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When entrepreneurs come to our venture capital firm to pitch themselves and their companies, they walk up the stairs and into a conference room named for Steve Jobs.
If you polled the thousands of founders that come through that room during the course of a year, you’d find that 99.9 percent of them never met Steve. You’d also find that a fairly large number of them entered the tech industry after Steve passed away.
But overwhelmingly, if you ask them who their hero is, who they have tried to learn the most from about how to build a company and how to have an impact on the world—Steve is number one on that list by a very wide margin.
I see Steve’s influence in everything they do. It’s in their behavior. In the polish and flair of their pitches. In the design of their slides. In the use of the word beautiful . Before Steve, no startup ever used the word beautiful . Now everything has to be beautiful. Every product needs to be fantastic out of the gate. Every product has to live up to its promise and bring delight to the lives of its users.
At its most basic, that’s the impact Steve had. His existence, his accomplishments at Apple—ultimately the mere presence of Apple—raised the bar for everybody, within and beyond technology. That effect seems likely to last for decades.
Before Steve staged his comeback at Apple, however, that wasn’t the way of things.
PRE-STEVE
If you rewind the tech industry to before Steve’s return in 1997 and Apple’s eventual dominance, Microsoft played the role that Apple does today. The well-understood script from Microsoft was that the first version of any product was going to be a clunker. But you also knew they would keep coming. The second product wasn’t going to be all that great, either. It was the third version of a Microsoft product that mattered; that’s the one that would be successful, and if not necessarily great, then at least okay.
The corollary was that business strategy is more important than product strategy. If you had enough sales and marketing hype, or used enough FUD—Microsoft like IBM before them, was famous for pre-announcing products that weren’t even on the drawing board, to freeze the market—you could bluff your way through to market success while your product wheezed along.
One of the things that went wrong in Silicon Valley in the 1990s—and one of the things that caused the crash in 2000—was too many Valley companies bought into that approach. So you had too many Valley companies that launched into market too fast and shipped subpar products. A lot of the products people used in the dot-com era, especially business products, were used out of fear—the fear of being left behind. Then 2000 and 2001 came around and everybody collectively said, “Holy Lord, these products are all crap.” And they all got dropped overnight, in many cases killing their companies.
Steve never believed that business strategy trumped product. He always believed that the product has to be great, and if it isn’t great, well, we’re not going to ship it.
THE IPHONE ARRIVES
For anybody coming of age in tech in the mid-2000s, the iPhone was the definitive product of the time. The iPhone set the benchmark for what a great technology product should be, and with a shove from Steve, it was arguably a higher benchmark than any set before.
The iPhone launched in 2007, but there were years of hard work prior to its debut. In 1999 Apple registered the domain iphone.org. In 2003 Apple began working on the hardware and software for touch screens. In 2004 the Apple skunkworks team on the project shifted focus from a tablet to what would become the iPhone.
The work on touch began years before the iPhone came out. Apple could have shipped a phone or a tablet at any number of points along that development timeline, and Steve chose not to because the product had to be great.
Pre–Steve and the iPhone I would try to keep up with all of the emerging mobile gear. I’d always have the latest Treo, or the latest Samsung, or the latest LG. You name it, I had a drawerful. They’d have Java BREW, eighteen thousand buttons, and a four-hundred-page manual translated into seven languages. They’d come in all these odd colors, and the graphics would be weird. Either the touch wouldn’t work right, or the keyboard would flake out. At their best they were laggy and slow. Dozens of models came out in the course of a year without any significant steps forward.
And then the Apple phone came out. It was just a slab of glass, and it was gorgeous. The software was butter-smooth. There was no giant manual to wade through. Every time you pulled your iPhone out of your pocket, you had this proud feeling, Wow. I’m really special. I have an iPhone. This is amazing. I’m part of the future.
The immediate and desperate need people had to write applications for the iPhone was another sign of how good it was. People were so motivated to build their software on top of the iPhone that they would “jailbreak” their iPhone to do it—voiding their warranty at a minimum, and risking turning it into a useless (but pretty) glass and metal brick if things really went south. Meanwhile, every other phone vendor had to beg people to develop for their phones.
That’s the quality bar that Steve set, what it meant to ship products. But also the bar for what it meant to have a customer, and whether that customer was happy—ideally, giddily happy. Steve made real the notion of customer delight. He did it with the products that Apple shipped. The fetishistic unboxing video trend took off only when Apple made stunning, simple packaging deserving of the device inside. And, of course, there was the breakthrough experience people had when they entered an Apple Store.
We experience so much of life today through our phone, our tablet, or our computer. We’re on these devices literally hundreds of times a day. It’s how we stay close to people we care about, and it’s how we work. It’s how we express ourselves. It’s how we participate in democracy. So how these things work, how they look and feel, really matters in determining how we live. Steve understood that better than anyone.
APPLE-LIKE
There’s a story told by Comcast CEO Brian Roberts of getting a call from Steve when he was on medical leave from Apple. Comcast had launched a new high-definition TV interface, and Roberts thought he was getting a congratulatory call. He wasn’t. Steve told him everything that was wrong with it. It didn’t meet the bar.
