Steve Jobs
The Steve Jobs most people know is the visionary who gave us the iPhone, the MacBook, the iMac. The Steve Jobs that Sam and Shaan keep returning to is a different one — the one who spent ten years building failing companies after being fired, and whose failures turned out to be the foundation of everything.
Lost in the Desert
Amjad Masad brought up the Jobs desert years while talking about his own experience building Replit through a decade of rejections. “People think about him in terms of the flashy things — the iPhone, the keynotes. But the thing I like is when he was lost in the desert for 10 years.”
After Apple fired him in 1985, Jobs started two companies. NeXT Computing built workstations that the market mostly didn’t want. Pixar was an animation technology company that burned through his money for years before Toy Story changed everything. Jobs bought Pixar for $5 million, invested $50 million of his own capital, operated at a loss for a decade, and cut personal checks to make payroll when the company couldn’t cover salaries.
The returns: Pixar sold to Disney for $7.4 billion in 2006. NeXT — widely written off as a commercial failure — turned out to contain what Apple desperately needed when it acquired the company in 1997. The NeXT operating system became macOS. Objective-C, from NeXT’s obsession with object-oriented programming, is embedded in everything Apple builds on today.
Masad’s conclusion: “Not just an acqui-hire. Going the distance is an advantage for entrepreneurs.” The ten years that looked like failure were the R&D for everything that followed.
Focus: Saying No to a Hundred Good Ideas
Shaan cites Jobs’s definition of focus repeatedly in his solo monologue on intensity. “Focus is saying no to a hundred great ideas so you can say yes to the one exceptional one. You can do anything, you just can’t do everything.”
The misunderstanding, Shaan argues, is that focus means doing more. Jobs’s version means doing less — but doing the chosen thing with unusual intensity. The result is not a busier schedule but a narrower one, with all available intensity concentrated on what actually matters.
This appears throughout Shaan’s thinking on WhatsApp (the founder had a sticky note that said “no ads, no games, no gimmicks”), on Peter Thiel’s PayPal management style (one priority per person, nothing else), on Chick-fil-A (chicken sandwiches, relentless execution). The Jobs framing is the purest version: you must actively reject good options to create space for the exceptional one.
The Pixar Rule of Storytelling
Blake Scholl quoted Pixar’s first rule of storytelling in the context of building Boom Supersonic: “You admire the character more for trying than for their successes.”
The rule reflects something Jobs understood intuitively about what moves people. The reason the early Elon Musk rocket story is more powerful than the synchronized landing is the three rockets that blew up first, and the fact that he pushed forward in the face of almost certain failure. The hallmark of every Pixar film is not the happy ending but how the character approached the obstacles.
This applies equally to founders and to the companies they build. The iconic Apple products are memorable not just for what they were but for what they replaced and how improbable they seemed. The Mac in 1984. The iPod in 2001. The iPhone in 2007. Each felt obvious in retrospect and was called crazy at announcement.
The Operating Standard
Ben Horowitz described Zuckerberg as “a phenomenal student of management” — and the way he expressed that admiration was by comparing Zuck to the standard Jobs set. The CEOs who build enduring companies aren’t the ones who were born knowing how to run them. They’re the ones who treated management as a craft to be studied.
Jobs’s reputation for intensity — for refusing to accept constraints that everyone else accepted, for pushing teams past what they thought was possible — runs through nearly every MFM reference to him. Sam’s shorthand is that he represented a particular kind of “founder mode”: simultaneously holding the big vision and diving into the most granular product details, moving between the two without losing either.
What Sam and Shaan find most interesting about Jobs, ultimately, is not the products. It’s the shape of the career: the failure, the ten years in the desert, the return, the second act that was bigger than the first. It’s a pattern that appears again and again in the people who build things that last.