My goal with this blog

I write about relevant changes in the way that people use the web and how startups are built to provide services and products for this ever changing wonderful thing we still know as "the web." As a former entrepreneur turned early-stage investor, my greatest hope is for this to be useful to other folks that are like me in the hopes that they can avoid some of the mistakes I've made.

From:
Antonio Rodriguez

On clarity of purpose and consistency of vision

tech
by Antonio on

There's an old Hindu saying that comes into my mind occasionally: "For the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you."
— Steve Jobs

It would seem that TechCrunch is on a similar wavelength today, thanking Steve Jobs for being such a seminal influence on the tech industry over the last 10 years.

I've got a similar aim, though I want to go further back— quite a bit further back to a time when Steve was not the king of the industry that he is today, but instead, a cocky 29 year old that hadn't been booted from the company he started, hadn't failed publicly, come back, almost died, and given (re)birth to the last remaining big tech company I know which is still truly innovative.

1984 was the year, and Playboy magazine was the venue. The interview is long but well worth reading for two main reasons. First, it is a great picture of the computer industry before consumers had been touched by it, and as such, a fantastic lesson for anyone who has ever struggled to pitch new technology to a mainstream audience. Sort of like watching Obi Wan in movies 1-3— you see the raw talent there without the years of refinement, and as such, it almost looks attainable.

The more important reason why the interview is so good though is because underneath it all, you can still see a beautiful consistency with the same core values that still lead Apple today. Here is the money quote:

PLAYBOY: What's the difference between the people who have insanely great ideas and the people who pull off those insanely great ideas?

JOBS: Let me compare it with IBM. How come the Mac group produced Mac and the people at IBM produced the PCjr? We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

What you see in the Apple of today is the continued adherence to this core belief that by building products for themselves which they would consider "insanely great," the employees at Apple have managed not only to define a nascent industry (personal computing), but increasingly to redefine existing but borked industries. And inspiring us all in the process.

There are all sorts of other great nuggets in this rather long interview for Apple fans, entrepreneurs, and just about anyone who might resonate with the notion of "making a dent in the universe."

Happy Thanksgiving.