"You have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win." — Steve Jobs
(From the PBS documentary, “Steve Jobs: One last thing.”)
I watched the PBS documentary on Steve Jobs last night,“One last thing” and it was well done, mixing a fair bit of the good, the bad, and the ugly about the life of the man.
And there was a lot of praise for the “marketing genius” of Steve Jobs.
Then it struck me:
"If Steve Jobs were starting out today in Silicon Valley, he would have trouble getting funding because he’s a marketeer — not an engineer. VCs generally won’t fund startups without a tech lead."
For example, Mark Suster, a popular VC blogger, writes on “Both Sides of the Table” that his ideal type of startup has mostly engineers, five out of six, and “dominance of tech personnel relative to others.”
Technology is not a product
Yet technology is not a product, as I like to remind people. Here’s Matthew Ingram, writing on GigaOM, Steve Jobs and why technology doesn’t matter:
Gates says he liked Jobs, but that the Apple CEO “never really understood much about technology.” The Microsoft billionaire no doubt saw that as a put-down, but looked at another way, it was one of Jobs’ biggest strengths.
But while Gates saying that Jobs “never really understood much about technology” was probably intended as a criticism, the truth is that in most cases the technology is the least important thing about Apple’s products, and probably wouldn’t appear anywhere on the list of the main reasons why devices like the iPod or the iPhone or the iPad are so appealing.
Someone like Gates, who spent his youth programming and was involved in much of the code behind things like Windows, would like to believe that superior technology wins — but for most users of both software and hardware, design is what wins.
Much has been said about the rarity of Steve jobs and how much Silicon Valley needs more people like him. But the fact remains, that if Steve Jobs were starting out today and were looking for funding — he’d have a very tough time because he is not an engineer.
Since when are apps startups?
A few of months ago I asked my friend, Paul Mooney, how a tech conference in New York turned out, and he said it was OK but added,
“Since when are apps startups?”
This struck and stuck in my mind ever since because he was right. Since when does an app become a business? Surely a business is formed that creates and sells an app rather than the other way around?
Why should a couple or three engineers that have created an app now have to build a business? These are engineers not business builders. They know how to code apps. If they wanted to be business executives, surely they would have chosen that career?
Wouldn’t it be better to create a business formed by professionals, including an engineering component, but not make the engineers run the company? A Steve Jobs master marketeer as leader, with a couple of other experienced business professionals, and a couple or three engineers should make for a killer startup.
Not if you are in Silicon Valley. Engineers rule over all else — even reason it seems, that’s how strong the cult of the engineer is here.
Lord Sugar disdains engineers
Lord Alan Sugar is one of Europe’s leading entrepreneurs. He also stars in the UK version of The Apprentice. Earlier this year he had to choose between two apprentices, he chose to fire the one that was an engineer, saying,
“I have never come across an engineer that can turn his hand to business.”
It was a cold comment, coming from a man who knows engineers very well. He was on the receiving end of a lot of criticism, and rightly so, because there are many examples of engineers founding great companies, Silicon Valley is full of them.
But that doesn’t mean that only engineers should lead companies.
Silicon Valley’s Achilles’ Heel
The cult of the engineer is a potential weakness for Silicon Valley. Why try to teach engineers about marketing, business strategies, PR, business alliances, etc, to retrain them for jobs for which there are plenty of experienced hands around?
But that’s what happens. Incubators such as the excellent Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, are essentially crash-course workshops that try to teach engineers about the business of being a startup, they are trying to turn engineers into marketeers in 60 days or less.
Why not let engineers stay engineers? They’d rather be coding than promoting on social media channels, figuring out design, and evaluating marketing strategies. Let the professionals, the Steve Jobs of this world, who are good at marketing lead the startups.
Surely that’s a better formula for success?
Silicon Valley startups have massive failure rates, less than 1 in 20 make it beyond a few years. Maybe it’s because they are invariably engineer-led.
We need more people like Steve Jobs but the irony is that even if we had them, Silicon Valley wouldn’t know what to do with them, and most VCs would ignore them.
