sometimes people come to me and say i want to start a company and i say why he said oh i want
to make lots of money i said forget it that's not a good enough reason you will not most likely you
will not succeed most people that have started companies because they want to make lots of money
i haven't seen very many of those succeed the ones that succeed are people that come sometimes they
don't even want to start a company they just have an idea that they want to get out express out into
the world and oftentimes they have to start a company because nobody else will listen to them
the most important thing though i think is that if you're going to start something new
you have to feel passionate about it because it's really hard it's so hard
to start a company you have to work so hard that if you're not passionate about it you'll give up
and most of the difference between people that succeed and people that don't is the people that
don't give up they give up sooner than the people that succeed and you have to be passionate about
it because it's so difficult people say you you have to have a lot of passion for what you're
doing and it's totally true and the reason is uh is because it's so hard that if you don't
any rational person would give up it's really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of
time so if you don't love it if you're not having fun doing it you don't really love it you're going
to give up and that's what happens to most people actually if you really look at at the ones that
ended up you know being successful unquote in the eyes of society and the ones that didn't
often times it it's the ones that are successful loved what they did so they could persevere
when you know when it got really tough and and the ones that
didn't love it quit because they're sane right who would want to put up with this stuff if
you don't love it so it's a lot of hard work and and it's a lot of worrying constantly and
if you don't love it you're gonna fail so you gotta love it you gotta have passion
i'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs
from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance it is so hard you pour so much your life into this
thing there are such rough moments in time that most people give up i don't blame them and it's
really tough and it consumes your life i mean if you're if you've got a family and you're in the
early days of a company it's i can't imagine how one could do it i'm sure it's it's been done but
it's rough because it's a pretty much you know 18-hour day job seven days a week for a while so
unless you have a lot of passion about this you're going to not survive you're going to
give it up so you got to have an idea and or a problem or a wrong that you want to write
that you're passionate about otherwise you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through
we went through that stage in apple where we went out and we thought oh we're going to be a
big company let's hire professional management we went out and hired a bunch of professional
management it didn't work at all most of them were bozos they they knew how to manage but they didn't
know how to do anything and so what if you're a great person why do you want to work for somebody
you can't learn anything from and you know what's interesting you know who the best managers are
they're the great individual contributors who never ever want to be a manager but decide they
have to be a manager because all every no one else is going to be able to do as good a job as them
the greatest people are self-managing they don't need to be managed you if they know what
if once they know what to do they'll go figure out how to do it they don't need to be managed at all
what they need is a common vision and that's what leadership is what leadership is is having
a vision being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it and getting
a consensus on a common vision we wanted people that were insanely great at what they did but
we're not necessarily those seasoned professionals but who had on at the tips of their fingers and in
their passion the latest understanding of where technology was and what we could do with that
technology and who wanted to bring that to lots of people so the neatest thing that happens is
when you get a core group of you know 10 great people that it becomes self-policing as to who
they led into that group so i consider the most important job of someone like myself is recruiting
my model of business is the beatles you know they were four very talented guys
who who kept each other's kind of negative tendencies in check uh they balanced each
other and and and the sum was greater than the the total was greater than the sum of the parts
and that's how i see business you know great great things in business are never done by one person
they're done by they're done by a team of people and and we've got that here at pixar
um and we've got that at apple as well and so that's that's what lets me do this well you know
with the beatles when they were together uh they did truly brilliant innovative work and when they
split up they did good work but it was it it was never the same and i i see business that way too
it's really always a team you have to have an extraordinary team because these are
these are um you're trying to climb a mount with a whole party of people a lot of stuff to bring up
the mountain so one person can't do it everybody working the company wants to do something great
they want to be excited about what they're working on and and they want to be recognized for it when
if they do a really great job so we just try to allow people to do the best work of their lives
you know we try to hire really smart people but we have a very simple organization
and we try to focus and do very few things well
and focusing's hard because focusing doesn't mean saying yes it means saying no so we say we decide
not to do a lot of things so we can focus on a few handfuls of things and do them well
that's an incredible feeling to know that you had something to do with it a and b to know it can be
done to know that you can plant something in the world and it'll grow and and change the world
ever so slightly there needs to be someone who is sort of the keeper and reiterator of the vision
because there's just a ton of work to do and a lot of times you know when you
have to walk a thousand miles and you take the first step it looks like a long ways
and it really helps if there's someone there saying well we're one step closer
you know the goal definitely exists it's not just a mirage out there so in a thousand
and one little and sometimes larger ways the vision needs to be reiterated i do that a lot
one of the things i've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work
backwards to the technology you can't start with the technology and try to figure out
where you're going to try to sell it and as we have tried to come up with a strategy
and a vision for apple it started with what incredible benefits can we give to the
customer where can we take the customer not not starting with let's sit down with the engineers
and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how we're going to market that and i
think that's the right path to take i remember with the laser writer we built the world's first
small laser printers you know and there was awesome technology in that box we had the
first canon laser printing cheap laser printing engine in the world in the united states here
at apple we had a very wonderful printer controller that we designed
we had adobe's postscript software in there we had apple talk in there just awesome technology
in the box and i remember seeing the first uh printout come out of it and just picking it up
and looking at it thing you know we can sell this because you don't have to know anything
about what's in that box all we have to do is hold this up go do you want this and if you can
remember back to 1984 before laser printers it was pretty startling to see that people went whoa
yes
you