Former Senior Vice President, Apple
Fifty years of building products.Six of them beside Steve Jobs.
And decades after that as one of the people Steve still called when he wanted the truth about something.
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Former Senior Vice President, Apple
And decades after that as one of the people Steve still called when he wanted the truth about something.
The short version
His book is called Leading Apple With Steve Jobs. With. Not under, not for — and that preposition is the whole story.
In 1980 Jay Elliot left Intel, where he was director of California operations reporting to Andy Grove and Gordon Moore, and joined a computer company most people hadn't heard of. The title on the door said Senior Vice President, responsible for all corporate operations. What it didn't say was that he would spend the next six years five to fifteen hours a day beside Steve Jobs, nearly every day of the week.
Steve had the vision, the impatience, and the refusal to accept that anything was as good as it was going to get. Jay had the thing Steve didn't: he could walk into a room of engineers who had just been told to do something impossible and get them to do it anyway.
Steve would say “make it smaller.” The engineers would say it couldn't be done. Jay was the one who sat with them until it could.
He was in the car driving to Xerox PARC and had no idea why they were going. He saw a clumsy three-button mouse and didn't understand what he'd seen until they were back in the parking lot. Then they drove to Cupertino and Steve told someone to fetch a roll-on deodorant and a soap dish, because he wanted a one-button version sitting on a table that day.
Not a memo about the mouse. The mouse.
And it didn't end in 1986. Through the Pixar years, and after Steve returned to Apple in 1997, Steve kept calling him back — and paid him for it. When there was a first iPhone prototype to look at, Jay was one of the people invited to hold it.
He said it was too thick.
Senior Vice President, responsible for all corporate operations, and part of the Macintosh organization from development to introduction. During his tenure, Apple's sales grew from $150 million to more than $3 billion.
Director of California operations, reporting to Andy Grove and Gordon Moore.
Programmer on the airline reservation system, then running a software development lab. He designed the BART ticket machines — which he writes became the prototype for the ATMs now standing in every bank in the country.
Founder of Migo Software and Nuvel. Currently mid-build on a new product.
The books
Most books about Steve Jobs were assembled afterward, from interviews with people who were in the building. These were written by the man who sat next to him.
iLeadership for a new generation. How Steve actually made decisions — about products, about people, and about what was worth doing at all.
Read more →
Management lessons from a controversial genius — written for the people who have to build the thing, not just admire it.
Read more →Free worksheet
Four questions Jay asks about any product, with ruled lines under every one. Fifteen minutes and a pen, and you'll know whether you have a marketing problem or a product problem.
Work with Jay
A six-week live cohort. You bring your actual product to a two-hour session every week, and Jay reviews it live — the way Apple ran product reviews. Your product gets reviewed at least twice.
No funnel talk. No ad creative. Just the thing you built, on the table, in front of the man who told Steve Jobs the iPhone felt wrong in his hand.
The newsletter
Stories from inside Apple and what they mean for whatever you're building now.