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Ask HN: What was Steve Job's core competency?
When we find co-founders, we look for what they can bring to the table. What was Steve Job's core competency?
- smt88 8y agoI'd call it luck. The answer would be pretty controversial. I strongly recommend you find a better rolemodel for cofounders, though. What's the point of starting a company if your partner makes you miserable by being an asshole all the time?
- FahadUddin92 8y agoSteve is not my role model. I am more of Woz fan.
- Havoc 8y agoNot sure I'd call it a competency, but I'd say a significant edge was a willingness build something & essentially create the demand. Bit like the Ford quote: >“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” On competency - probably some mix between UX & industrial design?
- quietbritishjim 8y agoI'm not disagreeing with your overall point, but ironically Apple mostly did build faster horses (at least in the iStuff generation). They didn't really build anything revolutionary, but the things they did build were significanly slicker and more useful than the (similar) products that existed at the time.
- davnicwil 8y agoApple saw that the horse was useful and then built the saddle. Not faster horses. Once people had ridden a horse with a saddle, they didn't want to go back, and were willing to pay a lot more for having that saddle there regardless of if the horse underneath was the same, or even faster.
- Reedx 8y agoBefore the iPhone, if you asked people what they wanted from a phone it was things like "I want more space to store ringtones". Nokia, Blackberry and such seemed to be operating with a focus group approach. People weren't saying "remove the buttons". And I remember a lot of complaining about that when the iPhone first arrived.
- jppope 8y agoSales. Steve Jobs was a sales guy. Apple's first order was from The Byte Shop for 50 units, he convinced The Byte Shop to buy, before even having the funds to build 50 units. So he went and convinced Cramer Electronics to allow him to purchase on credit everything that they would need to fulfill the order. Per your question. You NEED two core competencies to build a company: sales and the ability to fulfill what it is you're selling (product/services). Being strong in selling and building products (or providing services) tend to be separate skill sets, so often two-person teams form due to this concept (like the 2 Steve's). It is important to note that having a sales skill set does not negate the need for technical competency anymore than engineers can ignore building products that align with the business- it's about efficiency. I will end by saying... you don't need co-founders. Solo Founders are responsible for more than half of the exits. (https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/26/co-founders-optional/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/26/co-founders-optional/) There are advantages to having a cofounder(s) and the same can be said of going it alone.
- blihp 8y agoTo expand on your point: he also fulfilled the second core competency (building the thing to sell) via sales. His ability to sell those around him on a vision / mission / whatever was amazing. This was demonstrated in the early years with Woz and blue boxes, the contract with Atari for Breakout, his first stint at Apple, the NeXT/Pixar years, and his return to Apple. He was able to get some otherwise very smart people around him to do a lot of amazing work (often to the detriment of their own economic/mental/physical health) Not saying I'm a fan of him for this, just that it happened and it was a significant factor in his success.
- zubairq 8y agoEveryone seems to think of Steve as a martketing only guy, but he was actually an amazing techie too
- utopcell 8y agoI very much doubt that
- zubairq 8y agoAll I can say is that you should read up on him and what he did compared to his technical peers at the time. He was far better than most developers who call themselves developers today
- rasz 8y agoI agree. The way he developed that arcade board for Atari - not many people would scam their best friend for a couple hundred bucks.
- maxxxxx 8y agoHe certainly understood tech enough to have good judgement. What I have seen in companies I worked that was that a lot of executives can be bullshitted a lot because they don't bother understanding the tech. Jobs was at least technical enough to not fall into this trap.
- zubairq 8y ago
- southerndrift 8y agoTiming. Compare General Magic [1] to the iPhone. Half the company came from Apple, they were almost there but they didn't have the patience to wait until technology was ready for prime time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic
- rasz 8y agoNo, their vision for a product was just bad, it was clippy on a phone.
- uvcutman 8y agoVision. He has just done what should be done in the future.
- niksmac 8y agoI'd say Vision. Steve is the great visionary of the future. He was able to see the future in his mind to build amazing products that the future wants, not something world needed today to run. I'm always excited by the stories about the detail and time he spend on designing impeccable user experience.
- johnchristopher 8y agoThe reality distortion field, of course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field > Reality distortion field is a term first used by Bud Tribble at Apple Computer in 1981, to describe company co-founder Steve Jobs's charisma and its effects on the developers working on the Macintosh project.[1] Tribble said that the term came from Star Trek,[1] where in the Menagerie episode, it was used to describe how the aliens created their own new world through mental force. In chapter three of Steve Jobs, biographer Walter Isaacson states that around 1972, while Jobs was attending Reed College, Robert Friedland "taught Steve the reality distortion field."
- DoreenMichele 8y agoWhat could be called a visionary.
- sasidharm 8y agoProduct Management and Marketing
- sebringj 8y agoCreate a tech movement around a personality and brand and continually amaze by delivering breakthrough products by any means necessary.
- newscracker 8y agoI don’t think there was just one, because what anyone contributes is a combination of a few abilities and efforts. Steve Jobs has himself repeated several times during his career that it’s the intersection (or marriage) of technology and liberal arts and humanities that makes Apple’s products great. The first core competency was this vision — combining liberal arts and humanities with technology — explains the what, why and how of Apple’s most liked products. The second core competency he had was a deep attention to detail, though it can be argued that there were several bad products/issues and releases despite that. The third core competency was communication and presentation. Here too, one can read about the effort and attention to detail that goes into preparing for keynotes and product announcement events. To sum it all up, these enabled him to make technology seem like magic but yet relatable and useful in enriching people’s lives — whoever they were and whatever their profession. One example of how broad this has been treated is the emphasis on accessibility in Apple’s devices and software (compared to competitors). It wasn’t about the size of the market or market share alone.
- mcphage 8y ago- He knew what should be, and how it should work and look - He knew how to find people who could create what he wanted - He knew how to get them to create it according to his vision
- mindgam3 8y agoJobs was a true tech visionary, the kind they don’t make anymore. Not to undercut the arguments about sales, but his ability to sell came not from charisma alone but from a crystal clear and compelling vision of how technology could work for humans. Think of his line from circa 1980, “the computer is the bicycle of the mind.” This is a profound and easy to grasp vision for computing. Everything came from that vision. The products, the sales, the most valuable company in the world. It’s all about how technology can empower people.
- oktavist 8y agoHe was an extraordinary editor. With a creative and talented technical team bubbling up myriad product/software concepts and features, he was able to dictate a highly focused direction based on great instinct, and then sell the hell out of it that focused vision both inside and outside. It's remarkable how few products Apple makes to this day.
- mel_llaguno 8y agoHis ability to find the people who shared his vision (regardless of their educational backgrounds) and motivate them to do the best work of their lives. This was his superpower and the basis of his reality distortion field. Got this from reading Isaacson's biography (which BTW showed what an asshole he could be).