Steve Jobs

Apple · NeXT · Pixar · 1955–2011

Born February 24, 1955 · Died October 5, 2011

Adopted at birth in San Francisco in 1955, Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne on 1 April 1976 to sell Wozniak’s Apple I. The Apple II and the December 1980 IPO made them rich; the 1984 Macintosh made them famous; a power struggle with John Sculley pushed Jobs out in September 1985. In exile he built NeXT and bought Lucasfilm’s graphics division for $10 million, turning it into Pixar and Toy Story. Apple bought NeXT back in 1996, and from 1997 he rebuilt the company around the iMac, iPod, iTunes Store, iPhone, and iPad. He resigned as CEO in August 2011 and died that October, aged 56.

Covered 25× on Founders ↓

Which books are linked to Steve Jobs?

These are examples from the documented shelf. Each label describes the connection; a book on the shelf is not always a recommendation.

The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business by Clayton M. Christensen — Influence, reported through Isaacson. Source
The Business Value of Computers by Paul A. Strassmann — Recommended in a lecture. Source
Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company by Andrew S. Grove — Publisher endorsement. Source

See the full shelf and source notes

Contents

Career highlights

1955Born 24 February in San Francisco to Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, and adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs — who only got the final papers signed by promising his birth mother that he would go to college.
1972Enrolled at Reed College in September, dropped out after one semester without telling his parents, and stayed on campus as a drop-in for 18 months auditing Robert Palladino’s calligraphy class; he took a technician’s job at Atari in 1974, then travelled through India for seven months with his Reed friend Daniel Kottke and came back with a shaved head and a lifelong interest in Zen.
1976Co-founded Apple Computer Company with Wozniak and Ronald Wayne on 1 April in his parents’ Los Altos house; Paul Terrell’s Byte Shop ordered 50 assembled Apple I boards at $500 each, and the machine went on sale that July at $666.66.
1977Presented the Apple II at the first West Coast Computer Faire on 16 April, backed by Mike Markkula, who put in his own money and secured a $250,000 line of credit in return for a one-third stake and wrote the business plan.
1979Visited Xerox PARC twice in November and December, after Xerox took the right to buy $1 million of Apple’s pre-IPO stock in exchange for the access, and saw the Alto’s mouse-driven graphical interface.
1980Took Apple public on 12 December at $22 a share, raising over $100 million — the largest IPO since Ford in 1956 — and creating some 300 millionaires in a day. Massachusetts regulators barred their residents from buying it as too risky.
1984Launched the Macintosh on 24 January at $2,495, two days after Ridley Scott’s $1.5 million ‘1984’ commercial aired once during Super Bowl XVIII.
1985Stripped of operational duties in Sculley’s April reorganisation, resigned from Apple on 17 September and founded NeXT with five senior Apple staff; the NeXT machine that followed was what Tim Berners-Lee used at CERN in 1990 to build the first web browser and server.
1986Funded the spinout of Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division for $10 million and renamed it Pixar. He bought it as a hardware business; it sold almost no hardware.
1995Pixar released Toy Story on 22 November, the first entirely computer-animated feature film, with Jobs as executive producer; the company went public the following week and closed at nearly double its offer price, valuing it at roughly $1.5 billion — the largest IPO of the year.
1997Returned when Apple bought NeXT for about $400 million; announced Microsoft’s $150 million investment and a Mac Office commitment at Macworld Boston on 6 August, to boos from the hall, and was named interim CEO on 16 September.
1998Introduced the iMac on 6 May at $1,299 — Apple’s first ‘i’ product, designed by Jony Ive — and shipped it on 15 August.
2001Introduced the iPod on 23 October, ‘1,000 songs in your pocket’ on a 5GB drive; the iTunes Music Store followed on 28 April 2003 with over 200,000 songs at 99 cents from all five major labels.
2003Diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumour. He refused surgery for nine months in favour of diet and alternative treatment — a decision he later told Walter Isaacson he regretted — before a Whipple procedure in July 2004 and a liver transplant in Memphis in April 2009.
2007Introduced the iPhone at Macworld on 9 January as three products in one — a phone, a widescreen iPod, and an internet communicator; it went on sale 29 June, and Apple dropped ‘Computer’ from its name.
2010Introduced the iPad on 27 January at $499, creating the tablet category that had defeated every previous attempt at it.
2011Resigned as CEO on 24 August, recommending Tim Cook as his successor, and died at home in Palo Alto on 5 October of respiratory arrest following a relapse of his pancreatic tumour, aged 56.

