Steve Jobs
Co-founder 1976Background
Steve Jobs grew up in California's emerging electronics culture, where hobbyist computing, counterculture design ideas, and Silicon Valley engineering were beginning to overlap. He briefly attended Reed College before dropping out, worked at Atari, and spent time around the Homebrew Computer Club through Steve Wozniak. Jobs was not the engineer behind the Apple I, but he saw that Wozniak's board could become a product if it was packaged, sold, and explained properly. His pre-Apple experience gave him a feel for product presentation, retail persuasion, and the emotional side of technology adoption.
Role at Apple Inc.
Apple Computer was founded on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne (who famously sold his 10% stake back to his partners for $800 just twelve days later). The foundational mythology of the company is legendary: two college dropouts building circuit boards in the garage of Jobs' childhood home in Los Altos, California. The technical genius of the operation was Wozniak, a brilliant, idiosyncratic engineer who single-handedly designed the Apple I and, more importantly, the Apple II—a machine that featured color graphics and an integrated keyboard, inventing the concept of the accessible 'personal computer.' While Wozniak provided the engineering brilliance, Steve Jobs provided the visionary, ruthless commercial drive. Jobs possessed an almost messianic belief that computers should not be intimidating, industrial machines used only by hobbyists or corporations, but beautifully designed, intuitive 'bicycles for the mind' accessible to everyday people. This philosophy culminated in the launch of the Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-market computer to feature a graphical user interface and a mouse. However, Jobs' extreme perfectionism and abrasive management style led to a power struggle with CEO John Sculley, resulting in Jobs being ousted from his own company in 1985. The most important chapter of Apple's founding history is actually its 're-founding.' After Jobs left, Apple slowly lost its innovative edge and nearly went bankrupt in the late 1990s. In an act of desperation, Apple acquired Jobs' new company (NeXT) in 1997, bringing him back as CEO. Jobs executed the greatest corporate turnaround in history. He slashed Apple's bloated product line, secured a $150 million lifeline from arch-rival Microsoft, and forged a legendary partnership with designer Jony Ive. Together, they released a staggering sequence of industry-defining products—the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad—that transformed Apple from a nearly bankrupt computer manufacturer into the most valuable and culturally dominant corporation on the planet.