See all Founders transcripts on Applepodcasts

Speaker 1

00:00

People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing and it's totally true. And the reason is because this is so hard that if you don't, any rational person would give up. It is really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don't love it, if you're not having fun doing it, and you don't really love it, you're going to give up.

Speaker 1

00:24

And that's what happens to most people. If you really look at the ones that ended up being successful in the eyes of society and the ones that didn't, Oftentimes it's the ones who were successful loved what they did so they could persevere when it got really tough and the ones that didn't love it quit because they're sane. Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don't love it? It's a lot of hard work and it's a lot of worrying constantly.

Speaker 1

00:53

And if you don't love it, you're going to fail.

Speaker 2

00:57

That was Steve Jobs talking about the importance of passion. And it's an excerpt from the book I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is I, Steve, Steve Jobs in his own words. So I counted the other day and I think I've done 13 different podcasts on Steve Jobs.

Speaker 2

01:10

I will link them all with episode numbers in the show notes. Most of those, he's the main character, like there were biographies or books exclusively dedicated to him. In a few it's about like his partners like Johnny Ive or like Ed Catmull at Pixar. But even after reading all these books on Steve Jobs I didn't know the book that I'm holding my hand even existed.

Speaker 2

01:27

I walked into a small used bookstore the other day and about after an hour of just going through all their shelves I walked out with 6 books for

Speaker 1

01:36

$23.

Speaker 2

01:37

I love used bookstores and not only because they're usually fantastic values but because you just find books that you didn't even know existed and this book is a great example of that. It is about 120 pages long. It is just quotes organized by topic from Steve Jobs.

Speaker 2

01:50

So consider this a bonus episode of Founders. Most of this is just gonna be Steve Jobs talking directly to you and I. And so I'm gonna jump right in. He's talking about it's normal to have anxiety before you introduce a new product.

Speaker 2

02:01

He's talking about the way he felt right before he debuted the iPad.

Speaker 1

02:05

And I thought this was remarkable because it's the last product he ever introduced and you just think about how many groundbreaking products he had created up until this point of his career and he's still anxious. Even though we've been using these internally for some time and working on it for a few years, you still have butterflies in your stomach the week before, the night before the introduction, the day before the launch. You just never know until you get it into your customers hands.

Speaker 2

02:31

This is Steve on the fact that the core of your company is the quality of employee you have. He repeats this over and over again that the founders most important job is recruiting is to assemble the greatest concentration of talent that you possibly can. He says all we are is our people.

Speaker 2

02:47

That's what keeps us going to work in the

Speaker 1

02:49

morning, to hang around these great bright people. I've always thought that recruiting is the heart and soul of what we do.

Speaker 2

02:57

This is Steve on Apple's DNA.

Speaker 1

02:59

Most of us can't wait to get to work in the morning. But it's not like Apple has somehow morphed into a mass-market consumer electronics company. Our DNA hasn't changed.

Speaker 1

03:08

It's that mass-market consumer electronics is turning into Apple.

Speaker 2

03:13

Then he talks about his goal has always been to be the best. Not to be the biggest, not to be the first. To be the best.

Speaker 2

03:19

We're not gonna be

Speaker 1

03:20

the first to this party but we're going to be the best and then Steve talks about what you do after you recruit great talent it's not just recruiting after recruiting it's building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are. The feeling that their work will have tremendous influence and is part of a strong clear vision." Obviously he means the founder is

Speaker 2

03:41

the 1 that sets that strong clear vision.

Speaker 1

03:43

So he talks about recruiting usually requires more than you alone can do. So I found that collaborative recruiting and having a culture that recruits the A players is the best way. Any person he's interviewing is gonna speak to

Speaker 2

03:56

a bunch of different people in the company. And he says the reason he does that is because the current employees can veto a candidate. And then this is Steve on the importance of communicating a feeling to your customers.

Speaker 2

04:07

We don't stand a chance of advertising with features and benefits and with rams and with charts and comparisons. The only chance we have of communicating is with a feeling. And then he, there's another quote on branding, this is actually from 1997 when he, just when he returned to Apple the second time.

Speaker 1

04:24

What are the great brands? Levi's, Coke, Disney, Nike. Most people would put Apple in that category.