Lessons for founders

Follow curiosity you cannot yet justify. Having dropped out of Reed in 1972, Jobs sat in on a calligraphy class purely because the campus signage was beautiful. Ten years later it became the Macintosh’s multiple typefaces and proportional spacing. As he put it at Stanford in 2005: ‘You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards.’
Being thrown out can be the thing that saves you. Jobs resigned from Apple on 17 September 1985 after losing a board fight with John Sculley. In the next five years he started NeXT and bought what became Pixar. He later called it the best thing that could have happened: ‘The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again.’
Take the deal that keeps you alive, even from the enemy. At Macworld Boston on 6 August 1997, with Apple months from insolvency, Jobs put Bill Gates on a giant screen and announced a patent cross-licence, Internet Explorer as the default Mac browser, a Microsoft Office commitment, and a $150 million Microsoft investment in non-voting stock. The hall booed. Apple survived.
Cannibalise your own product before a competitor does. Isaacson records the rule in Jobs’s own words — ‘If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will’ — and it is why the iPhone was allowed to eat iPod sales in 2007 and the iPad to eat laptop sales in 2010. It is also the argument of the one business book Isaacson says deeply influenced him, The Innovator’s Dilemma.
Buy the capability, then wait nine years for it. In 1986 Jobs paid $10 million for Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division, intending to sell rendering hardware. It sold almost none. Toy Story did not arrive until November 1995, and the IPO the week after it opened valued Pixar at about $1.5 billion. The patience, not the purchase, was the decision.
Own the platform your comeback will run on. NeXT sold barely 50,000 workstations and pivoted to software in 1993. But Apple bought it in December 1996 for roughly $400 million specifically for NeXTSTEP, which became Mac OS X and, later, the foundation under iOS. The failed company was the asset.
Introduce a product by naming what it replaces. The 9 January 2007 iPhone announcement did not open with specifications. It described ‘three products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device — into one small and lightweight handheld device.’ The audience understood the category before seeing the object.
Sell customers rights, not restrictions. The iTunes Music Store launched on 28 April 2003 with unlimited CD burns, unlimited iPods, and 99-cent tracks from all five majors, at a moment when the industry’s instinct was subscription lock-in. Jobs’s framing: ‘Consumers don’t want to be treated like criminals and artists don’t want their valuable work stolen.’
Use mortality as a decision tool, not a fear. From age 17 Jobs asked himself each morning whether he would want to do that day’s work if it were his last. He told Stanford in June 2005, a year after his first cancer surgery, that ‘remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.’

Jobs's Operating Principles

Focus is about saying no.On returning to Apple in 1997, Jobs killed 70% of the product line and drew a 2×2 grid — consumer/pro and desktop/portable — telling engineers, 'You've got to pick four things and that's it.' He later reflected: 'People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.'
Stay hungry, stay foolish.The closing line of his 2005 Stanford commencement address, borrowed from the final issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. Jobs described it as a wish for himself and the graduates: to never be satisfied and to always have the courage to follow their intuition.
Real artists ship.A maxim Jobs repeated to the Macintosh team when they were tempted to keep polishing indefinitely. The point was that a great product in the world beats a perfect product that never leaves the lab. The original Mac shipped on 24 January 1984 after a 36-month crunch.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.Jobs interrupted a reporter who asked whether he thought the Mac was 'cute.' He insisted design runs all the way down to the circuit board, which on the original Macintosh was laid out beautifully — even though users would never see it — because the engineers who did see it would know they were building something great.
Put a dent in the universe.Jobs's phrase for the ambition that drove him. He told John Sculley in 1983 when recruiting him from Pepsi: 'Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?'
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.Jobs admired the Bauhaus aesthetic and brought it to computing: the iPod's click wheel, the iPhone's single home button. His design meetings often ended with him demanding, 'Simplify.' He told his biographer: 'It takes a lot of hard work to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.'

