Founders
Episode 208 #208 Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, Bill Hewlett
Founders

Episode 208: #208 Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, Bill Hewlett

Founders

Episode 208

#208 Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, Bill Hewlett

David Senra is the host of Founders, where he studies history's greatest entrepreneurs. This is what he learned from reading In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World by Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz.

What I learned from reading In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World by Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz.

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A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. —Steve Jobs

There are no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with people. —Steve Jobs

Usually people never think that much about what they're doing or why they do it. They just do it because that's the way it has been done and it works. That type of thinking doesn't work if you're growing fast and if you're up against some larger companies. You really have to outthink them and you have to be able to make those paradigm shifts in your points of view. —Steve Jobs

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Steve Jobs answer to What advice would you give someone interested in starting their own company?

A lot of people ask me, "I want to start a company. What should I do?" My first question is always, "What is your passion? What is it you want to do in your company?" Most of them say, "I don't know."

My advice is go get a job as a busboy until you figure it out. You've got to be passionate about something. You shouldn't start a company because you want to start a company. Almost every company I know of got started because nobody else believed in the idea and the last resort was to start the company. That's how Apple got started. That's how Pixar got started. It's how Intel got started. You need to have passion about your idea and you need to feel so strongly about it that you're willing to risk a lot.

Starting a company is so hard that if you're not passionate about it, you will give up. If you're simply doing it because you want to have a small company, forget it.

It's so much work and at times is so mentally draining. The hardest thing I've ever done is to start a company. It's the funnest thing, but it's the hardest thing, and if you're not passionate about your goal or your reason for doing it, you will give up. You will not see it through. So, you must have a very strong sense of what you want.

You have to need to run such a business and know you can do it better than anyone else.

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There are no safe harbors. The only safe harbor is competency. Competency at doing something. —T.J. Rodgers founder of Cypress Semiconductor

The first time someone says, “The product you've made has changed my life," is the biggest sense of satisfaction you get. It motivates me more than anything else, by far. —Charles Geschke, founder of Adobe

Being detached from the customer is the ultimate death. —Michael Dell

The faster you experiment and get rid of things that don't work and keep doing things that do work, the faster you get to the winning business model. —Michael Dell

The important things of tomorrow are probably going to be things that are overlooked today. —Andy Grove

The best assumption to have is that any commonly held belief is wrong. —Ken Olsen

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I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

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#208 Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, Bill Hewlett

Introduction

"The professor asked with a wide grin, 'So you want to write a book on high-tech CEOs? Well, gentlemen, it's a long shot, a huge long shot. And besides, no CEO knows why he's successful. It's all just luck.' Coming from a well-known strategic management professor, a comment such as this seems somewhat ridiculous. For if successful management were all luck, then why are we taking his class? Why, for that matter, were we in business school at all? Surely successful management was not entirely due to luck. There had to be some successful strategy and ideas at play, too.


Louis Pasteur once said that, 'Chance favors the prepared mind.' If chance is a major factor in a company's success, as our professor believed, then we really wanted to know what successful entrepreneurs do to prepare their minds. What are the crucial skills needed to run a successful company, to hire great people, to ship a great product? What skills should a potential manager try to develop? Why was one manager successful where another wasn't? Answers to these questions in the words of the very people who have started successful technology companies comprise this book.


We chose to focus on the computer industry for two reasons. First and foremost, computers are dynamically changing the way people exist. They are causing generational change. Compared to our parents who use computers for Word processing or technical applications at best, many of us use the power of computers for surfing the Internet, communicating with friends and colleagues, and balancing a checkbook. Second, going to Stanford's business school put us in the heart of Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs candidly told us one night, 'Well, if you're at heaven's gate, you might as well walk inside and take a peek.'"

That is an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today, which is In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations with the Visionaries of the Digital World. And it was written by Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz. So just a few things before we jump back into the rest of the book, I just want to tell you how the book is structured. So it's a series of interviews by two Stanford MBA students with 16 technology founders. And in each interview, they give the philosophy -- their philosophy on company building, managing, developing new technology and then advice to people, to future entrepreneurs.

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