Be in the right place at the right time

When it came to pursuing his career, Jobs had the benefit of being in the right place at the right time, having grown up in California’s Santa Clara Valley. By the 1970s the area had come to be known as Silicon Valley on account of the large number of tech companies that had set up business there in the preceding decades. (The name derives from the silicon transistor vital to the modern microprocessor.) Many of these businesses had strong links to Stanford, the Ivy League university situated in the vicinity. As Timothy J. Sturgeon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote in 2000: ‘Perhaps the strongest thread that runs through the Valley’s past and present is the drive to “play” with novel technology, which, when bolstered by an advanced engineering degree and channelled by astute management, has done much to create the industrial powerhouse we see in the Valley today.’

If Steve Jobs had not happened to be there already, it seems likely that he would have found his way to Silicon Valley of his own accord. That said, while being in the Valley at that particular moment in history was certainly serendipitous for Jobs, it was still beholden upon him to take advantage of the situation. Simply being in the Valley was no more a guarantee of success in the technology arena than being in Hollywood is a guarantee of an Oscar.

Find friends on the same wavelength

Crucially, from a young age Jobs attracted likeminded individuals who would help him develop his interests, skills and ideas. At high school he became great friends with Bill Fernandez, the two of them wiling away hours talking over the big questions of life and undertaking science projects together. Fernandez would go on to join Apple in its very early days but will be most notable to future historians as the person who introduced Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Wozniak, a bona fide technology geek, was in the early 1970s dreaming up plans for his own computer: reading manuals, making drawings, building circuit boards. Like Jobs, he learned by doing and didn’t mind making some mistakes along the way. The two, though very different in certain fundamental respects, were – it now goes without saying – a great fit, each inspiring the other to new heights. But more of that later.

At university Jobs made still more friends who would come to play a role in the Apple story, most notably Daniel Kottke. The two not only buddied up during Jobs’ brief stint at Reed but also shared the experience of that character-defining trip around India. Kottke, like Fernandez, would become one of the earliest employees of Apple a few years later.

Ask questions

Another important early influence on Jobs was an employee of Hewlett-Packard, a long-established technology giant in the Valley. One of the company’s engineers, Larry Lang, lived a few doors up the road from young Steve and he took the lad under his wing, acting as an early mentor and nurturing his love of all things technical.

Among other things, Lang introduced Jobs to the wonders of Heathkits, self-assembly technology kits that had been produced by the Heath Company of Michigan since 1947. For enthusiasts intent on building their own TV receiver or clock radio or even hobbyist computer, the kits demystified the world of resistors, capacitors, vacuum tubes and transformers. For an enquiring young mind they represented a veritable cornucopia of possibilities. When Jobs was a little older, Lang also introduced him into the Hewlett-Packard Explorers’ Club, which met weekly to hear talks by engineers. It was at one of these events that the twelve-year-old Jobs first set eyes on a prototype home computer.

And if the right people didn’t naturally gravitate towards him, Jobs was confident enough to go out and find them for himself. While he was certainly not everyone’s cup of tea – at school, perhaps to mask a lack of confidence, the quiet and introspective boy with a taste for poetry and microchips could sometimes appear arrogant and overbearing – he developed a bravado that often gave him the edge, providing him with an air of self-assuredness just when it was most needed.

This is neatly illustrated by an association he forged in his youth. After attending a Hewlett-Packard Explorers’ Club gathering, Jobs set himself the task of building a frequency counter but found he was short of several vital HP parts. Deciding to strike right to the very heart of his problem, he tracked down the personal details of Bill Hewlett, founder of Hewlett-Packard, and called the Silicon Valley icon on his home number. While other unsolicited callers might have expected to receive short shrift for their cheek, Jobs shared a twenty-minute conversation with Hewlett. By the end of it he had not only secured a guarantee that he would receive all the requested parts for his frequency counter but had also won the offer of a summer job – an opportunity for which others would have killed.

Network

Jobs’ ability to spot and build bonds with people who could be useful to him and his willingness to network were skills that came naturally to him, even from a young age. His instinct that the path to greatness could not be navigated alone was one that would stay with him throughout his career. For Jobs, amazing work was (with the very rarest of exceptions) done by teams of talented people sharing a vision and working in a conducive environment.

‘Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.’

STEVE JOBS