Speaker 1

04:31

You could spend billions of dollars building a brand that's not as good as Apple. Yet Apple hasn't been doing anything with this incredible asset. What is Apple after all? Apple is about people who think outside the box.

Speaker 1

04:44

People who want to use computers to help them change the world, to help them create things and make a difference, and not just get a job done. And this is Steve on what his company focuses on. We don't do market research. We don't hire consultants.

Speaker 1

04:59

We just make great products. And then this is about who he's building for. This is all the way back in 1999. I think this is 1 of his best insights actually.

Speaker 1

05:08

The roots of Apple were to build computers for people, not for corporations. The world doesn't need another Dell or Compaq.

Speaker 2

05:17

This is Steve on the importance of simplifying your product line. This is again is right when he came back to Apple. I said this in 1998.

Speaker 2

05:24

What I found when I got here was a zillion and 1 products. It was amazing.

Speaker 1

05:27

And I started to ask people now why would I recommend a 3400 over 4400? When should somebody jump up to a 6, 500 but not a 7, 300? And after 3 weeks, I couldn't figure this out.

Speaker 1

05:39

If I couldn't figure this out, how could our customers figure it out?

Speaker 2

05:44

And then As we go through this, you're going to notice that he just has a handful of ideas that he just repeats over and over again in different ways. I was actually texting with my friend Richard the other day because he was asking, he's like, why do you say on your podcast repetition is persuasive? He's like, I have noticed Jeff Bezos repeats himself a lot.

Speaker 2

05:59

This is what I sent him. I was like, nearly all the founders that I've read about have a handful of ideas and principles that are important to them and they just repeat and pound away at them forever.

Speaker 1

06:11

And the fact that this tiny little book that you could probably read in 2 hours, It's just a great illustration of that because you can read in such a condensed amount of time and you see him Decade after decade just repeating ideas are important to him. He'll put he'll place the ideas in different contexts He'll apply it to different parts of the company But there is just a small handful of ideas and principles that were extremely important to him.

Speaker 2

06:32

And instead of getting fancy I think he just really focused on mastering the fundamentals of those core principles. This is 1 of them. He's talking about consumer product design but really he's talking about his love of simplicity.

Speaker 2

06:42

Look at the design of a lot of consumer products.

Speaker 1

06:45

They're really complicated surfaces. When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem, and peel more layers off of the onion, you can oftentimes arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions.

Speaker 1

07:06

Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. And even that phrase most people he's constantly comparing and contrasting what his company does compared to what most other companies and most other people do. Most people quit. He says half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the unsuccessful ones is just pure perseverance.

Speaker 2

07:26

Most people don't like what they do. He says he loves, he has a passion,

Speaker 1

07:30

a deep desire for what he's doing. Most people, most companies don't put in the time and effort to actually solve the complexity and not just ignore it. He's saying he does.

Speaker 1

07:38

Most people don't focus enough on recruiting and having extremely high standards of excellence. He does. You'll hear this over and over again. And then there's just 1 quick sentence here that I really, I sat here and thought about this for quite a while because he's talking about, hey, it doesn't matter if I'm making an iPhone, I'm making an iPad, I'm making a computer, whatever it is.

Speaker 1

07:56

He's like, at the fundamental level, what are they? And he says, We make tools. That tool may manifest itself in different physical forms, but at its core, it's a tool. And that really resonated with me because that's how I think of founders.

Speaker 1

08:09

I think of it as a tool for working professionals. And what that tool does is it gets ideas from the history of entrepreneurship into your brain so then you can use them in your work. It just so happens that a podcast is a great way to achieve that goal. But I really do appreciate what

Speaker 2

08:22

he said. He's like, this

Speaker 1

08:23

is the focus. We're making tools.

Speaker 2

08:26

And then the book is obviously filled with maxims from Steve, here's 2 of them. It's not done until it ships. That is his credo.

Speaker 2

08:34

And then another 1 of his something he repeats over and over again is the journey is the reward. And that quote is from 1983. But again, that's something he says even as he knew he was dying. He talks about the journey is the reward.

Speaker 2

08:46

And in fact, that made me think of this fantastic interview that I just heard with Ed Thorpe. Ed Thorpe, I've talked about a bunch of the podcasts, as you probably know, but it's episode

Speaker 1

08:54

222.