COMMENTARY: I can totally understand where Bill Gates is coming from when he says that Steve Jobs “never really understood much about technology.” You often hear this type of criticism being leveled by engineers on marketers. I call this the "Primadonna Syndrome," or world view by most engineers that they are the "creators" and therefore have some special place and position that is higher than everybody else. This is the kind of philosophical Dogma that permeates companies that are engineering-centric like Google, Intel, Microsoft, and even Facebook. If you are an engineer at those companies you get most of the perks, the bigger stock options, free time to work on pet projects, better pay, and so forth. Everybody else who is not an engineer is a treated like a second class citizen. However, technology cannot build a great company or even sell its products without a marketing person.
If you went before a group of VC's and pitched your idea, they would definitely ask you a lot of marketing and finance questions. Trust me, been there, done that. The engineers may answer the technical questions, but the marketing and finance types answer all the really hard questions.
- "What's the value proposition?"
- "How are you going to make money?"
- "What is your business model?"
- "What is your marketing strategy?"
- "What is your distribution strategy?"
- "How much capital do you need?"
- "What do you need it for?"
- "When do you begin to breakeven or turn a profit?"
- "What's the valuation?"
- "What's the exit strategy?"
The simple truth is this: Steve Jobs was the ultimate engineer. He engineered some of the greatest ideas of the modern electronic age. He never asked "how?", but "why not?" For Steve Jobs, it was always about developing minimalist, elegant and beautiful products that would enhance our daily lives.
He was all about taking the complexity out of a new device, and making it super-easy to use. He would always end a new product launch presentation by saying, "it just works..." For Steve, it was all about the design of the product, NOT the engineering, and it had to work a certain way. He would drive engineers absolutely crazy getting them to design products that were simple to operate, often reducing the number of steps to operate a device from six down to three or four. It often meant getting rid of knobs, buttons, levers and dials. The iPhone and iPad are great examples of his purity of design.
You cannot have a great company without a great leader, a big vision and overall guiding mission, something many companies seem to forget. As a marketer, I still marvel at Steve Jobs greatest contribution to technology innovation--The Digital Hub Strategy or "Great Pivot" that Steve Jobs made to reinvent Apple during his second term as CEO beginning in 1997.
Click Image To Enlarge
On January 9, 2001 , Steve Jobs gave a great presentation at MacWorld (see video below) where he introduced the public to the concept of the Digital Hub, when he said that the PC was not dead, but was evolving. Steve Jobs declared that the Mac would become “the digital hub for the digital lifestyle,” an emerging digital trend driven by the internet and an explosion in digital devices: digital camera's, videocam's, portable music players, mp3 music players, PDA's and DVD video players. Steve's idea was to use the Mac as a way to add value to those devices by making them more useful by allowing users to share digital files and be able to combine text, images, video and sound to heighten the overal digital experience.
The Digital Hub Strategy has passed the test of time catapulting Apple from a plain vanila computer company based on the Mac to the pre-eminent consumer electronics device company in the World.
Since 2001, Apple has successfuly launched a succession of mobile devices from the iPod which started it all, to iTunes, iPhone and the iPad. All of these devices, adding a new spoke to the Digital Hub.
In a rare 1990 made-for-television interview by PBS, Steve Jobs commented that the spreadsheet and desktop publishing is what drove the popularity and adoption of personal computers. He also predicted that the personal computer was evolving into a device that would allow us to connect with one another without geographical barriers, and allow us to collaborate on a person-to-person basis. He was not talking solely about networked data processing as it was known then, but the concept of social networking as we know it today.
Watch An Interview With Steve Jobs on PBS. See more from NOVA.
In 2011, Steve Jobs pivoted again. only this time instead of continuing to make the Mac (now the iMac) the Digital Hub, he made the iMac into just "another digital device," and moved the Digital Hub into the cloud with the unveiling of iCloud.
Steve Jobs didn't have an engineering degree, but he possessed technology acumen built into his DNA. He was able to spot trends, see where technology was going, take great risks and create technology products that were always in a league of their own.
Steve Jobs gets a lot of credit for being a technology innovation genius, but when you think about it, all of Apple's products since his Second Pivot, have been redesigns of existing products, from the iPod to the iPad. There were already portable music players and cellular phones. Steve Jobs just made them better. It just works.
Courtesy of an article dated November 3, 2011 appearing in eFactor
Comments