SayingsAnecdotes
"Telling a Steve Jobs story": Silicon Valley's favorite topic of discussionI first met Steve Jobs 13 years ago, when I was working on a book on the history of Silicon Valley. Following an extended tap dance with his Apple gatekeeper, and after I’d already interviewed most of the Valley’s other leaders, Jobs agreed to see me, in a conference room at Apple headquarters. I got to see firsthand what I’d so often heard about: smarts, breadth, charm and abrasiveness.
Even before sitting down, he said, "You’ve got 20 minutes," adding with some derision, "You’re not from here, are you?" I asked why he asked, also wondering to myself where he’d honed his social graces. "Look at how you’re dressed!" he said. Jobs had on his usual black mock turtleneck and faded jeans. I was wearing a blue blazer and Oxford shirt. "I was just trying to show you some respect," I offered. He nodded, smiled slightly and acknowledged my efforts.
We wound up talking for three hours. I liked him right away, idiosyncrasies and all. […] In that initial [encounter], back in 1998, Jobs began by going to a whiteboard to draw a biographical timeline of the Valley. There were Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard back in 1938, developing an audio oscillator in their Palo Alto garage, and in the process giving birth to Silicon Valley (though it wasn’t called as such until the early 1970s, when silicon became the main element in microchips); there was brilliant-but-pathological William Shockley, who founded the first semiconductor company in 1956, in Mountain View; there were the "Traitorous Eight" -- including Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce and Gene Kleiner -- who bolted from Shockley to launch Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, which led to the most famous of the "Fairchildren" spin-offs, a company called Intel, started by Moore and Noyce in 1968, as well as the Valley’s first major venture-capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, co-founded by Kleiner and Tom Perkins four years later.
Jobs played the role of history teacher, with an appreciation for his entrepreneurial forbears that is rare in the Valley -- a place that cares mostly for the new. And he told the narrative with personal reverence and humility: Packard and Noyce had been mentors, so much so that when Jobs got fired from Apple in 1985 he met with them "to apologize for screwing up so badly."
What Jobs left out of the narrative, with even more uncharacteristic modesty, was Steve Jobs. At the end of that glorious chronology, sketched out over the course of 45 minutes, he should have added himself (and Steve Wozniak), for starting Apple Computer in 1976.
Source: David A. Kaplan, Fortune, Oct 11, 2011
