This clip is from my interview with Chris MacAskill, who worked for Steve Jobs at NeXT Computer. Today, Chris is the co-founder of SmugMug, a family-owned photo sharing site that makes pictures look incredible.

Transcript below. (And you should hear the full interview.)

The clip

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The transcript

Chris: I had a friend who was Vice President Engineering for Quantum Computers and … Steve didn’t want a hard drive in the original Mac.

Everybody else did and they were hiding an engineer from Sony and so on and Bill tells the story the following way:

When Steve showed up at Quantum to see about getting a hard drive — when he finally realized it was important — instead of going to the front door and parking in the visitor parking lot like anyone else would do, Steve went to the back door and then he waited for the door to swing open and he went in.

It was a secured area where you were supposed to have a badge and all that. He started looking around back there at people soldering and working and putting components together and so on.

Bill was paged to go back there and get him and said, “Steve, you can’t be back here,” and took him into the conference room where the CEO was and Bill was and so on.

And this is so like Steve because this happened with me in so many meetings. There was a slide projector back in the old days when they had slide projectors and a screen set up. And everyone was sort of dressed up. And they wanted to do a presentation to Steve.

And he said, “No, I’m not wired that way, I just can’t sit. I can’t do a presentation. I just want to know three things: I want to know the price, I want to know the mean time between failure and I want to know the data transfer rate,” or something like that.

And they said, “Well, OK Steve. We’ll just shorten it and give you a few slides…”

And Steve said, “No, you don’t understand.” He jumped up and he grabbed a white board marker and he drew three lines on the board. One had a dollar sign in front of it, one had MTBF, mean Time Between Failure, whatever, and handed it to the CEO, and said, “Fill these blanks in.”

The CEO reluctantly said, “OK, Steve.”

And when he filled them of course Steve exploded. “No, that’s crap,” except he used other words and pounded on the table and said, “That’s why Apple has to build everything, it’s no good!” And he ran out and got in his car and drove away.

Well, you’d think that’s the method of a madman but I think it’s pretty shrewd actually. I’ve seen it work a lot of times. They’re on the defensive now, they gotta go back to Apple and they sort of grovel if they want this deal and it worked for Steve, I’m telling you.

Andrew: And so they did come back to him?

Chris: Oh yeah, Quantum drives ended up in Macs like crazy.

Continue to the full interview >>