Excerpts from Becoming Steve Jobs

I recently went back and read Becoming Steve Jobs by journalists Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. I really enjoyed the book. While reading it, I shared a few excerpts with friends. I decided to post those here as well.

The first excerpt comes from the period of time when Steve was in negotiations to buy what would become Pixar from George Lucas:

“At one point,” says Barnes, who helped with the negotiations, “the delays went on forever and he [Steve] just went and told one of their executives to ‘fuck off.’ One of the Lucas team said, ‘You can’t say that to one of our EVPs.’ ‘Yes I can,’ he replied. ‘And fuck you, too.’”

During the post hardware time at NeXT, the company pivoted to selling software, which included government information servers. This anecdote from Ed Catmull amused me:

One day, Ed Catmull read a NeXT press release about, he says, “how NeXT is really happy to be selling software to control government information servers, or data centers, or something mundane like that. I read this and thought, Oh, shoot, this has got to be killing Steve. So I called him up. We met at a Japanese restaurant in Palo Alto, and I said, ‘This isn’t you, Steve.’ And he went, ‘Ohhhhh, I know! I hate this so much. I mean, CIOs are nice guys, but God is this awful!’”

This anecdote is from when Neil Young tried to send a few remastered LPs to Steve to make amends. Neil had criticized the compression of tracks sold on the iTunes Music Store and talked about how it rendered the music unbearably “compromised“:

“Fuck Neil Young,“ he [Steve] snapped, “and fuck his records.“

Lastly, the book touches on a conversation between Steve and Andy Grove (a founder and former CEO of Intel) about whether or not he should accept the CEO position at Apple after Apple’s board decided to dismiss Gil Amelio. I cannot recall if the book includes this full anecdote, but I’ve always enjoyed it:

“I knew Apple was a mess [at the time], so I wondered: Do I want to give up this nice lifestyle that I have? What are all the Pixar shareholders going to think? I talked to people I respected. I finally called Andy Grove at about eight one Saturday morning — too early. I gave him the pros and the cons, and in the middle he stopped me and said, ‘Steve, I don’t give a shit about Apple.’ I was stunned. It was then that I realized that I do give a shit about Apple … That was when I decided to go back.”