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He utterly rejected the idea of speed (move fast) and destruction (break things). He believed in working for as long as you needed to get the design and technology right, which was one of Apple’s persistent characteristics.
there in lies the difference btw software and hardware
Still, take Jobs saying this: “One of my beliefs very strongly is that any democracy depends on a free healthy press. We all know what’s happened to economic businesses. News gathering and editorials are important. I don’t want to descend into a nation of bloggers.” Compare that with Elon Musk—who
I am also certain Jobs would have despised Musk in his current incarnation.
I recall being struck that Jobs was so full of life, even as it was visibly seeping away from him, that I had to ask: “What do you imagine the next ten years of your life is going to be about?”
In other words, I won’t go changing to try and please you, which is a piece of advice I would think about for myself and my career many times after hearing it from him. Changing, for sure, but with certain values and mainstays that would never alter.
One of the many things I thought his critics got wrong about Jobs was that he was passionless and cold. My take: As an entrepreneur, Jobs was too passionate, which led him to push hard—and sometimes too hard—on what he believed in. Over time, he and what he represented would prove to be a rarity.
Sadly, for Dickson, when it came time to fill out the 1891 patent application for the Kinetograph, his boss Thomas Edison decided to put his own name down as the inventor, a classic tech-bro move.
I introduced Hurley to Lucas as the YouTube guy. As much as Hurley’s face lit up, Lucas’s reaction could not have been less thrilled. “You’re ruining storytelling with your service,” he told Chad flatly. “What you do is like throwing puppies on a freeway.”
Lucas was one of the more insightful and prescient players in entertainment—disliking much of what was happening but understanding what was coming and using the new tools to his advantage.
It was a nice cushion, but due to sloppy management and its inability to innovate from a noisy, one-note offering to a service that was easier to use and more of a utility than a party, Myspace soon foundered. Myspace’s kiss of death was that it was trendy rather than useful, unlike Facebook. And it lost its status as a daily addiction to Twitter.
moat is all about repeated innovation in tech
He asked about grabbing Yahoo at one point along with Microsoft (fat chance, I told him) or investing in Vice Media (please don’t, I advised; he did it anyway).
As he once said to me in a 2005 interview, “If someone is going to eat our lunch, it might as well be us.” He’d certainly faced worthy adversaries before as he clawed his way up the slippery ladder of power at Disney.
“Hollywood is now irrelevant,” Diller told me in a 2019 interview. “Netflix has won this game. I mean, short of some existential event, it is Netflix’s. No one can get, I believe, to their level of subscribers, which gives them real dominance.” And although studios did catch up to some extent, Diller said out loud what Hollywood had refused to acknowledge for a decade.
The worst reaction came when they talked about the inevitability that movies would probably stream on the Web at the same time as they appeared in theaters, with Kilar noting that the TV screen would essentially become nothing more than a blank monitor fed largely by the Internet.
Well-known director Christopher Nolan, who made Inception and The Dark Knight, released a statement: “Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.”
Backstage, I listened to Kilar’s apology and was crestfallen. That he was pilloried in 2009 and again in 2020 for the same thing said more about the intransigence of Hollywood than it did of him. Kilar, who lost his job when Discovery took over the company soon after, might have made his move prematurely, but the direction he was running in was inevitable.
As sweat poured down Mark Zuckerberg’s pasty and rounded face, I wondered if he was going to keel over right there at my feet. I had been told by several Facebook executives that this sometimes happened when their CEO became nervous. But I didn’t know whether they were kidding or not. “He has panic attacks when he’s doing public speaking,” one had warned me years before. “He could faint.”
It was an even better move on Zuckerberg’s part, as he had struggled to find a copacetic business partner for his hot startup. The stench of persistent operational chaos was growing around the company, even as it had been valued at an unheard of $15 billion after a $240 million investment from Microsoft in 2007. Bill Gates had become a mentor to the young entrepreneur, but it was Sandberg who would prove to be Zuckerberg’s most important ally over the next decade.
But the worrying signs were there—as they had been from its earliest days as a service when internal texts from Zuckerberg revealed his true feelings about users who handed over data so easily. “They ‘trust me,’ dumb fucks,” he wrote. Seems nice.
(These handsome hustlers, who were twin rowing champions, got paid out by Facebook later and then launched a cryptocurrency exchange, so let us not shed a tear for them.)
While he later did laugh it off, including appearing on Saturday Night Live with Eisenberg, Zuckerberg was not of that mindset at this time of the conference.
Mark had just turned twenty-six and had almost no sense that life was long and that he should be preparing for what would become a marathon of scrutiny.
I thought he was probably an asshole, an opinion based on what many others had told me. Some people I respected who had met Zuckerberg walked away with what could most kindly be described as a meh impression of him. Some thought he was a lightweight. Some thought he was extremely arrogant. Most thought he was just another tech bro who was—say it with me now—frequently wrong, but never in doubt. For sure, no one thought he was a game-changer.
