Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs absolutely owned the founder archetype in my head for a while. Not in the adult retrospective sense where you read biographies and make a balanced accounting of product taste versus management pathology versus historical contingency. I mean as a kid/teenager watching the presentations, he looked like what it meant for a person to have a picture in his head of something that did not exist and then somehow make the rest of the world inhabit it. The black shirt, the stage, the huge screen, the one-more-thing pacing, the way the product appeared not as a bundle of engineering compromises but as a coherent object that had been waiting to be revealed. It was incredibly seductive.

I tried to copy it. Of course I did. I would make Apple-style presentations for my own things, trying to get the clean slides and the dramatic reveal and the feeling that the product was not merely functional but inevitable. [embed: old presentation if recoverable] I loved the idea that presentation was part of engineering rather than some bullshit applied afterward by marketing. If you actually understood why the thing mattered, you should be able to compress that understanding into a demonstration where another person suddenly sees it too.

The MakerBot Replicator 2 launch video hit me in the same place. [link/embed] Here was a machine that took digital geometry and made it physical, presented with exactly the kind of techno-optimist product theater that my brain was already primed for. The Jony Ive iPhone 5 video too. [link/embed] The materials, tolerances, manufacturing processes, all described with this almost devotional seriousness. Aluminum was not just aluminum; somebody had thought about the edge and the finish and the machining and the integration until manufacturing itself became part of the aesthetic argument. I ate that shit up.

There is an obvious line from that into a lot of what I still want. I do not want software to live entirely in software. I am obsessed with CAD, robotics, fabrication, machines that make machines, software that can cross the interface into atoms. A product presentation where some new physical capability appears on the table still does something to me that a SaaS metric dashboard fundamentally does not. That is not because hardware is morally superior. It is because the transformation is so legible. Here was a thing that did not exist; now there is a thing.

Steve Jobs also gave me a model of the founder as a person who could integrate domains that institutions normally split apart. Industrial design, software, hardware, manufacturing, narrative, capital, recruiting, strategy. The founder was not "the business guy." He was the person attempting to maintain enough of the whole model in his head that the product did not decompose into locally optimized pieces. I still think there is something real in that. I also later learned how badly the heroic-founder model can distort perception: products are made by organizations, timing and distribution matter, other people's agency matters, charisma can hide errors, and being convinced does not make you correct. But those caveats arrived much later. The original model was much simpler and much stronger: if you can see the thing clearly enough, BUILD IT.

I wanted the coolness too. I should not sanitize that into "I admired product leadership." I wanted to be cool in that way. I wanted to walk on stage with something I had built and have people understand that the future had moved. I wanted the aesthetic confidence. I wanted the identity. There was absolutely ego in it, but the ego was attached to creation. Be the person who can make the thing real and make everybody else see why it matters.

[embed: my Apple-style slide decks] [embed: early product demos] [link: Replicator 2 launch video] [link: iPhone 5 Jony Ive video]

The funny part is that this founder archetype coexisted with another archetype that was much more important to me morally. Steve Jobs could show me what worldly creation looked like. Jesus, as I understood him through Jehovah's Witnesses, was still the model for what a person was SUPPOSED to be. When those models disagreed, there was no serious question about which one won.