Speaker 2

08:54

If you haven't listened to it, he's my personal blueprint. He was on Tim Ferriss' podcast, episode number 596. But towards the end of the podcast, he talks about that a lot.

Speaker 2

09:03

That you don't confuse the reward as the main objective. The journey is the reward. But listening to that podcast and hearing it at Thorpe at 89 just reaffirmed the fact that I really do think he's the blueprint. Going back to this book, we'll see that Steve's going to repeat himself here.

Speaker 2

09:18

This time he's talking about applying simplicity to the organization, like the actual structure, the way your company is set up. The organization is clean and simple to understand and very accountable. Everything just got simpler. That has

Speaker 1

09:29

been 1 of my mantras. Focus and simplicity.

Speaker 2

09:33

This is Steve Jobs when he was still in his 20s and he's talking about setting up Apple as the David to IBM's Goliath. It's curious to me that the largest computer company in the world IBM couldn't even match the Apple 2 which was designed in a garage 6 years ago. And so that's something he'll repeat over and over again.

Speaker 2

09:51

He's like, listen, it's not about the size of your R&D budget. Like we out innovated IBM and we

Speaker 1

09:55

were just working in my garage. It's the quality of the people that you have working there. This is Steve Jobs when

Speaker 2

10:01

he was 30. Keep in mind he's about 9 years into Apple.

Speaker 1

10:04

At this point I think that's 1 of the Apple's challenges really. When 2 young people walk in with the next thing, are we going to embrace it and say this is fantastic? Are you going to be willing to drop our models?

Speaker 1

10:15

Or are

Speaker 2

10:15

we going to explain it away? And really, he's just describing what happened to him when he was younger. He went to Atari, he went to HP.

Speaker 2

10:22

He was at 1 time the 2 young people that are walking in with the next thing. And so he knew from experience, you're more likely to actually dismiss it because you already have something that's working and you're focused on that.

Speaker 1

10:33

This is Steve on what's important to him. Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful, that is what matters to me.

Speaker 1

10:42

This is Steve Jobs on design. In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains and the sofa.

Speaker 1

10:52

But to me nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. That's incredible. I'm going to reread it again.

Speaker 1

11:09

Keep in mind he's saying this 4 years before the iPhone comes out. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. Here's another thought he had on design. Design is a funny word.

Speaker 1

11:26

Some people think design means how it looks but of course if you dig deeper It's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like although that was part of it Primarily it was how it worked. To design something really well you have to get it You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something.

Speaker 1

11:50

Chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people, there's that phrase again, most people don't take the time to do that. And then this is his comment on the essential difference. This 1 really hit me hard and I've read a lot about both the creation of the Lisa and the original Mac and he said the Lisa people wanted to do something great and the Mac people wanted to do something insanely great.

Speaker 1

12:15

The difference shows

Speaker 2

12:18

And then on these 2 pages I essentially just underlined everything.

Speaker 1

12:21

This is about employee motivation. Everything here is so fantastic. So it says, we attract a different type of person.

Speaker 2

12:25

A person who doesn't want to wait 5 or 10 years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her.

Speaker 1

12:30

Someone who really wants to get in a little over his head and make a dent in the universe. This is on maximizing employee potential. My job is not to be easy on people.

Speaker 1

12:40

My job is to make them better. And then this is on excellence. People judge you by your performance, so focus on the outcome. Be a yardstick of quality.

Speaker 1

12:50

Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

Speaker 2

12:54

And then Steve talks about part of having an environment dedicated to excellence means that the founder is going to have to do editing. And so this is on firing people. It's painful when you have some people who are not the best people in the world and you have to get rid of them

Speaker 1

13:05

but I found my job has sometimes it's been exactly that to get rid of some people who didn't measure up and I've always tried to do it in a humane way but nonetheless It has to be done and it's never fun. This is Steve Jobs on focus. People think focus means saying yes to the thing that you've got to focus on.

Speaker 1

13:23

But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done Innovation is saying no to a thousand things Then he extends this and he's talking about focusing on product And so he's asked this question What can we learn from Apple's struggle to innovate during the decade before he returned in 1997, he is answering this question in 2004.