Unlike the perpetually intriguing Jobs, Zuckerberg had almost no charm or game and it was painful how socially awkward he was then.
Early Zuckerberg had yet to become the muscled MMA fighting, patriotic foil-boarding, bison-killing, performative-tractor-riding-calf-feeding man that he would develop into over the next decade.
But he seemed intent on working to improve himself continually, a trait I admired.
Still, Zuckerberg’s first verbal chess move impressed me. He had a quality I actually liked: He did not hide his bottomless ambition as other smoother young entrepreneurs did.
In contrast to the shark babies who tried to feign cuddly, Zuckerberg openly craved power and historical significance from the get-go.
While most of the venture capitalists I knew tended to judge their startups by the very lowest of ethical bars, I assumed this investor was relieved that Zuckerberg’s childhood hero was not someone more problematic. (Not Stalin, not Hitler, not Mussolini? Phew! Let’s proceed with Series A!)
Osnos summed up Zuckerberg’s attitude perfectly, noting, “Between speech and truth, he chose speech. Between speed and perfection, he chose speed. Between scale and safety, he chose scale.”
The pertinent fact he left out is that when trouble happened, as it often does, citizens can fire a police chief and elect a different mayor. In contrast, Zuckerberg had permanent job security as ruler-for-life of Facebook. Thanks to Facebook’s intentional corporate structure, he controls the voting shares and the board and can never be expunged in any kind of democratic way for bad management. Let me break it down more simply: Mark. Cannot. Be. Fired. Ever.
Expert after expert I talked to over the years has made the same point—in the new paradigm, engagement equals enragement.
unfair imo. tiananmen is a tourist attraction in china so why wouldn’t you post a pic there?
Neither Mark nor his staff present seemed to understand that what he’d said would attract attention. Perhaps he felt safe at his office, rather than on my stage; perhaps he thought he was being sincere by using his own religion to make a point; perhaps he had exactly no sense of history and far too much power. Whatever. All I know is that as soon as we could, we ran to the car, hightailed it up to San Francisco on the 101 and posted the interview.
Zuckerberg had equaled Augustus in reshaping the world in own his image, with no need of spear-throwing legions. While Zuckerberg was not evil, not malevolent, not cruel, what he was, and continued to be, was extraordinarily naïve about the forces he had unleashed.
No, Zuckerberg wasn’t an asshole. He was worse. He was one of the most carelessly dangerous men in the history of technology who didn’t even know it. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the worst of them.
I never turned anyone into a pig. Some people are pigs; I make them Look like pigs.
I didn’t say it out loud, but in my head I screamed a line that I wanted to say to an increasing number of players in the Internet space: “You’re so poor, all you have is your money!”
Over the years, with increasing alarm, I watched idealistic young founders aiming to change the world with miraculous digital innovations become sloppy and careless Internet moguls due to ungodly financial windfalls. Even when presented with data that they were doing harm, they shrugged off the consequences of their inventions on the larger world.
I had spent a lot of time with Kalanick and was alternately repulsed and fascinated with his development as a leader of the wolf pack.
“So, the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away.” Oh God, I thought, as the words fell out of his mouth with hardly a pause. Kalanick was actively bragging about using people—or rather “dudes”—as fodder until it was easier and cheaper to replace them with a machine. And it was a day he actually looked forward to.
I mean… he’s just being honest. It’s what everyone in his position would actually think
“Do not have sex with another employee UNLESS a) you have asked that person for that privilege and they have responded with an emphatic ‘YES! I will have sex with you’ AND b) the two (or more) of you do not work in the same chain of command. Yes, that means that Travis will be celibate on this trip. #CEOLife #FML.”
The innovators and executives ignored issues of safety not because they were necessarily awful, but because they had never felt unsafe a day in their lives.
This became startlingly clear in the gender discrimination and retaliation lawsuit waged by Ellen Pao against the famed venture firm Kleiner Perkins.
his attitude crystallized my belief that the worst men operated with impunity, while the best were utterly clueless.
I could not keep calling people I covered “idiots,” so I just shrugged and said, “I guess you need a better imagination.”
“The people who love you are the only ones that count,” he said to me. Then, tearing up, he added, “Don’t waste your time on anyone else.” And then, wonder of wonders, he gave me a hug.
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
Steve’s final words were: OH WOW. OH WOW.” I had to marvel at that and did many times that week. The consummate performer and tech’s greatest showman had even died with the kind of style that befitted him. It was, as far as goodbyes went, just-one-more-perfect-thing. Like Apple products, Jobs’ last utterances were both minimal and wondrous.
I had done well by walking away many times before when I did not feel great about my career situation.
