Co-founder and CEO of Apple, founder of NeXT, majority owner of Pixar, and the product mind behind the Macintosh, iPod, and iPhone.
1955–2011 · Palo Alto, California
Install Steve's frameworks in Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add adamtpang/summon.guide
/plugin install steve-jobsInstalls 0 skills from Steve, plus the rest of summon.guide. Source on GitHub.
Steven Paul Jobs was born in San Francisco on February 24, 1955 to two unmarried graduate students, Joanne Carole Schieble and Abdulfattah John Jandali, a Syrian-born political science lecturer, and was placed for adoption at birth. Paul Reinhold Jobs, a machinist and mechanic who had not finished high school, and his wife Clara, a payroll clerk born to Armenian immigrants, adopted him. Jobs later said his birth mother refused to sign the final papers until the couple promised the boy would go to college. He grew up in Mountain View and then Los Altos, in the orchards that were becoming Silicon Valley, and learned careful work at his father's workbench, where Paul insisted the back of a cabinet be built as well as the front. Jobs never called Paul and Clara anything but his parents, and he had little interest in Jandali, whom he met by chance and never acknowledged. He did build a lifelong bond with his biological sister, the novelist Mona Simpson. At Homestead High School in Cupertino he fell in with Bill Fernandez and, through him, met Steve Wozniak in 1971. Their first venture was not a computer but the blue box, an illegal tone generator that let a user place free long distance calls. Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland in the fall of 1972, dropped out after a single semester because he could not justify spending his parents' savings, and then spent about eighteen months sleeping on friends' floors and auditing whatever interested him, including a calligraphy course that he later credited for the Macintosh's typography. He took a job at Atari in 1974, traveled to India in search of enlightenment with his friend Daniel Kottke, returned with a shaved head and a lasting attachment to Zen Buddhism, and began attending the Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, where Wozniak was designing a computer of his own.
On April 1, 1976, Jobs, Wozniak and Atari engineer Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer Company to sell Wozniak's hand-built Apple I. Wayne sold his 10 percent stake back for $800 twelve days later. Apple was incorporated on January 3, 1977, and the Apple II, released that year in a plastic case with color graphics, made it one of the fastest-growing companies in American history. The December 12, 1980 initial public offering created hundreds of millionaires and left Jobs, at 25, worth roughly $250 million. He recruited PepsiCo executive John Sculley as chief executive in 1983, took over the Macintosh project, and launched the machine on January 24, 1984 with the Ridley Scott directed 1984 commercial. The Macintosh sold poorly against its forecasts, Jobs's management of the division drew open revolt, and in May 1985 the board backed Sculley in stripping him of operational control. Jobs submitted his resignation on September 17, 1985 and left with five senior Apple employees. He put $7 million into NeXT, a workstation company aimed at higher education, and later took investment from Ross Perot. The NeXT Computer was unveiled at a theatrical launch in San Francisco on October 12, 1988, drew admiration for its software and almost no buyers at prices near $10,000, and the company eventually abandoned hardware to sell its object-oriented operating system. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser and server on a NeXT machine. In 1986 Jobs paid roughly $10 million for the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm and renamed it Pixar, expecting to sell high-end imaging hardware. That business failed too, and he spent years and tens of millions of his own dollars funding a small animation group that kept making award-winning shorts. The bet turned in November 1995, when Toy Story opened as the first fully computer-animated feature and Pixar's public offering days later made his stake worth more than a billion dollars. Disney bought Pixar in an all-stock deal announced on January 24, 2006 and valued at about $7.4 billion, which made Jobs Disney's largest individual shareholder with roughly 7 percent and put him on its board. Apple, meanwhile, was close to failing. It bought NeXT in December 1996 for about $400 million to get a modern operating system, and brought Jobs back as an adviser. After chief executive Gil Amelio was forced out, Jobs was named interim chief executive on September 16, 1997, a title he kept until becoming permanent CEO in January 2000. He cut the product line to four machines, settled with Microsoft in August 1997 in exchange for a $150 million investment and a commitment to keep making Office for the Mac, and relaunched the brand with the Think Different campaign. The iMac arrived in 1998, the first Apple Stores in 2001, the iPod in October 2001, the iTunes Music Store in 2003, the iPhone on January 9, 2007, the App Store in 2008, and the iPad in 2010. Apple dropped Computer from its name the day the iPhone was announced. By August 2011 it was briefly the most valuable publicly traded company in the United States.
Jobs was not the most gifted engineer in any room he entered, and he is the rare business figure whose reputation rests on taste, editing and refusal. He insisted that hardware, software and services be designed together, that a product be judged by what it is like to use rather than by its specifications, and that a company's most important decisions are the projects it kills. Under his second tenure Apple went from weeks of cash on hand to the most valuable company in the world, and it reordered four industries along the way: personal computing, music, mobile phones and, through Pixar, feature animation. He was also a difficult and often cruel manager, denied paternity of his eldest daughter for years, and left almost no public philanthropy under his own name, facts his admirers tend to skip. He is named on more than 450 patents. Jobs was diagnosed in October 2003 with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor, an uncommon and comparatively slow-growing cancer that is often treatable by surgery. He delayed an operation for about nine months while trying diet and alternative therapies, a decision he later told his biographer Walter Isaacson that he regretted, and had a modified Whipple procedure at Stanford in July 2004. The disease returned, he received a liver transplant in Memphis in April 2009, and he took an indefinite medical leave on January 17, 2011. He resigned as chief executive on August 24, 2011, naming Tim Cook his successor, and stayed on as chairman. He died at his Palo Alto home on October 5, 2011, aged 56. His sister Mona Simpson, in a eulogy published by The New York Times, reported his final words as "OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW." Isaacson's authorized biography, based on more than forty interviews with Jobs and published weeks after his death, became the best-selling book in the United States that year.
“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.”
“It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
“A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.”
“Focusing is about saying no.”
“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me ... Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful ... that's what matters to me.”
Their voice on summon.guide is grounded in:
Further reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
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