Speaker 1

13:49

You need a very product-oriented culture, even in a technology company. Lots of companies have tons of great engineers and smart people, but ultimately, there needs to be some gravitational force. He's talking about the founder again. That's the world of founder, right?

Speaker 1

14:05

But ultimately, There needs to be some gravitational force that pulls it all together. Otherwise you can get great pieces of technology all floating around the universe but it doesn't add up to much.

Speaker 2

14:17

This is another thought he

Speaker 1

14:18

has on focus, this time focusing on the right thing. Sure, what we have to do has to make commercial sense, but it's never the starting point. We start with the product and the customer experience.

Speaker 1

14:30

And then Noah left myself on that page, was the founders with this philosophy, because he's essentially saying, yeah, it has to make money, right? But if you can't start with the goal in mind is I just want to make the most money. You start with the product and the actual experience that

Speaker 2

14:44

your customer has, and So

Speaker 1

14:45

this is my note. The founders of this philosophy wind up getting the money anyways.

Speaker 2

14:49

This is Steve on the role of the founder forcing the issue, the important issues in the company. What happened that he's talking about the design of the iPhone. What happened was the designers came up with this really great idea.

Speaker 2

15:00

Then they

Speaker 1

15:00

take it to the engineers and the engineers go, nah, we can't do that. That's impossible. And so it gets

Speaker 2

15:05

a lot worse. Then they take it to the engineers and the engineers go, nah, we can't do that,

Speaker 1

15:05

that's impossible. And so it gets a lot worse. Then they take it to the manufacturing people and they go, we can't build that.

Speaker 1

15:09

And it gets a lot worse. Sure enough, when we took it to the engineers, they said, oh, and they came up with 38 reasons, meaning why I can't do it. And I said, no, no, we're doing this. And they said, well, why?

Speaker 1

15:22

And I said, because I'm the CEO and I think it can be done and so they kind of begrudgingly did it but then it was a big hit this is Steve Jobs on the importance of forward thinking what really right Why this really resonated with me is because he sang this when he was 30 years old. He had no idea what the next 25 years of his career, what he was able to produce. His biggest hits were so far in the future. If you want to live your life in a creative way, you have to not look back too much.

Speaker 1

15:49

You have to be willing to take whatever you've done and whoever you were and throw them away. And that's why

Speaker 2

15:56

I think my favorite Steve Jobs biography is Becoming Steve Jobs,

Speaker 1

15:59

the Evolution of a reckless upstart into a visionary leader. It was episode number 19 because that's what the book is focused on. It's his transformation.

Speaker 1

16:07

The person he was at 30 is vastly different than who he's going to become when he's 45, 55. When he's the person that is capable, that has the skills and has built the organization to create some of the greatest products that humans have ever seen. And evolution is a fantastic description of that process of the process of Steve becoming Steve Jobs. This is Steve on goals.

Speaker 1

16:30

When we first started Apple, we really built the first computer because we wanted 1. We designed this crazy new computer with color and a whole bunch of other things called the Apple 2, which you've probably heard of. We had a passion to do this 1 simple thing, which was to get a bunch of computers to our friends so they could have as much fun with them as we were. And that's really important, because he's saying, I wasn't trying to build the biggest company.

Speaker 1

16:55

I wasn't trying to build a trillion dollar company. It wasn't doing any of that. Those things happened later as a by-product of what I was actually focused on, which is just building the best computer that I wanted to use.

Speaker 2

17:08

And then he has a quote about testing people and putting them under pressure to test them. This comes from the book in the company of giants. I read this book for founders 208.

Speaker 2

17:15

If you haven't listened to that episode yet. Many times in an interview I will purposely upset someone. I'll criticize their prior work. I'll do my homework, find out what they worked on, and say, God that really turned out to be a bozo product.

Speaker 2

17:27

Why did you work on that?

Speaker 1

17:29

I want to see what people are like under pressure.

Speaker 2

17:31

I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief and pride in what they did. And then here's Steve on the importance of studying great ideas. Really, this is just a giant ad for Founders Podcast if you really think about it.

Speaker 2

17:45

It comes down to trying

Speaker 1

17:46

to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you're doing. Picasso had a saying, good artists copy, great artists steal. And we've always been shameless about stealing great ideas.

Speaker 1

18:00

And then he goes back to what are you focused on? What is your North Star? For him it's very clear. I want to build great products, and in order to build great products, I have to build a great company that has the capability of building great products.

