steven jobs figures heroically in thehistory of american entrepreneurship at the age of 22 he founded acompany called apple computer and proceeded to grow it into a twobillion dollar business in the spring of 1985 he lost the powerstruggle inside apple and left the company he had created he spent the summer considering his next move
apple stock price 2007, and resolved to begin again in september he started a new computercompany with his own money with characteristic flair he called it next incorporated this morning
at its offices in silicon valleycalifornia the company is about to get a first look at its new trademark the signature it hopes to make familiararound the world the designerpaul rand created the logos for ibmwestinghouse ups and many others rand doesn't normally work for infant companies even if they could afford him but next isn't an ordinary start up the idea is too...
please don't open don't look at the back first this is the front and don't get scaredthis is not the design [laugh] why i did this was to sort of floor steve when he saw it you don't figure, jesus a hundred thousandbucks down the drain jobs had had a sneak preview of the logo and loves it as he waits for a verdict from his staffhe can hardly contain his excitement assertive as he ishe values consensus most of these young computer andsoftware designers
were on the team thatdeveloped the macintosh they left secure jobs at apple to followtheir boss in pursuit of his new vision steve's goal is to transformthe learning process at the college and graduate school level with the powerful computerand a new kind of software and we decidedwe wanted to start a company that had a lot to do with education andin particular higher education colleges and universitiesso what our vision is is that there's a revolution in softwaregoing on now on college and university campuses andit has to do with providing
two types a breakthrough software one iscalled simulated learning environments it's where... you can't give a student in physics a linearaccelerator you can't give a student biology a five million dollar recombinant dna laboratory but you cansimulate those things you can simulate them on a very powerful computer and it is not possible forstudents to afford these things it is not possible for most facultymembers to for these things so if we can take
what we do best which is to find reallygreat technology and pull it down to a price point that's affordable to people if we can do the same thing for thistype of computer which is maybe ten times as powerful as a personal computer that we did for personal computers theni think we can make a real difference in the way thelearning experience happens in the next five years and that's whatwe're trying to do company's come and goat the crest of the way ibm had their day way back whenthey were the crest
in december 1985 inbusiness for just 90 days jobs and his 11 employees hold theirfirst retreat - company retreats like this are the continuation of a tradition steveestablished at apple early on watching him in action at thesebrainstorming sessions as an opportunity to observe him at his lucid best as acompany builder and motivator slicing in the future his opening remarks reveal his faith in high technology and his idealism an unusual combination thatis part of his uniqueness
in effect he is planting the seeds ofa new corporate culture more important than buildinga product we are in the process of architecting a company that will hopefully be much much more incredible the total will bemuch more incredible muscle its parts and the cumulative effort approximatelyyou know twenty thousand decisions that we're all gonna make over the next twoyears are going to define what our company isand one other things that made apple great was that in the early days
it was built from the heart not by somebody who came in and said i know how to guid a company here's what you do tatatatatatata - it wasn't built that wayit was built from the heart now unfortunately we didn't always useour heads and we can do better in many respects because we are wiserand smarter no more in those kinds of things butwhat are the most important things one of my largest wishes isthat we build next from the heart and the people it are thinking aboutcoming to work for us or buying our products or who want to sell us things
feel that that we're doing this becausewe have a passion about it we're doing this because we really careabout the higher educational process not because we want to make a buck not because we just want to do it to do it jobs can be overbearing and impatient but this team knows what to expect andis not easily intimidated they are smart and they're focused andtheir preferred language is computer ears they actually provided an artist to rehearsethe words when you drop into small talk tworps* provided you a way to drop actually into the c-shell
and programmed the actions that happenedwhen you double clicked on an icon or when you dropped something on an iconcreate a product we have to create a product that is an order of magnitude more powerful than the current generation of pcs for two solid days the grouplistens to progress reports from each department the goal is to arrive at designdecisions production deadlines and a marketing strategy aimed atselling on college campuses define the problem? the point is that june july and august are timeframewhere people do work
when the school's out and when the people, the researchers,the staff that deal with making computing happen for septemberthat's when they do work that is like a bomb run you don't change your target whenyou're on the ball run from the sidelines jobs probes andchallenges he has a remarkable ability to identify the conclusions implicit inwhat the others have to say so really the next 90 are really importantwe're gonna make it or break it based on whether we can provide productto higher education
