All dressed up, nowhere to go
My early years, spent worshipping the saints and characters which papered the walls of my Roman Catholic upbringing, had many heroes. As I grew, there were fewer. Nurses and doctors are heroes; cops, firemen, and EMTs. Unless you’ve put yourself in danger to save others, you are no hero.
In 1995, Steve was no hero. His progeny was now a line of gutless, Motorola-driven quadras, marketed by a . . . well . . . a marketer. Steve was in exile on the shores of Redwood City.
If you are a Sales rep and your name is not Todd Beamer, you are likely no hero. Some sales reps are a bit deluded on that front, thinking that being lucky enough to bring in a deal at the end of the quarter and revenue for the company is heroic. I say leading the charge on Flight 93 is heroic. Closing a deal is just your fucking job.
At Adobe, amongst the unwashed, we called him Steve, not “The Steve,” but just Steve, and never “Mr. Jobs.” You said “Steve” and everyone knew who you meant. Buddha also had no last name by the time it was all done, but I digress.
There was not much intimacy in our communications, initially. Most correspondence was indirect at first. I worked with his people, who did their best to manage and cater to the reality around him.
Our initial communications were by email, as I thought they should be just for practical reasons. The relationship between NeXT and Adobe was very mature. Something, anything, needs to be memorialized and written, if only to counterbalance a more popular view, backed up by countless anecdotes, that Steve was a terror, an asshole.
So this is my story of working with Steve, and no one else’s.
I will never be a fanboy, another perspective, a day-to-day view – a Steve who sweated like the rest of us, is more than appropriate in an age where we often lack inspiration. Most of the people who were Steve fanboys, then, if they are still draw breath, gravitate into the black hole of devotion known as Elon Musk. His RDF, headed to deep space, ebbs and flows over us like a Bay of Fundy tide, violently in a dystopia rivalling Atwood’s.
My aperture into Steve’s life as my client is not the same. Mine is just one of the many point of views about Steve. I saw Steve as no one else did. I enjoyed a relationship a few had with him.
My sanity began to wane and Imposter Syndrome kicked in. As a puke immigrant from Quebec, my status with Steve was somewhere between an acquaintance and a friend. Looking around, it was hard to believe my surroundings, my local, my metaverse. Am I faking it?
The Impostor
Call it Impostor Syndrome, or whatever you will, the feeling that you just don’t belong, that you, in spite of overwhelming evidence of your competence and abilities, believe you aren’t quite good enough, that you are a fake, a fraud. It’s important to segment these feelings, to get all the bullshit out of your mind. Adobe would not have put me in the role without some luck and some merit on my part.
Scared shitless, the only real survival strategy in this scenario is to press on, know your role, and play it. This may not work for everyone, but for me, it was a way to survive through the day.
Steve knew my name and my phone number, and he used it when he needed something from Adobe.
Pierre Bedard was his new sales rep. Pierre Bedard represented Adobe.
Steve Jobs influenced and changed the worlds, in both overt and covert ways. My experiences with Steve are more than snippets documented for posterity, they provide another facet of his life, a snapshot from someone who knew him, to reinforce (or contradict) current thinking about “Steve.”
Others who have written about Steve had a writer–subject relationship with him: Steve was my client, and my job was to keep him happy within the bounds of our contract. My main motivation was his satisfaction, again within the bounds of the contract between NeXT and Adobe.
I had a sales-rep-to-client relationship. When speaking with me, he didn’t have his guard up in regards to anything but the terms of his business relationship with Adobe. There was nothing else at play. My job wasn’t to write a book. I was not judgmental. I was not the media.
Nothing but a taxman, there to collect the royalties, negotiate the contracts, and take care of any special requests. A grocery clerk, sent to collect the bill. Within reason, Steve’s every Adobe need was curated and catered to.
That was the mission upriver.
Intellectual Property
When speaking about the business, not what it had become but what it was becoming, Intellectual Property, IP, was fundamentally what Steve cared about. We lived it and understood it.
The meaning of IP and his relative position specifically juxtaposed against Adobe’s vision of intellectual property made for some unique viewpoints around the commercial architecture of operating system software at the time. Jobs had a unique relationship with IP, he understood it for what it was, building blocks and Eli Whitney interchangeable parts. Steve continually thought about its meaning and the implications of licensing terms he had to deal with for the NeXTSTEP operating system.
This is what this book is about, the rank and raw importance of IP in our business and thus, our world. I hope each page celebrates that.
The time I spent with Steve is important to me. The outside noise always has to be at least heard, in the off chance that it colors the narrative and taints it.
It’s important to see Steve and not Ashton Kushner nor Elizabeth Holmes, one playing Steve as an actor; the other playing Steve as a complete fraud. No one deserves a faux Steve clouding their grey matter.
So, with the help of a friend who copy-edited my slim draft, we rushed it to market.
A year later, like millions of others, I have yet to see it, or any other movie, on the life of Steve Jobs. The reality was enough. Why taint a good thing.
And so it goes, my relationship with Steve remains intact in my head, somehow on my terms, only weathered by time, delusions, and the fantasy brought on by age.
Retiring quota
Many of us have a personal relationship with a chosen deity. In the same way, our times have domestic, secular deities. Steve is among them. Many of us now have our personal relationship with Steve, be it through our phones, or our computers (or whatever the Apple brand pitches) (or Disney/Pixar).
My relationship with Steve was different from any other, and that is the perspective I want to give you – as a sales rep working with Steve.
There was neither time nor place for worship, be he secular or divine. I was a sales rep, not a fanboy. I knew who Steve was, but that could not and did not matter.
Knowing Steve never retired any quota.
Mine was a relationship that he had with a few handfuls of people scattered on this earth – the people who sold him the clay from which he sculpted his visions – the sales guys – the men and women who sold to Steve.
There are many people who will try to sell you a book, telling you how to sell like Steve, how to make your product in His Image.
This book is not for that book. This book is about the basics. How to sell to Steve Jobs – what I think it takes, based on what I believe it took.
There are three basics to selling to steve and they deal with typing, making copies, and channeling fear.
If that’s all you want from me, steal my book, you’ve read far enough. There is nothing more to see here but some anecdotes linked with clichés.
It’s about the basics – mainly being there in heart and soul, ready to type, copy, and fear only yourself. Steve was absolutely correct in his simplicity and aesthetic. He knew that it is all about the basics. Without the basics down, you are nothing.