Speaker 1

18:11

My philosophy has always been very simple. My philosophy is that everything starts with a great product. I obviously believed in listening to customers, but customers can't tell you about the next breakthrough that's gonna happen, that's gonna change the whole industry. So you have to listen very carefully, but then you have to go out and sort of stow away.

Speaker 1

18:30

You have to go hide away with people that really understand the technology but also really care about the customers and dream up this next breakthrough. And that is my perspective that everything starts with a great product.

Speaker 2

18:44

Then he talks about the importance of hard work. Keep in mind when he's writing this or when he's saying this, this is right when he came back to Apple, this is in

Speaker 1

18:50

1998. He is already a billionaire. He did not have to do this. Pixar made him a billionaire.

Speaker 1

18:55

And so he says, I've never been so tired in my life. I come home at about 10 o'clock at night and flop straight into bed. Then I haul myself out of bed at 6 in the morning and take a shower and go to work. My wife deserves all the credit for keeping me at it.

Speaker 1

19:09

She supported me and kept the family together with a husband in absence." And then here's an example of something I love about Steve. He's a very clear communicator. I've told you this before, over

Speaker 2

19:20

and over again. I think he might be the person that communicates the clearest out of anybody that I've ever read or studied. But he also has this biting wit, very similar to Charlie Munger, but he makes you laugh.

Speaker 2

19:32

And so he's talking about the fact that when he first came back to Apple he said that he was just the interim CEO the I CEO right and this is hilarious because he's referencing how bad a job that the previous CEO Gil Amelio did Some people worried about the word interim, but they weren't worried about the last CEO and he wasn't interim. And then this is a quote that he was addressing when he was addressing Apple employees. This is the very early days of Apple.

Speaker 1

19:57

We have a major opportunity to influence where Apple is going. The work that the 50 people here are doing is going to send a giant ripple through the universe I'm really impressed with the quality of our ripple I know I might be a little hard to get on with but this is the most fun I've had in my life I'm having a blast

Speaker 2

20:17

this is on innovation This is right after the great financial crisis in

Speaker 1

20:21

2008-2009. So he's saying a lot of companies have chosen to downsize and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. This is the most important part of this paragraph.

Speaker 1

20:32

Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets. And then this is probably Steve's most famous quote on innovation, innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower. And then Steve's gonna say something here about insight that made me think of what Claude, a quote that Claude Shannon said 1 time. So Steve says, I think the artistry is in having an insight into what 1 sees around them.

Speaker 1

20:57

Generally putting things together in a way no 1 else has before and finding a way to express that to other people who don't have that insight.

Speaker 2

21:05

So all the way back on Founders Number 95 I read the fantastic biography of Claude Shannon

Speaker 1

21:09

and I think Shannon said something that speaks to Steve's obsession with only working with the highest quality people and Shannon said a very small percentage of the population produces the greatest proportion of the important ideas. There are some people if you shoot 1 idea into their brain, you will get half an idea out. There are other people who are beyond this point at which they produce 2 ideas for each idea sent in.

Speaker 1

21:33

And then back to the book. This is Steve Jobs on the importance of inspiration. The most important thing is a person a person who incites and feeds your curiosity

Speaker 2

21:43

and then this is Steve on the importance of having an interdisciplinary approach to your work. This is

Speaker 1

21:48

the first time in the book that he's gonna mention his hero, Edwin Land of Polaroid, and he says, I never believed that they're separate. Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist. Michelangelo knew a tremendous amount about how to cut stone at the quarry.

Speaker 1

22:02

I don't believe that the best people in any of these fields see themselves as 1 branch of a forked tree. I just don't see that. People bring these things together a lot. Dr.

Speaker 1

22:13

Land at Polaroid said, I want Polaroid to stand at the intersection of art and science. And I've never forgotten that. Edwin Lane is extremely, extremely important person

Speaker 2

22:24

in the history of entrepreneurship to study. If you have not, go back and listen to the 4 episodes, 5 different books that I've read on him. It's episode number 40, number 132, 133, and 134.