and services and relationships tohigher education that no one else provides and i think weought to spend a 100% of our time thinking about that and if we can't dothat that we ought to go broke there needs to be someone who is sort of the... keeper and reiteratorof the vision because there's just a ton of work to do anda lot of times when you have to walk a 1,000 miles and you take the first step it looks like along ways and it really helps if there's someone there saying well we're one stepcloser you know the goal definitely
exists it's not just a mirage out there so in a 1001 little and sometimes larger ways the vision needs to be reiterated i do that a lot there was the price one, the schedule oneand the technology jobs continually interrupts tofocus the lens of his vision on priorities by the end of the first day the teamhas established the critical importance of keeping the price of the computerwithin the reach of students and professors and bring the product to market byspring 1987 a survey of college campuses hasindicated that the new computer should
sell for no more than three thousanddollars to be considered affordable since college buying takes place in thesummerjobs is concerned that a failure to have their product ready by spring 1987will delay the company an entire year we ought to deliver this by spring '87or we're out of business so my first priority is to make sure that everything was out by spring '87 i think spring can basically push out the summer but ialso hear that that is number one right... i guess i disagree with price being the second thing because
unless we have thistechnology that wows people we're not going to have a firmfoundation that people are gonna buy from i think people are going to be a lotmore flexible saying' but geez this runs three times faster seven times faster than you know...what's the highest we can go here? well we couldn't make this 5,000i think we're already they didn't say if you can go three times faster we'd pay four thousand - they didn't say that that's right they say three thousand dollars is a hot price they said you're 3,000 forget itthat's our magic number they've also told us
that nobody else says they do that and they think that's a really bignumber now whether it is or not in reality who knows whether it is or notin term of their commitment to push us we've established that if we really do believe that we haveto ship this by summer of '87 then how are you going to move that up?i don't think prices going to change the schedule that muchi think the real risk is the technology it's not on the cost there's another option, we could go to the spring of '88yeah we could
but the problem is if we do that then... no that's not the worst thing the worst thing is the world isn't standing still so by the spring of '88 well we want colour the technology windows sort ofpasses us by and all the work we've done we throw in the toilet we start over and since we prove if we can't do something great in 18 months why should we believe we can do it one year later? i don't care what you say, reality distortion this is reality distortion and have motivational value and that's fine
and i think it has a very strong pointand very important value however when it comes to that date affecting the design of the product that's when we get into a rot real deep shit because if we areunrealistic about this date we make design decisionsthat we then have to go over reiterate, throw outstart all over again and you told us yesterday we have a past that unfortunately some of us can't get rid of that past and i remember past where we put out a list this long about the software that wasgoing to ship with our product
as you recall the list was formidable and with all thought we could do it in 12-month - 15 packages so maybe what we ought to do though is say see i think we have to drive a stakein the ground somewhere and i think if we miss this window thena whole series of events come into play we can't sell enough units in '87to pay for our operating costs okay you know word gets out that we'renot doing that well a lot the credibility starts to erode tada-tada-tada-tada-tada - i don't know you can make up all these fantasies
we've got to have a stake in the ground the problem i got though is one where everybodybelieve that the stake is in fact in the ground and secondly when software comes back and says what they can do by summer or spring of '87will they be telling us the truth? that's what i worry about well one of the thing.... that's exactly my point - we've got a person here that says he can do a word processor in six months its taken three years well georges i can't change the world you knowwhat do you want me to do? what's the solution? i mean i don't want to hear
just because we blew last time we're gonna blow it this time just see what we can learn... what i want is probably irrelevant i mean there are certain realities here both psychological and ... market that are gonna come into play in my own personal judgment and i think this is a window that we'vegot we've been given it thank god we've been given it nobody else is done this it's a wonderful window we have 18 months so i don't think we have a company if wedon't do this no matter what i say
or anybody else saysthat is my deepest belief if we don't do this we will not be ableto attract great people we will not be able to retainsome of the ones we have and it just won't be us and i find myself making lists of thingswe don't know and then i remember that our company is 90 days old and i look back to all things we do know it's really phenomenal how far we've come in 90 days boy i forgot how much work it actually isto start a company it's a lot of work
and you've got to do everything you got tocome up with the name you've got to come up with a logo in addition to designing theproduct you gotta figure out what to design you gotta figure out how yougonna get to the marketplace you have to do a part number system you got to get bank accounts you gotta set up charts general ledgers get a management information system geta little kitchen set up get a coffee maker all the stuff where we going to?
