Liner Notes – selling to steve jobs

Page length	153 pages printed
Languages	English
Publication Dates	December 2015 for kindle / December 2017 print

About selling to steve jobs

I only wish Steve Jobs was still here to sell to, but he’s not. When I was licensing software to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) for Adobe, I was blessed by the fates to sell to Steve Jobs. To me at the time, Steve was a client. Years later, when I attend a legal symposium or any event which attempts to inspire me, someone, somewhere quotes Steve Jobs, often repeatedly and with fervor, to prove their point.

As Steve would say “That’s braindead.”

When I hear someone do this, I shut down. I can’t deal. This book is not about the cult of Steve. I don’t get lost in the wonderment of his words, and the sage advice bestowed whenever he stepped on the Stanford campus.  I think about what the Steve of NeXT would say to all this, and I suspect he would shrug and move on to the next thing, as he invariably always did.

This book was written in 2015 (print edition 2017) and has undergone at least two full editions and revisions.

In terms of reading length, the version available on Amazon is good entertainment and will entertain you from SFO to ORD once you can fly again.

Why write this book?

I am not special. I was at the right place at exactly the right time. I was lucky. The only valid reason to do anything is when your wife insists on it, and Caroline did. And she was right. There are so many perspectives and takes on Steve. He lives on, but not as he was, but as we want him to be. This is not some Jobs-created or initiated phenomena. I always respected Steve but was never a fanboy, my eyes glazed over in awe. But this is about selling to Steve, not about Steve in particular.

Nothing hit me harder than when a just laid off friend of mine read the book and told me

“Oh yeah, just like you wrote on page 43!”

“What the hell did I write?” I thought to myself.

“Something about fear.”

If I only inspire one person to not fear their future, what is immediately in front of them, I have succeeded.

Did Steve inspire me? (Much less than my parents.)

Did I fear him? (Much less than John Warnock, the other Adobe cofounder.) Steve is who you project him to be – it’s well within your control to be in fear or inspired, as you will.

Selling to Steve was life-changing, but not for the reasons you would think.

Plot (?)

Plot? There is no plot in tech memoirs, I say, channeling my inner Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own. The book takes anecdotes and strings together lessons like popcorn. These anecdotes suss out a solid sales philosophy and relevance through a series of vignettes, hearsay, encounters, and interactions taking place in 1995.

I sold to Steve. I learned something from Steve. But he was always  a customer, not a buddy, not an idol. I hoped I was a good friend.

It’s unlikely you are going to read this book and start selling to Steve Jobs, but you may run into some finding divine guidance from Steve’s Light, people who fancy themselves in the cult of Steve by believing that 1) black turtlenecks rule, and 2) they are the Dalai Lama of steves, the next reincarnated one.

By reading about what I did to sell Steve, you can learn how to deal with Steve (or any difficult client who thinks he is Steve) using the FTC rubric – Fear, Type, and Copy.

Author

I wrote it, but with a lot of help. Much thanks to Mike T for his excellent editorial help. I think he worked with me out of prurient interest, just to see where the car would crash. Mike was of great help and inspiration. Dirk’s review of an earlier edition inspired to keep writing and get better.

There are many of us running around the Valley who worked with him and shared the same oxygen. I’m just one of them of those many people.

Writing Process

I started much like I’m writing these liner notes, one piece of text at a time. First, it was an anecdote here, and then an anecdote there. Soon, it was enough to string together a small book.

In terms of my writing process now, I’ve become a big believer in outlining first with a tool like iThoughts, and then using Scrivener to put things together and reorder materials.

Eventually, the output is a clean word file for the Kindle and a pdf for the print version.

I use Amazon for one reason only – no inventory. Forget royalties –  inventory is a terrible problem in a world with little storage space.

Factoids

Steve was not an asshole. OK, we cleared that up. He really wasn’t. At least to me. Many seemed to be a little bit in fear, but for me, I was too focused on the client relationship, which is what I was tasked to do. Focus is a skill learned young.

Steve loved immigrants and the underdog. I am an immigrant. I learned English at 6. I immigrated. He knew I had licensed Display PostScript at Sun. I treated him like a normal client. I think he appreciated the baser instincts involved.

Trying to get close to Steve means never getting close to Steve. These things happen by chance, not by design. There’s no way I could have worked it to get assigned to his account. In sales, you are assigned, for whatever reason.

I never fawned on Steve. In my career, I never debased myself. I always spoke my mind. I was in an adversarial relationship with Steve. I was happy in my own space. I didn’t need Steve to make me who I was. He wasn’t the first famous person I had been dealing with. Doing a deal between Sun Microsystems and Adobe was exhilarating and mind numbingly unreal.

I charge more for this book. It’s the highest price of my books. They call it value pricing – the anecdotes about time spent with Steve won’t be found elsewhere.

Chuck Geschke read it. He told me he liked it. But of course, Chuck would say that even if it truly sucked, which is why I wrote a full chapter on really all the good that is the man, Chuck Geschke.

The current edition is written by Miles J. Watson. This was my pen name for the first piece of writing I ever sold to the San Diego Reader in the summer of 1975. Subsequent editions will be written by pd bedard. There may even be a different title.

Selling to Steve Jobs is Kindle exclusive. You’d think a book about Steve Jobs would be available on iBooks, but it’s not. Maybe I fear Apple would reject it. When I first chose Amazon, I looked at all the pros and cons of publishing online, and Amazon makes it too damn easy. I don’t know why. It just is. I have yet to put it on iBooks. Maybe the next version.