Speaker 2

22:34

This is Steve on the fact that the experience trying to build the iPad first is actually what inspired the iPhone. I actually started on the tablet first. I had this idea of being able to get rid of

Speaker 1

22:43

the keyboard to type on a multi-touch glass display And I asked our folks, could we come up with a multi-touch display that I could actually type on? And about 6 months later, they called me in and showed me this prototype display. And it was amazing.

Speaker 1

22:55

I thought, my God, we could build a phone out of this. And I put the tablet project on the shelf because the phone was more important and we took the next several years and we made the iPhone. And then he has this idea that with some products you need to stop adding features and just figure out how to decrease the price so you can make it more widely available to people. And this is about the iPod Touch.

Speaker 1

23:19

And so when they released that, they realized, oh, it's kind of like an iPhone without the phone, but what customers started using it as, in addition to playing music, is a gaming machine. And so he's like, oh, okay, it's actually the lowest cost way for customers to get into the app store. And he realized that's a big draw, that's a big market we didn't even think about. And so he said, what we focus on is just reducing the price to $199.

Speaker 1

23:43

We don't need to add any new stuff. We just need to get the price down where everyone can afford it. And then this is the way Jobs described himself. He was making this fake resume for 1 of Apple's products.

Speaker 1

23:55

And he said, I'm looking for a fixer-upper with a solid foundation. I'm willing to tear down walls, build bridges, and light fires. I have great experience, lots of energy and a bit of that vision thing and I'm not afraid to start at the beginning." This is Steve talking about his legacy, the legacy of Apple when he was 30. If Apple becomes a place where computers are a commodity item, where the romance is gone, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, I will feel that I've lost Apple.

Speaker 1

24:28

And this is Steve on why he wanted to build really simple products, products that do not need instruction manuals. In fact, this is a lesson he learned 30 years previously when he was working at Atari, where the only instructions to 1 of their games was, insert quarter, avoid Klingons. And so this is what he says, it's insane. We all have busy lives, we have jobs, we have interests, and some of us have children.

Speaker 1

24:50

Everyone's lives are getting busier, not less busy. You just don't have time to learn this stuff, and everything's getting more complicated. We don't have a lot of time to learn how to use a washing machine or a phone.

Speaker 2

25:01

This is Steve on making sure that your company has a point of view. This is absolutely fantastic.

Speaker 1

25:06

Macintosh is basically this relatively small company in California taking on the Goliath, IBM, and saying, wait a minute, your way is wrong. This is not the way we want computers to go. This is not the legacy we want to leave.

Speaker 1

25:19

This is not what we want our kids to be learning. This is wrong and we're going to show you the right way and do it and here it is and it's so much better. And this is Steve on the importance of marketing. My dream is that every person in the world will have their own Apple computer.

Speaker 1

25:34

To do that, we've got to be a great marketing company.

Speaker 2

25:38

That particular quote was from 1987. He says that throughout his career in a bunch of different ways. The way I found it and read it and interpreted it in the book was that if you truly believe that the product that you're making or the service you're providing makes somebody else's life better then you have a moral obligation to get good at marketing because the better you get a marketing the more lives of other humans you will improve more of Steve Jobs biting wit He talks about this and it's fine that Microsoft makes a lot of money.

Speaker 2

26:07

Good for them. I'm glad they're successful. That's not my problem with them.

Speaker 1

26:09

He says the only problem with Microsoft is they have no taste. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products.

Speaker 2

26:18

This is the quote I referenced earlier about that. It's more important the quality of people you have as opposed to

Speaker 1

26:24

how much you're spending on R&D. Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least a hundred times more on research and development.

Speaker 1

26:35

It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it.

Speaker 2

26:42

So Steve said this all the way back in 1984, which is really fascinating because you figure how much, Apple is still a couple years old at this time, but they already had this bureaucratic creep that just appears over and over again. It's just part of the nature of a building company. Sam Walton says, hey, you have to draw a line in the sand and keep pushing bureaucracy across that line and just know that that's something that's like a never-ending job.

Speaker 2

27:03

You're going to push it back. It'll slowly grow and you push it back. But I really liked what Steve said here. The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh.

Speaker 2

27:11

My job is

Speaker 1

27:12

to create a space for them to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay. This is the neatest group of people I've ever worked with. They're all exceptionally bright, but more importantly, they share a quality about the way they look at life, which is that the journey is the reward.

