Steve Jobs on Founding Apple: Building for Ourselves

When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. But life, that's a very limited life. Life can be much broader. Once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you, and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.

I had a partner named Steve Wozniak, who's a brilliant guy, and he did most of the engineering on the original Apple 1 and the Apple 2. We just made it for ourselves, and we showed it to our friends, and they all wanted one. And so we were busy making these computers by hand for our friends, and it was taking all of our life, all of our spare time. And so we decided we better manufacture 100 of these so that we can not have to spend the rest of our lives making them for our friends, and that's how we got into this. We didn't think about starting a company. We were just doing it for ourselves, and then our friends, and then the circle got bigger and bigger and bigger. Now there's 25 million people. We went and talked to the venture capitalists, and none of them would give us any money. One of them referred to me as a renegade from the human race.

When you get a core group of 10 great people, it becomes self-policing as to who they let into that group. So I consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting. We wanted a computer, and we knew exactly what we wanted in a computer. So we could do the marketing as well as the engineering of that product. This changed later as we started selling to people that were different than us, but certainly in the first several years of Apple, we were selling to people that were just like us. And a lot of Silicon Valley companies have started that way. You know who the best managers are?

They're the great individual contributors who never ever want to be a manager, but decide they have to be a manager because no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them. I remember reading an article when I was about 12 years old, I think it might have been Scientific American, where they measured the efficiency of locomotion for all these species on planet Earth. How many kilocalories did they expend to get from point A to point B? And the Condor won, came in at the top of the list, surpassed everything else. And humans came in about a third of the way down the list, which was not such a great showing for the crown of creation.

But somebody there had the imagination to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. Human riding a bicycle blew away the Condor, all the way off the top of the list. And it made a really big impression on me that we humans are tool builders, and that we can fashion tools that amplify these inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes. And so for me, a computer has always been a bicycle of the mind, something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities. And I think we're just at the early stages of this tool, very early stages. And we've come only a very short distance, and it's still in its formation, but already we've seen enormous changes. I think that's nothing compared to what's coming in the next hundred years.

I can tell you what our goal is. Our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world, and make products we are proud to sell and would recommend to our family and friends. And we want to do that at the lowest prices we can. But I have to tell you, there's some stuff in our industry that we wouldn't be proud to ship, that we wouldn't be proud to recommend to our family and friends. And we can't do it. We just can't ship junk. We don't offer stripped-down, lousy products. Isn't this awesome? To prove I'm right I don't need to be forgiven So, this is what we're up to today, and I'm really glad you liked everything.

But there is one more thing that I want to talk about. But there is one more thing. There is one more thing. But there's one more thing. But there is one more thing. But we do have one more thing today. But there is one more thing. But there is one more little thing. This is our store. And the store is divided into four parts. The first quarter of the store has our home section, with great home and education products, and our pro section, with all our great pro products. And every product we make is in this first 25% of the store.

You can see the whole product line. Wouldn't it be great if when you went to buy a computer, or after you bought a computer, if you had any questions, you could ask a genius? Well, that's what we've got. This is called the Genius Bar. As you can see, we've got some pictures of our heroes up here. And this bar here, I'm not a genius, but I'll stand behind here. There'll be somebody here who can do service right in the store, and who can answer any questions you've got about your Mac, or about any of the peripherals or software that work with it. And if that person doesn't know the answer, they've got a hotline to call us in Cupertino at Apple headquarters, where we have somebody who does.

And so we're hoping this is going to be an entirely new thing. But there's one more little thing. So, I've got one more thing.