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Dive into this episode of the Startup Mantras Podcast with Anu Khanchandani as she explores the myth of passion-driven success through Steve Jobs' early career. Discover why passion isn't the only key to entrepreneurship and how unexpected opportunities can define your journey.
Mon Apr 29, 2024
Listen to the Startup Mantras Podcast on your favourite podcast host.
THE 7-STEP STARTUP SUCCESS FORMULA
I am not the only Business Coach around. There are many distinguished business coaches and gurus out there. At the end of the day, our aim is not just to give you knowledge and jargon.In this book, I have mentioned 7 defined steps to reach your startup milestone, condensed with my 25 years of experience.
___ by Anu Khanchandani
I would like to make an interesting start by sharing one aspect of the Startup Story of none other than Steve Jobs and the lesson that I learnt from it.
Now, here's the thing.
This makes us want to presume that Steve Jobs always had a passion for technology and computers specifically.
News of the day - No! Steve Jobs did not build Apple because he had a passion for technology and computers on Day 1.
Shocking and weird right?
Here’s a little about the early foundational days of Apple Computers.
Jobs was student Reed College, a prestigious liberal arts enclave in Oregon. He grew his hair long and took to walking barefoot. Unlike other technology visionaries of his era, Jobs wasn’t particularly interested in either business or electronics as a student. He instead studied Western history and dance, and dabbled in Eastern mysticism.
Jobs dropped out of college after his first year, but remained on campus for a while. He slept on floors and gorged on free meals at the local Hare Krishna temple. His non-conformity made him a campus celebrity—a “freak” as he was popularly referred to.
As Jeffrey S. Young notes in his exhaustively researched 1988 biography, Steve Jobs: The Journey Is the Reward, Jobs eventually grew tired of being a pauper and, during the early 1970s, returned home to California, where he moved back in with his parents and talked himself into a night-shift job at Atari. (The company had caught his attention with an ad in the San Jose Mercury News that read, “Have fun and make money.”)
During this period, Jobs split his time between Atari and the All-One Farm, a country commune located north of San Francisco. At one point, he left his job at Atari for several months to make a mendicants’ spiritual journey through India, and on returning home he began to train seriously at the nearby Los Altos Zen Center.
In 1974, after Jobs’s return from India, a local engineer and entrepreneur named Alex Kamradt started a computer time-sharing company dubbed Call-in Computer. Kamradt approached Steve Wozniak to design a terminal device he could sell to clients to use for accessing his central computer. Unlike Jobs, Wozniak was a true electronics whiz who was obsessed with technology and had studied it formally at college.
On the flip side, however, Wozniak couldn’t stomach business, so he allowed Jobs, a longtime friend, to handle the details of the arrangement. All was going well until the fall of 1975, when Jobs left for the season to spend time at the All-One commune.
Unfortunately, he failed to tell Kamradt he was leaving. When he returned, he had been replaced.I tell this story because these are hardly the actions of someone passionate about technology and entrepreneurship, yet this was less than a year before Jobs started Apple Computer.
In other words, in the months leading up to the start of his visionary company, Steve Jobs was something of a conflicted young man, seeking spiritual enlightenment and dabbling in electronics only when it promised to earn him quick cash.
It was with this mindset that later that same year, Jobs stumbled into his big break. He noticed that the local “wireheads” were excited by the introduction of model-kit computers that enthusiasts could assemble at home. Jobs pitched Wozniak the idea of designing one of these kit computer circuit boards so they could sell them to local hobbyists.
The initial plan was to make the boards for $25 apiece and sell them for $50. Jobs wanted to sell one hundred, total, which, after removing the costs of printing the boards, and a $1,500 fee for the initial board design, would leave them with a nice $1,000 profit. Neither Wozniak nor Jobs left their regular jobs: This was strictly a low-risk venture meant for their free time.
From this point, however, the story quickly veers into legend. Steve arrived barefoot at the Byte Shop, Paul Terrell’s pioneering Mountain View computer store, and offered Terrell the circuit boards for sale. Terrell didn’t want to sell plain boards, but said he would buy fully assembled computers. He would pay $500 for each, and wanted fifty as soon as they could be delivered.
Jobs jumped at the opportunity to make an even larger amount of money and began scrounging together start-up capital. It was in this unexpected windfall that Apple Computer was born. As Young emphasizes, “Their plans were circumspect and small-time. They weren’t dreaming of taking over the world.”
Lesson Learnt
If a young Steve Jobs had taken his own advice and decided to only pursue work he loved, we would probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers. But he didn’t follow this simple advice. Apple Computer was decidedly not born out of passion, but instead was the result of a lucky break—a “small-time” scheme that unexpectedly took off.
Having said that, I will be very quick to add that this does not necessarily in anyway mean that Steve Jobs was not passionate about computers and technology. What I mean to say is that his Startup was not inspired by Passion. His Startup was a means to give himself the satisfaction of having found an avenue that could help him make money. Clear and Simple. And once he saw that working he made it his passion to infuse all his energies into it and to scale it to the heights of what we see Apple as of today.
And another viewpoint here also is that, it is not necessary that all Startups stem from an urge to make huge money. There are Startups that stem from the passion of the Startup Founder.
Conclusion
The bottomline is Passion is not mandatory. If you see potential in an idea, but don’t know a thing about it yet, go ahead and fire up the adrenalin to learn about it and make it happen. Passion will come along the way, especially when it starts raking in the moolah and the accolades that go with it.
Hope I was successful in giving you a different perspective on Passion and sincerely hope that you will brood over this as I did and make it work for you.
So, Until Next Time - Ciao and have a great life!
Dr. Anu Khanchandani
With over two decades of experience in the software technology arena, having worked in multinational and SME companies in India, USA and Singapore in the capacity of programmer to CTO - I felt now was a good time to give back to the world what I have learnt in this journey. Even if it ends up benefitting a few of my readers by giving them insight or solving a technical issue, I think I will have achieved my mission!
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