Speaker 1

27:28

Another thing that he repeats over and over again, you see that? They really want to see this product out in the world. Another 1 of his most famous quotes and

Speaker 2

27:36

I think founders understand that at their core it is better to be a pirate than to join the Navy.

Speaker 1

27:41

And so I'm going to read this quote. This is actually they cut off part

Speaker 2

27:44

of the quote because I really learned this lesson when I was reading the biography of Johnny Ive. This is Steve saying why he's not going to build a netbook. Netbooks aren't better than anything.

Speaker 2

27:54

They're just cheap laptops. So it actually gave me a mental model to use because there's more detail in the Johnny Ive book. So in

Speaker 1

28:02

the mid 2000s, I think from 2004, 2007, somewhere in there, netbooks were like 25-30% of the laptop market. They became quite large. And so everybody is, even within Apple, they're like, hey we should make 1.

Speaker 1

28:14

And Steve Jobs adamantly refused for that reason. He's like, they're not better than anything, they're just cheap laptops. And so instead of dedicating resources to making a netbook and just following on and making like a cheaper version of a MacBook or whatever the case is, they directed resources at making the iPad. And so that gave me a model, I was like, wow, so everybody else was going in this direction because the market said, hey, look how many people are willing to buy a cheap laptop.

Speaker 1

28:39

And Steve's like, no, I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna create an entire new category and just make something better than a cheap laptop. And so really the way I

Speaker 2

28:47

think about it is like are you making a netbook or are you making an iPad? So this is Steve on new products this is I just re-listened to episode number 98 I

Speaker 1

28:56

think it's 98 it's the longest biography I've ever read it's the almost thousand pages on Enzo Ferrari But what I realized is they talk about their products the same way. Ferrari would describe his cars as like the way you talk about like your lover. And so listen to Steve here.

Speaker 1

29:10

I've said this before, but I thought it was worth repeating. It is in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. That it's technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing. And nowhere is that more true than in these post PC devices.

Speaker 1

29:29

And A lot of folks in this tablet market are rushing in and they're looking at this as the next PC. The hardware and the software are done by different companies and they're talking about speeds and feeds just like they did with the PC. In our experience and every bone in our body says that is not the right approach to this. That these are post PC devices and they need to be even easier to use than a PC.

Speaker 1

29:55

They need to be even more intuitive than a PC and where the software and the hardware and the applications need to intertwine in an even more seamless way than they do on a PC.

Speaker 2

30:08

I just want to pause there

Speaker 1

30:09

because it just made me realize this as I'm reading it out loud to you. He's describing the advantage that his company and his company alone has and no 1 else does. And we think we're on the right track with this.

Speaker 1

30:20

We think we have the right organization to build these kind of products. And so I think we stand a pretty good chance of being pretty competitive in that market. This is Steve on the importance of not resting on your laurel. The way you and I usually discuss this is if you go to sleep on a win, you wake up with a loss.

Speaker 1

30:38

I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then go do something else wonderful. Don't dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next. And then here's Steve again describing what the only thing, the capability that his company has that every single other company in the world lacks.

Speaker 1

30:54

Really it's an echo of Edwin Land, his hero, his personal motto. He says, my motto is very personal, it might not work for other people, and it is this, don't do anything that someone else can do. And so Steve says, we're the only company that owns the whole widget, the hardware, the software, and the operating system. We can take full responsibility for the user experience.

Speaker 1

31:17

That's fantastic way to think about it. We're the only ones that can take full responsibility for the user experience. We can do things the other guys can't do. This is another quote from Steve on passion.

Speaker 1

31:30

I already read at the very beginning of the podcast the longer quote on passion. This one's shorter,

Speaker 2

31:34

but just as good You've got to find what you love and that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers Your work is

Speaker 1

31:40

gonna fill a large part of your life And the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. Don't settle.

Speaker 2

31:51

I love that quote so much I didn't even I

Speaker 1

31:53

just noticed what I'm doing I'm sitting here punching my heart with my hand as I read it. So I'm gonna read it again in case I caused my voice to change from hitting my chest. You've got to find what you love and that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.

Speaker 1

32:06

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. Don't settle. That kind of reminds me of the advice that Jeff Bezos gives. He's like, you can find a job, you can find a career, or you can find a calling.