News

Had a nice chat with my former co-worker Steve Gillmor at the Rackspace party last week. I told him about how we are trying to document the people/processes that are “denting the future.” Steve’s new gig is at Salesforce, and he informed me that Marc Benioff and Steve Jobs were close, and that Jobs had mentored Benioff.

With that information, I am now hunting online for examples of any advice Jobs proffered to Benioff. Here is a nice instance.

This Bloomberg video interview with Marc Benioff talks about Benioff’s “special relationship” with Jobs and how Jobs advised Benioff to do more than simply create a platform. He pushed Benioff to create (and own) a complete ecosystem.

Note how Benioff wisely took it to the level of owning the term “App Store”.

And one really good – good example of that is – happened in around 2003. And I went down to talk to him and brought a few members of my executive team with us. And he said something really exciting. He goes, “Look, you’ve got a fantastic enterprise application here, but you’ve got to build an ecosystem.” So to us, we went back and we were like, “Well, we don’t know how to do that.” That was like a zen co-on (ph). How do we build an ecosystem?

So we designed this whole technology that we called App Store, which was the ability to basically buy these apps and run them in Salesforce. And when we launched it we actually called it AppExchange, and you can see it at AppExchange.com. But we like the App Store name so much that we bought the URL and we trademarked it. And then I was in the audience when he announced App Store. And I went up to him and I said, “I have a gift for you. I’m going to give you the trademark and the URL because of the help you gave me in 2003.”

The Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, titled as such, is a critical item on the to-read list in the process of prying into the minds of the world’s great leaders.

Equally interesting is, I think, looking at the reviews popping up around the internet as written by the people who have been following all things Apple for years and years…and they’re mostly very negative.

Thomas Q Brady sums up a lot of the criticism in part of his review:

But all Isaacson’s armchair, Psychology Today thinking rendered from the source materials was a self-absorbed, immature, emotionally unstable control-freak. There are two reasons that’s a complete shame.

1) We already knew that about Steve Jobs.

2) I know lots of people that could be described that way (we seem to have been breeding them in the US over the last couple (few?) decades), and none of them started a company in their garage that became one of the most valued corporations in the world.

What we’re looking to explore with Dent is, in part, the question: “what made Steve Jobs different than all those other people?”

I think Thomas has a very interesting theory about at least one thing that changed for Jobs in between NEXT and his return to Apple.