What Steve Jobs taught me
- Oct 13, 2011
Mark Thompson guest blogs on the valuable entrepreneurial tips he received from the late, great Steve Jobs...
My first memory of Steve Jobs is back at Homestead high school in Cupertino, in the heart of California's Silicon Valley about 50 miles from San Francisco. He was a senior and I was a freshman. I was at Prospect High a few miles away but showed up at Homestead every week because my mom was the principal's secretary. I'd work in the office after school.
Some kids were throwing a football out in front of the office and one jerk fired a bullet at the back of Steve's head. He never looked back but he must have seen my shocked expression as I approached him. Like Yoda, he smirked, ducked, and the football skimmed his back collar and pounded my chest. It knocked the wind out of me - even though I saw it coming! That's how Steve lived his life - Zen like - seeing not only what others couldn't see in the future but also what would normally hit the rest of us in the back of the head.
When I was at Schwab, I also served on a few boards and invested in some startups, including being recruited as Chairman in April 2000 for Rioport, which had popularised a cool new technology known as the mp3 player prior to iTunes. I'll never forget seeing Steve at lunch and he played with my little RIO device. He gave me a slap on the shoulder and said it was a geeky piece of crap. Of course he was right. I was Chief Customer Experience Officer at Charles Schwab at the time and I could see that the RIO was way too hard to use, but Steve had saved me from investing millions in the company.
In just over a year Steve launched the iPod and no one remembers Rioport put the mp3 on the map, nor should they. What we all remember is what Steve did to make it USEFUL to everyone. He reinvented not ONE but FOUR industries - music, smart phones, PCs and digital movies.
I'd seen Steve prior to his serious surgeries in the past. As sick as he'd been many times before, there was always a twinkle in his eye. He was filled with courage and promise for the future. Steve loved Richard Branson's phrase: Screw IT, just do it. A great man.
Live for today my friends,
Mark Thompson, who tweets @SuccessMatters
Photo: acaben on Flickr
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