This blogpost is not an exhaustive summary of the book. Just contains the notes I took.

  • Despite his evasiveness and his determination to hew to a single message, Jobs was a vivid presence. The intensity of his self-confidence made me hang on his every word.

  • In his later years, as Steve would show me a new iPod or a new laptop, he would remember how his father told him that you had to devote as much care to the underside of a cabinet as to the finish, or to the brake pads of a Chevy Impala as to the paint job.

  • Pixar’s Ed Catmull likes to say that since you can’t control the luck itself, which is bound to come your way for better and for worse, what matters is your state of preparedness to deal with it.

  • He had to assign numbers to the workplace badges everyone wore around the new Stevens Creek Boulevard office. When he decided that Woz would be “Employee no.1,” Steve went to him and whined; it didn’t take long till Scotty relented and gave Steve a new, customized tag: “Employee no.0.”

  • The headline of the first promotional brochure McKenna created for the machine asserted, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

  • Susan Barnes has observed that Steve entered every negotiation knowing exactly what he had to get, and what his position was versus the other side. In negotiating with Lucas, he had been able to exploit Lucas’s need for cash. This time Steve went in knowing that Katzenberg had the power, and that Pixar needed a deal to survive. He kicked off the negotiations with a certain brashness, saying that he wanted Pixar to be a partner on all aspects of the revenue from the film, something no neophyte studio filmmaker would ever get. Katzenberg promptly nixed that.

  • “We had to have been there at least an hour, just talking about stuff. I was telling him I was nervous, that I was kind of scared of the IPO. I wished that we could wait for the second movie. And he did that thing, where he kind of looks off, and he said, ‘You know, when we make a computer at Apple, what’s its life span? About three years? At five years, it’s a doorstop. But if you do your job right, what you create can last forever.’”