Fifteen years ago this week, on October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs died at the age of 56.
Almost every founder I know has quoted him at some point. “Think different.” “Stay hungry, stay foolish.” His face is on posters in co-working spaces from San Francisco to Đà Nẵng.
But most of those posters show only half the story. The real Steve Jobs is more useful to a founder than the legend, because the real one made huge mistakes, got fired, paid for it, and came back better.
In an earlier post I wrote that every startup lives in two worlds, a light one and a dark one. Steve Jobs lived in both, more loudly than almost anyone.
A quick timeline
If you only know the iPhone, here is the short version:
- 1976: Jobs co-founds Apple with Steve Wozniak in California.
- 1984: Apple launches the Macintosh.
- 1985: After a power struggle with CEO John Sculley, the man Jobs himself had recruited, Apple’s board sides with Sculley. Jobs is stripped of his role and leaves the company he started.
- 1985–1996: He founds NeXT, a computer company, and buys a small graphics group from Lucasfilm that becomes Pixar. In 1995, Pixar releases Toy Story.
- 1997: Apple, now struggling badly, buys NeXT. Jobs returns, and soon becomes CEO again.
- 1998–2010: The iMac, the iPod, the iTunes Store, the iPhone, the iPad.
- 2011: He steps down as CEO in August and dies in October.
That middle part, the twelve years in exile, is the part founders should study most.
Lesson 1: Even the founder can be fired
This is the lesson that connects Jobs to everything I’ve learned about startups and investors.
In 1985, Steve Jobs was the co-founder, the face and the soul of Apple. And Apple’s board still removed him from power.
It’s the same lesson as Adam Neumann at WeWork and Travis Kalanick at Uber, decades earlier: once a company has a board and outside shareholders, the founder works for them. Being the founder gives you influence, not ownership of the decision.
If it could happen to Steve Jobs, it can happen to anyone. That’s why I wrote a whole guide on reading every word of your term sheet, especially the parts about board seats.
Lesson 2: Getting fired can be the start, not the end
Jobs later said that being fired from Apple turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to him. It forced him to start over, with less pressure and more freedom to try things.
Look at what he built in those years:
- NeXT never became a big business on its own. But its software became the foundation of the modern Mac, and later the iPhone.
- Pixar struggled for years, kept alive partly by Jobs’s own money. Then it changed animated film forever.
Neither looked like a success for a long time. Both ended up shaping the rest of his career.
The lesson for founders: a failure is information, not a verdict. What you learn while rebuilding from zero often becomes the foundation of your best work.
Lesson 3: Focus means saying no
When Jobs came back in 1997, Apple was close to running out of money and was selling a confusing range of computers, printers and gadgets. Even people inside the company couldn’t explain which one a customer should buy.
So he drew a simple grid with four boxes: consumer and professional, desktop and portable. One great product for each box. Almost everything else was cancelled.
It sounds obvious now. At the time it meant killing projects that teams had worked on for years.
Most startups don’t die because they do too little. They die because they try to do too much with too few people. Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. For a small team, saying no is a survival skill.
Lesson 4: Simple is a feature, and it’s hard
Jobs was obsessed with simplicity. The iPod’s promise was “1,000 songs in your pocket.” The iPhone got rid of the physical keyboard that every smartphone had at the time. Apple products came out of the box ready to use.
That simplicity wasn’t laziness. It was the result of enormous work behind the scenes, so the customer wouldn’t have to do it.
This is the same idea I wrote about in People Don’t Pay for Features. They Pay to Do Less. Jobs understood that customers don’t want more buttons. They want fewer steps between them and what they’re trying to do. The hard work should be yours, not your customer’s.
Lesson 5: Care about the parts nobody sees
Jobs famously cared about details customers would never notice: the layout of circuit boards inside the computer, the packaging, the feeling of opening the box.
You could call that perfectionism, and sometimes it was too much. But the underlying idea is right: quality is a habit, not a department. If a team cares about the hidden parts, it will certainly care about the parts customers see.
For a small business, this doesn’t mean polishing forever. It means that the invoice email, the error message and the support reply are part of your product too.
The dark side: what not to copy
Here is where many founders get Steve Jobs wrong.
Jobs could be brilliant, but he could also be harsh, even cruel. Many people who worked with him described public humiliation, screaming and impossible demands. Colleagues invented a phrase, the “reality distortion field,” for his ability to convince people (and himself) that something impossible was possible. Sometimes that pushed teams to do great work. Sometimes it meant ignoring facts.
His personal life had dark chapters too. For years he denied being the father of his first daughter, Lisa, something he later said he regretted.
Some founders look at Jobs and conclude: “To build something great, I have to be difficult.” That’s the wrong lesson. Apple succeeded despite many of these behaviors, not because of them, and many talented people left because of them.
You can learn from someone’s genius without copying their cruelty.
The parts worth copying are focus, simplicity, taste and the courage to start again. The temper is not part of the formula.
What I take from him
When I think about Steve Jobs as a founder, not as an icon, I come back to a short list:
- The founder can be fired. Understand who controls your company.
- Failure is not the end. Rebuilding from zero can lead to your best work.
- Focus is saying no. Especially when your team is small.
- Simplicity is hard work, and it’s the work customers pay for.
- Care about the details nobody sees.
- Learn from genius, but don’t copy cruelty.
None of these require you to be Steve Jobs. They just require you to pay attention, the way he did, and to be kinder to the people building with you than he often was.
Fifteen years later, that might be the best way to remember him.
Related: My First Business Teacher: William Christopher Skelley · Read Every Word You Sign · People Don’t Pay for Features. They Pay to Do Less.
