Michael Moritz: Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple

In April 2010, Owen Thomas reported on the author, Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital and author of the book, Return to the Little Kingdom, for Venture Beat. Tech pundits like to look forward, not back. But at a speaking appearance on Tuesday, Mike Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, admitted to two regrets: passing on Netflix and never repairing his relationship with Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Moritz appeared at the Rosewood Hotel on Sand Hill Road, the epicenter of the venture-capital business, at an event sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank to discuss his new book, Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs, the Creation of Apple, and How It Changed the World. The book is actually a reissued and updated version of his original 1984 biography of Jobs, The Little Kingdom. And the reporting for that book, done when Moritz was a reporter for Time magazine, is part of what led him to his unlikely career as a venture capitalist.

“So much of what has happened has been associated with Apple and the tale of this extraordinary company that I find that Apple’s breadcrumbs are strewn across the path of my life. As a correspondent for Time magazine, I had this wonderful calling card.”

- Michael Moritz, author of the book: Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple

“At that point, Steve Jobs had just begun work on a little computer that at that point didn’t have a name, was just a skunkworks project. He was interested in having its evolution documented, and I was interested in telling the story of Apple Computer.”

- Michael Moritz, author of the book: Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple

In December 1982, Andy Hertzfeld recounted incidents that were corroborated by Michael Moritz’s book. Those anecedotes were recently archived on Folklore.org, a collection of first-hand accounts at Apple. The February 15th, 1982 edition of Time magazine featured none other than Steve Jobs on its cover, appearing in an article entitled "Striking It Rich: America's Risk Takers". Instead of a photograph, Steve was depicted in a drawing with a red apple balanced on his head that was pierced by a zig-zag bolt of light emanating from an Apple II. The article inside focused on a number of high tech start-ups, but there was a long sidebar that told the story of Apple's meteoric rise, written by a young business reporter named Mike Moritz. It was a bit critical in places ("As an executive, Jobs has sometimes been petulant and harsh on subordinates"), but in general it was positive about the company and its prospects. Macintosh development was shrouded in secrecy, even within Apple, so we were surprised one day a few months later when Steve appeared in the software area of Bandley 4 accompanied by the Time reporter, Mike Moritz. Steve requested that I give him a demo of the Macintosh, and answer all of his questions. Apparently, Mike wanted to write a book about Apple, and managed to convince Steve to give him total access to the company, including the Macintosh team.

“The previous year, a development team at Data General was immortalized by Tracy Kidder's best selling book, "The Soul of a New Machine", about the ups and downs of developing a new mini-computer. Now it seemed like Mike Moritz was going to do something similar for the Mac team. Over the next few months, Mike spent lots of time hanging around the Mac team, attending various meetings and conducting interviews over lunch or dinner, to learn our individual stories. Mike had grown up in South Wales and attended Oxford before moving to the US for grad school, obtaining an MBA from Wharton. He was in his mid-twenties, about the same age as most of us, and was very smart, with a sharp, cynical sense of humor, so he fit right in, and seemed to understand what we were trying to accomplish.”

- Andy Hertzfeld, former Apple Employee; December 1982

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Recent Quotes, by Steve Jobs:

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Jan 17, 2011 BusinessWeek (1479 occurrences)

"The curiosity over my personal health continues to be a distraction not only for me and my family, but everyone else at Apple as well," Jobs wrote in 2009.

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In a press release announcing the lawsuit, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said, "We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it," said Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

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"My doctors think they have found the cause -- a hormone imbalance that has been robbing me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy," he said in early 2009. "The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and...

Jan 17, 2011 AOL News (1252 occurrences)

"With more than 1,000 apps, the Mac App Store is off to a great start," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement on the firm's website... "We think users are going to love this innovative new way to discover and buy their favorite apps."

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David Kirkpatrick: The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

In July 2010, James Harkin wrote a review of the David Kirkpatrick book for The Guardian. Last month Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer, stood in front of an industry conference in Las Vegas and announced that email was on the way out. Figures showed that only 11% of teenagers use email on a daily basis, she said; most preferred to send messages via social networks such as Facebook. Even though she herself couldn't imagine life without it, she predicted that email "is probably going away". Sandberg's figures weren't quite right; they referred to data on how many American teenagers were using email to communicate with their friends on a daily basis, not how they were using it in general. Given Facebook's enormous success in colonising our online activity, however, there's every reason to take her hubristic ambition seriously. A good way to understand that ambition is to read David Kirkpatrick's new book.

“Zuckerberg sees the world as moving very rapidly toward transparency and very rapid sharing of data between individuals in all sorts of ways, on and off Facebook. And from the day he first created his system, he had this ethos of sharing that he strongly believed in.”

- David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

“But to everyone else the episode was a clear sign: Zuckerberg had a knack for making software people couldn’t stop using. That came as little surprise to his roommates. They knew he had even been talking to Microsoft and other companies about selling a program he’d written with a friend as his senior project at Exeter, called Synapse. The software watched what kind of music someone liked so it could suggest other songs. His friends called the program “The Brain” and were especially excited when they heard Zuckerberg might get as much as a million dollars for it.”