Roberts took that to heart; you can see it in Comcast today. Its X-line of cable set-top boxes are much more Apple-like. Would Steve have some choice comments? Undoubtedly, but the point is, even the cable company is trying to get better now.
The new Microsoft is also trying to be more like Apple. The products coming out of Microsoft over the last five years are clearly better. It’s no longer “third time’s a charm, and it’s okay if the first two suck.” Satya Nadella is running Microsoft more like Steve ran Apple.
That same Apple-like influence has rippled across other industries. Take online banking. We see startups all the time that make this point. Go to an incumbent big bank website and you’ll see it’s still pre-Apple. There will be too many words, too many menu choices, odd fonts, off-putting colors, and bad layout. It’s all very confusing.
Then you go to a modern financial services website or mobile app, and the recognition comes unbidden: It’s just clean and smooth and fresh. Simple and easy. It’s Apple-like.
Ask any of the Apple devout and they will offer a list of products, services, and experiences that they would love to see get an Apple-like redo. Better yet, they would like to see Apple just get into the business.
In the automotive world Tesla is bringing that Apple-like experience to cars, but they are the exception for now. Climb inside most vehicles, and it’s still buttons and knobs and levers all over the place. On top of that, most cars are still perfectly happy to collide head-on with another car and never even give you advance warning. Whereas, you just know when Apple comes out with a car, it’s never going to let you do that. And it won’t require a nine-hundred-page manual in fourteen languages with a massive index to operate.
An example: Since I have a degree in computer science, I pride myself on never opening the manual on anything electronic. But I could not change the clock on the center console screen of my father-in-law’s German sport-utility truck. There’s a “Systems” button, and there’s a “Settings” option in the “Systems” menu. But there’s no setting for changing the clock. I finally broke down and went into the manual for the console display, and I looked up in the index under “time.” Under “time” it said, “Refer to the other manual.” It turns out you can’t change the truck’s clock from the center console. You have to change the clock from the steering wheel because the clock is controlled by the car’s firmware, not the dash display software. It took twenty-five minutes to change the clock. Pre-Apple in the extreme.
The way Steve would react to that is simple: everybody involved in allowing this product to leave the factory without that being fixed would get fired.
“NICE” CEOS
Would Steve, in that case, be “mean” to fire, or at a minimum, yell at people for shipping a lousy product? Or is it the people who made the lousy product that are being “mean” to the rest of the world?
Steve yelled. There is no debating that. He wasn’t the easiest guy to work for, but he was the best guy to work for. Apple couldn’t have accomplished all it has if Apple wasn’t a place where people loved to work.
Talk to the very large number of people who not only worked at Apple, but worked at Apple for a very long time, and they all say the same things: “I did the best work of my life at Apple. My work had the biggest impact. I built products there that are so much better than anything else I’ve ever done. I learned the most. And it wasn’t just me; I was surrounded by the best people.”
What they describe is a real sense of having something very, very special. And it is probably the most special thing that they—employee or executive—are ever going to have. Steve’s ability to create and foster and maintain a company of that size and scale, with that feeling among the employees and executives, was an extremely rare and special thing. There are a lot of “nicer” CEOs who never even get close to that.
Steve may have chewed people apart in a meeting, but afterward they almost always had two things to say: One is, he was right. What they’ll tell you next is that they learned “good enough” isn’t good enough. And the next time they came back to meet with Steve, they came in with something great.
It’s like anything in life. There are standards. The standards have to be enforced. If the standards aren’t enforced, then the standards slip. This is the role of the CEO in any company. Some care and some don’t. Great CEOs care a lot. Steve cared a lot.
“Nice” CEOs who don’t hold the line on standards do not build great places to work. They may build a nice place to work, but they will not build a great place to work. Then the great people will leave, and then the company will degenerate into mediocrity. Steve built Apple into the best place to work.
People watching Steve’s personal behavior too closely often miss the broader point of what he was doing, and why he was putting so much energy and so much passion into it. The experience most people had at Apple was not just “I had a meeting with Steve and he yelled at me.” The experience most people had at Apple was “I worked at Apple for ten years, and, oh my God, did we do amazing things.”
GOOD ENOUGH, GOODBYE
There’s a concept in some countries called the tall poppy syndrome , where everybody has to be average. It’s culturally very important for everybody to be the same. If anybody ever sticks their head up and says, “No, no, I can do something special,” or “I can be special,” they get it chopped off.
There’s a major urge in American society today to implement the tall poppy syndrome. It’s this movement right now in politics and economics, this purported ideal that everybody ought to be equal, which is to say, for nobody to be special. Steve embodied the other side of that. The whole point of Steve, and the whole point of Apple, was to be special, was to be the tall poppy.
It’s not just Apple that can do this. It’s everybody. It’s a question of expectations. It’s the difference between good enough and great. Good enough was good enough for a long time, but thanks to Steve, it isn’t anymore.
—Marc Andreessen