Marc Andreessen on what made Steve Jobs great

April 15, 2025

“There’s basically two stories about Steve you hear. One is that he was a saint and perfect in all regards, which was somewhat true. The other story that you hear is he was a screaming lunatic and would just run around, yell at people in elevators, fire people in meetings, and all these awful, horrible things… I think the reality was somewhere in the middle.”

Marc continues:

“At least what I saw — and what I’ve heard from people who worked with him for a very long time — was he was absolutely intolerant of anything less than first class work. If you brought him first class work, and you were top in your field, super diligent, on top of everything, had all the details figured out, and knew what you were doing, he was the best manager you were ever going to work with and the best CEO you were ever going to work with. And the thing that comes up from people who worked with him closely was, ‘I did the best work of my life working for him.’ Part of that is because he really appreciated and understood the quality of great work. And the other part was he didn’t tolerate anything less than that, which meant that everybody around you also hit that bar.”

People forget though that Steve matured a lot along the way too. He had failures like the Lisa, which came before the Macintosh, and of course, he was fired before coming back to Apple 12 years later. “He learned a lot from the failures,” Marc explains. “And now everyone has forgotten about the failures, but you can read about them on Wikipedia.”

Marc believes it was the 12 years he spent building NeXT and Pixar where Steve learned to be a great CEO before coming back to Apple:

“People who knew him better than I did said he learned how to be a great CEO, not at Apple, but at NeXT, because he spent 12 years doing it the hard way where he wasn’t being showered with praise. He didn’t have the magic touch. The product fundamentally didn’t take. He had to pivot.”

Marc tells a great story of Steve insisting on the NeXT computer being a perfect cube even though it would double the cost. He got his cube, but it was slow, expensive, and completely flopped:

“Nobody wanted it. He pivoted the company to software. Nobody wanted the software… Anyway, the point is that was really hard… He had to try to figure out how to optimize it the hard way and retain a team through basically 12 years of failure.”

Marc concludes:

“People say he had this incredible growth and innovation skillset from Apple phase one. And then he had an incredible management skillset from the sort of wilderness years. And so by the time he came back to Apple in 1997 he at that point a great CEO, but maybe he wouldn’t have ever become the Steve Jobs that we know had he not gone through the hard period.”