuses and they were going to change history.

So, I've done, I don't know, like 10 bonus episodes, somewhere like that.

Eventually, I wised up and realized I should number the bonus episodes just like every other episode so you could actually find them.

So, the 2 I did on Steve Jobs was before I realized I should number them.

And I was like, oh, I just won't number them because they're bonus episodes.

But bonus episode or not, every single episode, before I sit down, like Founders is 1

of the craziest podcasts that you will ever come across.

Like there's no other podcast like it in the world.

Before I sit down to talk to you, I have to read an entire book and it's not like I'm taking long times between making new podcasts.

It's just insane the amount of preparation I have to do.

The first book is insanely simple, The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success.

You can find it between episodes number 112 and episodes number 113.

It was written by somebody who worked at the ad agency that Steve Jobs used and he gives us in.

The ideas that he used that were completely different because this guy is not only working for Apple, he's working for all these other technology companies.

He's like, there's nobody else that thinks like Apple.

So he writes an entire book about what are these unique things, unique perspectives and ideas that Steve used.

It's called Creative Selection Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs.

You can find it between episodes 110 and 111.

for Founders, and I think not signing up for Founders is a gigantic, gigantic mistake.

Just read, I'll leave some reviews down below if you wanna read what other people say.

Gives you an insight into what it was like.

Like this, the author literally had to do product demos to Steve over and over again.

It's just, there's gold, there's like gem after gem after gem in that book.

going to tell you about that have to do with a person that worked very closely with Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs.

So the first 1 is Johnny Ive and Steve Jobs.

It's number 178, Johnny Ive, the genius behind Apple's greatest products.

I just found out that when Johnny Ive worked at Apple, after Steve came back, there was only 1 person in the entire company.

Steve set up the company, so there's only 1 person in the entire company that could tell Johnny what to do, and that was him.

And his base salary, Johnny's base salary was $30 million a year.

That's how valuable Steve thought he was.

So anyways, that's number 178, Johnny Ive, the genius behind Apple's greatest products.

Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration.

This is Steve's co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, who's by all accounts a managerial genius, and also the person that worked the longest consecutive time with Steve Jobs.

I don't have the book in front of me, so it's 1 of those.

The end of this book, there's like a 30 page afterward or 20 page afterward called Steve We Knew.

It's absolutely fantastic, but you can learn a lot from Ed in general, but there's also Steve's, you know, obviously a main character in that book and in the podcast.

Now there's 2 other books that I read that are on Steve Jobs and several other technology company founders.

Number 1, excuse me, number 157, The Innovators, How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and geeks created the digital revolution.

Steve's in there a lot and a lot of Steve's heroes are in there as well.

And then the other 1 is another example book on Steve Jobs and several other technology company founders is number 208.

In the company of giants, Candid Conversations with Visionaries of the Digital World.

2 MBA students at Stanford in the late 90s decided to write a book and the entire book is just interviews with Steve and I think 15 other technology company founders.

Like Bill Gates is in there, Steve Case, like just flat-out geniuses.

And so obviously if you listen to number 208 you'll learn a lot from Steve Jobs and other people as well.

Now I want to get into Steve's influences.

These are the people he talks about over and over and over again.

He has this world famous quote when Steve said, Picasso had a saying, good artists copy, great artists steal.

And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

He gives them, he gives credit to who these people are.

So the most important person, I would study all these people because they're also very formidable individuals in their own right, but the person that has the single largest influence on Apple is this guy I didn't know about him before I started doing this project.

He ran Polaroid for like 60 years and he was Steve Jobs' hero.

Edwin Land at the time was like in his 70s.

And he said visiting Edwin Land was like visiting a shrine.

I was shocked when I started reading, and I've read 5 books on Edwin Land for the podcast.

I was shocked how many ideas I had thought I had learned from Steve Jobs that he just learned, that he literally regurgitated and learned from Edwin Land.

So, number 40, Insisting on the Impossible, The Life of Edwin Land, and there's another book.

So, I read Insisting on the Impossible, The Life of Edwin Land, and there's another book.

So I read Insisting on the Impossible, The Life of Edwin Land, my opinion the best biography of Edwin Land.

So one's a biography of Edwin Land, one's the history of Polaroid.

Obviously there is no Polaroid without Edwin Land.

Then number 2, 3 more episodes on Edwin Land.

Number 132, the instant image, Edwin Land and the Polaroid experience.

Number 133, Land's Polaroid, a company and the man who invented it and number 134 a triumph of genius Edwin land Polaroid and the Kodak patent word so right there because there's some giant books right there That is probably if I had to guess almost 2, 000 pages just on everyone land that I went through Then we go through 1 of Steve Jobs' mentor, 2 of his mentors were the 2 co-founders of Intel.

So technically the 2 co-founders of Intel were Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, but really Andy Grove was considered an unofficial co-founder and really 1 of the most important, probably the most important CEO of Intel.

So Bob Noyce and Andy Grove, Steve Jobs talks about over and over and over again.

the godfather of Silicon Valley at the time.

He'd go, he was in his 20s, he'd just show up at Bob Noyce's house and just have dinner with his family and stuff, it was hilarious.

Bob Noyce would constantly chastise Steve about his bad manners and just the way he talks and everything.

So number 8, episode number 8, the Intel Trinity, how Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove built the world's most important company.

Number 166, the man behind the microchip, Robert Noyce and the invention of Silicon Valley.

And then 159 is the autobiography of Andy Grove.

the craziest autobiographies because he winds up, it's, you know what?

I'll just read you, I'm going to read you 1 of the opening paragraphs of the book.

It only covers the first 21 years of his life.

But he says, I was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1936.

By the time I was 20, I'd lived through a Hungarian fascist dictatorship.

So this is everything happened to him before he turned 20.

I lived through a Hungarian fascist dictatorship, German military operation, the Nazis final solution, the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint.

He winds up escaping Hungary and making it to the United States and becoming 1 of the most important founders and managers in the technology industry history by far.

But there's also a fantastic story that Steve Jobs tells in other books why Andy Grove was so important to his decision to return to Apple because at the time he just, well I'll read this, this is Steve Jobs talking about this and this gives you an idea of Andy Grove's like blunt no bullshit style.

So it says, we just taken Pixar public and I was happy being CEO there.

I never knew of anyone who served as a CEO of 2 public companies, even temporarily, and I wasn't even sure it was legal.

This is all Steve Jobs talking, by the way.

See all Founders transcripts on Applepodcasts

Steve Jobs's Heroes