three months later the company returnsto pebble beach to hold its second retreat progress has been made the first mock upof the new computer is in the trunk steve is carrying but the flush of excitement thatanimated the first days of start-up has given way to the pressure of solvingactual problems in time to meet critical deadlines the minute steve begins to deliverhis traditional sayings of chairman jobs it becomes clear that the mood of thisretreat will be different from the first my first saying... is the honeymoon is over all of those wonderful things that we got for just being
are now sort of justold news we are like every other start-up we'vebeen a company now for six months and yes you could say that wehad a lawsuit for 4 of those months and we had this and that but the bottom line is the world doesn'treally care what the world cares about is what we produce we've bee a start up forsix months we've been spending money like we've been a start up for sixmonths and in some areas we've really produced a lot we've got a lotto show for six months in summaries in other areas we don't have a lot to show for six months
so i hope that throughout this retreat we tend to make sure that our feet are onthe ground and we realize that we're gonna be judged like every other start-upfrom here on out and that is by what our product is how timely we bring it to market not on the fact that we're next not on the fact that we were sued not on the fact that we're really good people who had a lot to do with macintosh that stuff's irrelevant at this point what i'd like to do is step back a minute from the point of view of what'sfeasible ignore that
in december the group concluded they must ship product ineighteen months and agreed they could be ready three months down the line this seems questionable and there is frustration in the room it's totally useless as far as i can see totalk about how you gonna implement something unless you know what it is you want to implement so that's what i'm not getting i'm not getting it from marketing i'm not getting you know a clear idea from anybody really what
what the features are and what is this thing that we're talking about doing it ain't my job and if i was himit wouldn't be my job it'd be your job you know isn't like this should besomething new but i agree... let me back up...so somebody's gotta say here's what we can do and we can make it happen and here's the level of thingwe can ship in16 months what i hear him hear saying iswell anything more than a [inaudible] forget it and boy that just makes me smoke it just seems like we're
were in this really difficult time where i don't know... i mean i sort of think another month is going to go by and they're still not going to be anything running on the sun it's very interesting another month ago by there's still anything runningit just seems like it's and i guess maybe it's just the way ithas to be we thing we're gonna have tono forget about sleeping at times fuck everything after shipment just look to shipment you know marketing's out of line there's too many people in marketing
i'd figure about $250 a month for helpingbefore we cut the facilities budget it's a thousand dollars worth money is also emerging as a problem in return for seventy percent of thestock jobs has committed seven million dollars of his own money to carry thecompany to product launch but at the present burn rate it appearsthat that amount will be insufficient the unpleasant task of cutting expensesmust be faced all that other stuff that we went to inthe final analysis we really don't care about that much
is what's costing us the money they are not million dollar buckets out to identified that we need spending cuts there's lots and lots of hundred thousand dollars buckets and it's gonna take everybody inthis room doing a mindset change we just go out and we buy brand new macintoshesand brand new hard disks for just for everybody and i don't think we're getting great deals on thats stuff, we're not scrounging why don't the mac owners bring their macs from home? we use to find people to get us really good employee discounts
on things and everything else that we stop scrounging we stop nickel and diming for that stuff and it all adds up and i think the other thing is we signaldeep pockets out there every vendor that comes to us everyperson who comes to us from recruiting everything they expect these twenty thirty milliondollars behind us and it isn't there and it's not going to be there so you can keep yourself in the butt but now is the time to change one of the things i don't see is i don't see it myself but i don't see it
in enough in the rest of us is thati don't see that that startup hustle in other words if we zoom out of the bigpicture it would be a shame to have lost the war because we won a few battles and i sort of feel like that i and therest of us are concentrating too much on the smaller battles and we're notkeeping the war in perspective and the war is called survival the war is called not ran out of money until we get our product on the market steve jobs had built a major company by the time he was 28 according to some he had even created thepersonal computer industry
in any event he was a wealthy man andwas acknowledged as a master entrepreneur what is it the drives him at age 31 to begin all over again? part of the answer seems to be his needto feel that he is contributing to history i felt it the first time when i visited a schoolit was like third and fourth graders classroom one time and they had a wholeclassroom for apple ii's and i spent a few hours there and i sawthese third and fourth graders growing up completely different than i grew up because of this machine and
what hit me about it was that here was this machine there's very few people designed about four in the case of the apple ii and then they gave it to some peoplewho didn't know how to design it but they knew how to make it to manufacture it make a whole bunch of them they give it some people that didn't know how to design or manufacture itbut they knew how to distribute it and they gave it to some people that didn't knew how to design or to manufacture or distribute it but they knew how to right software for itand gradually this sort of inverse pyramid grew and when it finally got into the handsof a lot of people
it blossomed out of this tiny little seed and it seemed like an incredible amount of leverage and it all started with just an idea andhere was this idea taken through all of these stages resulting in a class roomfull of kids growing up with some insights and somefundamentally different experiences which i thought might be very beneficial fortheir lives because of this germ of an idea a few years ago and that's an incredible feeling to knowthat you had something to do with it
a and b to know it can be done to know that you can plant something inthe world and it'll grow and change the world ever soslightly whether next can be a viable businessis something only time will tell but steve jobs' passionate commitment tohis vision is clear and his certainty that it can beachieved and is worth achieving is a conviction to be observed in allsuccessful entrepreneurs