Read about them

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson

Isaacson interviewed Jobs more than forty times. Jobs cooperated but did not have editorial control over the biography. source ↗

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader

Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli

The authors examine Jobs’s changing approach to leadership, using interviews with him and people who worked with him. source ↗

Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary

Geoffrey Cain

Cain focuses on Jobs’s years building NeXT after his departure from Apple in 1985 and before his return in 1997. source ↗

The Second Coming of Steve Jobs

Alan Deutschman

Deutschman’s biography follows Jobs through NeXT, Pixar and his return to Apple, with the account reaching his appointment as CEO in January 2000. source ↗

Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs, the Creation of Apple, and How It Changed the World

Michael Moritz

Moritz’s account follows Jobs and Wozniak from childhood through Apple’s early years. This later edition revisits the original 1984 history. source ↗

iCon: Steve Jobs, The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business

Jeffrey S. Young and William L. Simon

Jobs is the subject of Young and Simon’s unauthorized 2005 biography. It covers Apple, Pixar and his return to Apple through the iPod era. source ↗

Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing

Randall E. Stross

Jobs and his NeXT venture are the subject of Stross’s 1993 account. The author describes it as a story of a startup that repeatedly struggled. source ↗

Inside Steve's Brain

Leander Kahney

Jobs is the subject of Kahney’s examination of his personality, methods and work across Apple and Pixar. source ↗

The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company

David A. Price

Jobs is one of the business figures in Price’s account of Pixar’s development and relationship with Disney. source ↗

To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History

Lawrence Levy

Levy’s book recounts his work with Jobs at Pixar. Levy’s own biography says Jobs called him in 1994; he later served as CFO, in the Office of the President and on Pixar’s board. source ↗

Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs

Ken Kocienda

Kocienda describes developing Apple software and showing prototypes to Jobs, who used demonstrations and detailed feedback to guide product decisions. source ↗

Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success

Ken Segall

Segall describes working with Jobs at Apple and NeXT and examines his approach to simplicity, marketing and decisions. source ↗

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience

Carmine Gallo

Gallo analyzes Jobs’s presentation methods and uses them to explain how to plan and deliver talks. Jobs is the subject of the book; this is not his endorsement. source ↗

In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World

Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz

Jobs is interviewed about what Apple did right and where it went wrong. This records his participation, without implying an endorsement of the book. source ↗

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

Leander Kahney

Kahney examines Ive’s collaboration with Jobs on Apple products including the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. source ↗

Start With Why

Simon Sinek

Sinek uses Jobs as an example in his argument that leaders inspire people by communicating a clear purpose. source ↗

Leading Apple with Steve Jobs: Management Lessons from a Controversial Genius

Jay Elliot

Elliot, a former Apple executive, interprets Jobs’s leadership through his own experience; this is not a Jobs endorsement. source ↗

Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made

Andy Hertzfeld

Jobs appears in Hertzfeld’s firsthand Macintosh account; the public publisher excerpt shows his role in setting the software schedule. source ↗

Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company

Patrick McGee

The licensed excerpt follows Jobs’s glass-screen demand for the original iPhone and the supplier and manufacturing work it set in motion. McGee is the author. source ↗

In their own words

Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in his own words

Steve Jobs Archive; edited by Leslie Berlin

The Steve Jobs Archive publishes this edited collection of Jobs’s own speeches, interviews and emails, with contextual notes by Leslie Berlin. source ↗