Transcript
Introduction
Steve Jobs’ return to Apple demonstrated the irreplaceable value of a company's founder. In some ways, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were opposites. Jobs was an artist, preferred closed systems and spent his time thinking about great products above all else. Gates was a businessman, kept his products open and wanted to run the world. But both pushed the companies they started to achievements that nobody else would have been able to match. A college dropout who walked around barefoot and refused to shower, Jobs was also the insider of his own personality cult.
He could act charismatic or crazy. All this eccentricity backfired on him in 1985. Apple's Board effectively kicked Jobs out of his own company, when he clashed with the professional CEO brought in to provide adult supervision. Jobs’ return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business, the creation of new value, cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals. When he was hired as Interim CEO of Apple in 1997, the impeccably-credentialed executives who preceded him had steered the company nearly to bankruptcy.
That year, Michael Dell famously said of Apple, “What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to shareholders.” Instead, Jobs introduced the iPod, then the iPhone and then the iPad before he had to resign in 2011 because of poor health. By the following year, Apple was the single most valuable company in the world. Apple's value crucially depended on the singular vision of a particular person. This hints at the strange ways in which the companies that create new technology often resemble monarchies rather than organizations that are supposedly more modern.
A unique founder can make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty and plan ahead for decades. Paradoxically, impersonal bureaucracies, staffed by trained professionals can last longer than any lifetime, but they usually act with short time horizons. The lesson for business is that we need founders. If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme. We need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.
That is an excerpt found in the last chapter of the book I'm going to talk you about today. The chapter is The Founder's Paradox and the book is Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build The Future and is written by Peter Thiel. So this is the second or third time that I've read this book. All the way back in August of 2018, I did an episode on two books about Peter Thiel, it’s Episode #31, and it's based on Ryan Holiday's fantastic book called Conspiracy and then this book that I'm holding in my hand.