Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, to Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian whom she had met at the University of Wisconsin where Jandali was pursuing a Ph.D. Apparently, Joanne had not told Jandali that she was pregnant and traveled to San Francisco to give birth and put the baby up for adoption. After several interviews, Joanne chose Paul and Clara Jobs as the adoptive parents when they agreed to fund her child’s college education.
Steve’s precocity became evident during his early education. His biographer, Walter Isaacson wrote:
Near the end of fourth grade, Mrs. Hill [his teacher] had Jobs tested. “I scored at the high school sophomore level” he recalled. Now that it was clear, not only to himself and his parents, but also to his teachers, that he was intellectually special, the school made the remarkable proposal that he skip two grades and go right into seventh; it would be the easiest way to keep him challenged and stimulated. His parents decided, more sensibly, to have him skip only one grade.…The transition was wrenching. He was a socially awkward loner who found himself with kids a year older.
At age 13, Steve enrolled at Homestead High School near his home in upscale Los Altos. While working on an electronics project he telephoned Bill Hewlett (of Hewlett-Packard) to request parts for an electronics project. Impressed with the youngster’s initiative, Hewlett later provided him with a summer job, where he could learn more about computers.
While at Homestead High, Steve was unable to fit into any of the social groups and began to regard himself as an outsider. However, he was able to find a friend, Bill Fernandez, who later introduced him to Steve Wozniak. While in his senior year in 1971, Steve visited Wozniak at University of California, Berkeley several times a week, exposing him to the university cultures at UC and nearby Stanford. Wozniak or “Woz,” as he was called by his friends, had developed an electronic device called “the little blue box,” that enabled a telephone to avoid charges on long-distance calls. Seeing the potential for a profitable enterprise, Jobs persuaded Woz to produce these devices that he would market and they would split the profits. Their enterprise was a success and laid the groundwork for what would come 3 years later.
Jobs enrolled at the prestigious and expensive Reed College in Portland, Oregon in September 1972, but dropped out at the end of the first semester because he felt that the courses (except one in calligraphy) offered him nothing of value. For many months that followed, he lived hand-to-mouth, sleeping in his friends’ dorms, sometimes recovering the deposits on Coke bottles to pay for food, and sometimes visiting the Hare Krishna temple for free meals. Seeking spiritual enlightenment, and wishing to explore Hindu philosophy, he decided to earn money for a trip to India. To obtain a job at Atari, he presented “the little blue box” to its founder, Nolan Bushnell, as evidence of his experience in electronics. Bushnell hired Jobs, but within a short time, some of the other employees were complaining that Steve’s personality was “prickly” and that he reeked of body odor. Recognizing Jobs’ exceptional intelligence, Bushnell assigned him to the night shift where he could work alone.
By mid-1974, Jobs had earned enough money to travel to India with a friend, Daniel Kottke, to seek out guru Neem Karoli Baba at his Kainchi ashram–unaware that the guru had died the previous September. Seven months later the two acolytes returned home. Shortly after his return, Jobs resumed employment at Atari, where he was required to create a circuit board for an arcade video game. To encourage efficient and inexpensive design, Atari was offering $100 for each computer chip eliminated from the original circuit board. Knowing little about circuit board design, Jobs approached Woz, suggesting that if he could minimize the number of chips needed, they could split the prize equally. Applying his electronic genius, Woz reduced the design by so many chips that they were awarded $5000.
During the mid-to-late 1970’s, teenage math nerds were becoming engaged with the emerging computer technology. What had started as a hobby, would quickly morph into a passion, transforming some of these mathematically-oriented adolescents into young entrepreneurs with a vision. At informal gatherings, young computer enthusiasts would share ideas about computer design. Through 1975, Jobs and Wozniak attended meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club and this became a stepping stone to the development and marketing of the first Apple computer.
In 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, unveiled their Apple II computer, complete with color display. Later that year, they incorporated Apple Computer Inc.–a company that would bring computer technology into the home and, by 2012, evolve into the largest public corporation in the world (by market capitalization) surpassing EXXON Mobil and Microsoft Inc.!
The stories of Steve’s difficult personality, temper tantrums, and insults have become part of his legend and provide some insight into his intolerance for anything less than perfection. Isaacson reported:
What particularly struck [Joe] Nocera [writer for Esquire Magazine] was Jobs’s almost willful lack of tact.” It was more than just an inability to hide his opinions when others said something he thought dumb; it was a conscious readiness, even a perverse eagerness, to put people down, humiliate them, show he was smarter.”
Clearly, Jobs’ success had more to do with his IQ than his people skills. He was able to lead, but only those who could live with his moods and tantrums. He had serious rifts with people and corporations, including his best friend, Steve Wozniak, his colleague John Sculley, his competitor Bill Gates, and software producer Adobe Inc. Steve Jobs had a social detachment that set him apart from others, and that contributed to his alienation from the Board at Apple, and his ultimate firing, in 1985, from the company he founded.
Within then next two years, Steve Jobs founded NeXT, a computer platform development company and Pixar, which produced, in 1995, the first 3D computer-animated feature film Toy Story. In 1997, Apple purchased NeXT and Steve Jobs returned to Apple as CEO. In the decades that followed, Jobs brought Apple from the brink of bankruptcy to once again, one of the preeminent computer companies in America. The creation of a line of highly innovative marketing sites and products such as Apple Store, App Store (iOS), iMac, iPad, iPod, iPhone, iTunes, and iTunes Store proved to be highly successful sources of revenue. Then in 2001, the Apple computers were installed with a new Unix-based operating system macOS, making it more secure as well as compatible with a much broader range of software.
In 2003, it was discovered that Steve Jobs had a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. During the next 8 years, he and his doctors experimented with several treatments, but on October 5, 2011, he succumbed at the age of 56. In a span of a little over 3 decades, he had ushered in a new era of personal computers, dramatically expanding everyone’s access to music, social networking, and global communication.
In an interview with Business Week on October 12, 2004, Steve Jobs explained one of the secrets of his success in hiring employees.
I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1. Given that, you’re well advised to go after the cream of the cream… A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.
Steve Jobs embodied the qualities he sought in his employees and was, indeed, the leader of teams of A+ players who changed our world forever.