If you spent any time around Steve Jobs, you want to tell people about it. That could be one takeaway from the myriad of stories we’ve heard about the early days of Apple across our shows. Here are five of our favorites:
The Founding
Apple didn't start in a garage — and it wasn't started by two people. David Pogue, author of the new book Apple: The First 50 Years, tells Remarkable People host Guy Kawasaki that on April 1st, 1976, three people signed the founding documents: Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and a forgotten third founder named Ron Wayne. Jobs knew Wayne from Atari. He designed Apple's first logo, helped mediate between the two Steves, and was cut in for 10%. Twelve days later, he was out, Pogue explains. Apple had taken on a $15,000 loan to build circuit boards, and Wayne — already burned by start-ups he couldn't pay back — decided he couldn't risk it. Apple's lawyers paid him $800, then another $1,500 to make it final. His stake would be worth roughly $400 billion today, Pogue says.
iTunes
By 2001, the music industry was in free fall. On Masters of Scale, music industry mogul Jimmy Iovine tells guest host Angela Ahrendts that when Napster hit, he wasn't scared — he was pissed off. Universal's Doug Morris sent him to Cupertino to meet Jobs and Eddy Cue, and get acquainted with the coming digital music revolution. What he found surprised him. "He understood the why of John Lennon," Iovine says of Jobs. "He just didn't like the music — he understood the person who made the music." Iovine called Morris on the way out: "The party is at Steve's house." Interscope became one of the first labels to embrace iTunes fully.
The iPod
iTunes existed, but it lived on your computer. Tony Fadell, who oversaw the development of the iPod and iPhone, tells Reid Hoffman that Jobs saw the gap: MP3 players were clunky, and Apple could build a better one. It would draw people into their music ecosystem and give them a reason to buy a Mac. Fadell describes it as "the first device that Apple would make that you needed so badly that you would buy a Mac for." The iPod shipped in 2001, but Fadell candidly shares: it didn't break through until three generations in, when the iTunes Music Store launched alongside it.
The iPhone
The iPod's success made phone makers nervous, and they started building music into their handsets. Fadell says the threat was obvious: people only want to carry one device. If the phone absorbed the iPod, the iPod was finished. What followed was a sprawling development process — a touchscreen iPod, a click wheel phone, a touchscreen Mac, all running simultaneously. Rather than picking a winner, the teams combined the best of each. "It was literally like having a ton of Lego blocks all around and coming up with the right model," Fadell says. In 2007, the iPhone launched.
The Apple Store
Angela Ahrendts, former Burberry CEO and SVP of retail at Apple, shares on her two-part episode of Masters of Scale that when she arrived at Apple, the stores had no operating system. Her answer was "Today at Apple," a program of free daily lessons in every store worldwide. She told store managers they were the "de facto mayor" of their communities. She backed the vision with a three-minute video recorded on her iPhone every week for four years, sent directly to every retail employee on the planet. Tim Cook has called it one of the greatest launches in Apple's history.
-2.jpg?upscale=true&width=1120&upscale=true&name=LinkedIn%20newsletter%20iamges%20(8)-2.jpg)
.jpg?upscale=true&width=1120&upscale=true&name=Ch_%20Strong%20phrase_clip%20(2).jpg)