- David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

In July 2010, Don Tapscott wrote “Changing the world, one friend at a time” for The Globe and Mail. It was well known among industry insiders a couple of years ago that David Kirkpatrick's book about Facebook was overdue. Some felt he'd lose the window – that Facebook's 15 minutes of fame, like those of Myspace, were coming to an end. Kirkpatrick ignored them, spending another 18 months researching. Good call; the book appears just as Facebook has become the most popular destination on the Internet. Our obsession is justified, as Kirkpatrick points out in the most meticulous and exhaustive exposition to date. Facebook has gone “from a dorm-room novelty to a company with an unbelievable 500 million users.” Canadians love it most: A whopping 40 per cent of us are users. It defies the conventional wisdom that social networks are here today and gone tomorrow. It has become “a technological powerhouse with unprecedented influence across modern life, both public and private.” Facebook has the capability to do everything from linking us with friends to saving lives in the Haitian disaster. It may “be the fastest-growing company of any type in history.”

“Facebook was still burning tons of cash. It couldn’t keep endlessly pulling in investment money to cover losses, no matter how much contempt Zuckerberg had for ads. Luckily, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all wanted to talk about a deal to place display ads on Facebook. Zuckerberg authorized his deputies to begin negotiations. To him it seemed like easy money. He wasn’t going to give them much onscreen real estate anyway.”

- David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

“A couple of Google executives came over to see if there might be a way to work with or even buy Thefacebook. Even at this early date, Google was well aware that something noteworthy was gong on in Palo Alto. Zuckerberg and Parker were leery, though, because the risk of becoming subsumed by Silicon Valley’s Internet giant was real. If they wanted ot do their own thing, they had to stay independent, they believed. Anyway, what they were trying to do was very different from what Google did. Their site was about people; Google was about data.”

- David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

In June 2010, NPR’s Morning Edition did a feature on the David Kirkpatrick book, “Author Explores The Evolution Of Facebook.” The site, which essentially began as an online student directory, went live on Feb. 4, 2004. Thefacebook, as it was then called, became popular almost instantly. Within four days, more than 650 students had registered. After one month, the number had reached 10,000. And now, more than six years later, close to 500 million people worldwide actively use the site. Author David Kirkpatrick spent a considerable amount of time with Zuckerberg while writing his new book The Facebook Effect. Zuckerberg, Kirkpatrick tells NPR's Deborah Amos, is adamant in his belief that the world is becoming more open.

“As costs mounted, Zuckerberg mused to the Crimson, which had taken to idolizing him, that “it might be nice in the future to get some ads going.” By the end of March, with the active-user number surpassing 30,000, Thefacebook was paying $450 per month for five servers from Manage.com. Zuckerberg and Saverin each agreed to invest another $10,000 into the company. Meanwhile, Saverin had begun selling a little advertising and had secured a few small contracts with companies that sold moving services, T-shirts, and other products to college students. These ads began to appear in April.”

- David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World

David Kirkpatrick on the Future of Facebook

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Recent Mark Zuckerberg Quotes:

"Before we do anything there, I'm personally spending a lot of time studying it and figuring out what I think the right thing to do is," he said, adding that he spends an hour a day studying Chinese.

Dec 22, 2010 Herald Sun (100 occurrences)

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Dec 29, 2010 TopNews United States (50 occurrences)

On his Facebook page, Mr. Zuckerberg said it was "a real honor and recognition of how our little team is building something that hundreds of millions of people want to use to make the world more open and connected."

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Jan 12, 2011 WBIR-TV (8 occurrences)

At a talk this fall to aspiring entrepreneurs in Palo Alto, Calif., Zuckerberg said he was hoping to figure out the "right partnerships that we would need to do in China to succeed on our terms."

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"People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people," he told TechCrunch this month."That social norm is just something that has evolved over time."

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"The Farm Bureau agreed to sell us fb.com and we in return have agreed not to sell farm subsidies," Zuckerberg said in an account on techcrunch.com.

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Greg Farrell: Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, the Fall of Merrill Lynch, and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America

From the book's promotional website: Greg Farrell is a correspondent for the Financial Times. In January 2009, he broke the news that Merrill Lynch had paid out its 2008 bonuses a month ahead of schedule, in December, even though Merrill was in the process of losing $28 billion for the year, and Bank of America needed an extra $20 billion in taxpayer funds to complete its acquisition of the firm. That story sparked an investigation by New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo. Greg is a past winner of the American Business Press’s Jesse Neal Award for investigative reporting and a recipient of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship for business journalism. He earned a BA from Harvard University and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University.

Daniel Yergin: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

Recently, USA Today invoked the author in a story about the demand for gas in the United States: "A combination of demographic change and policy change means the heady days of gasoline growing in the U.S. are over," says Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the oil industry. This isn't the first time in U.S. history that gasoline demand has fallen, at least temporarily. Drivers typically cut back during recessions, then hit the road again when the economy picks up. Indeed, the Great Recession was the chief reason demand fell sharply in 2008. But this time looks different. Government and industry officials — including the CEO of ExxonMobil— say U.S. gasoline demand has peaked for good. It has declined four years in a row and will not reach the 2006 level again, even when the economy fully recovers. Read that USA Today report here.

Kurt Eichenwald: Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story

In April of 2005, The Slate had this to say about the book and author: Kurt Eichenwald's version of the Enron drama, Conspiracy of Fools, does not waste breath on unsubtle introspection. The painstakingly researched book is written in the popular (and gripping) fly-on-the-wall style, with recreated dialogue, actions, and scenes. For me, this style sets off warning bells—I unfortunately know firsthand how warped such accounts can be—but Eichenwald's admirable lack of editorializing leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. Conspiracy is also mercifully light on the insipid class caricatures that often color such tales, in which private jets, expensive suits, boardroom struggles, hubris, and other facts of corporate life are ridiculed as symbols of "excess." (They may be excessive, but they aren't limited to companies that disintegrate.) Find the rest of that article here. See also: The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, Enron: The Rise and Fall, The Crooked E: The Unshredded Truth About Enron.