Return to the Little Kingdom
In 1984, The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer told the story of Apple's first decade alongside the histories of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Now, com¬pletely revised and expanded, Return to the Little Kingdom is the definitive biography of Apple and its founders from the very beginning.Moritz brings readers inside the childhood homes of Jobs and Wozniak, and records how they dropped out of college and founded Apple in 1976. He follows the fortunes of the company through the mid-1980s, and in new material, tracks the development of Apple to the present and offers an insider's profile of Jobs, whose genius made Apple the powerhouse it is today.Required reading for everyone who's ever listened to music on an iPod, Return to the Little Kingdom is timely and thorough, and the only book that explains how Steve Jobs founded the company that changed our world.
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- Yes, "The Little Kingdom" is a great book (the very slightly updated edition is called "Return to the Little Kingdom" but really just adds a short epilogue), and in my opinion (having read most of them), the best book on early Apple. It gives you more insight into some of the other characters at the early company (Mike Markkula and Mike Scott for example) than some of the other books. Interestingly, the author, Mike Moritz (a lot of Mikes), went on to be a highly successful venture capitalist. So he must've had some keen insights about the tech industry.
I was a guest on a podcast called "CFO Bookshelf" to discuss that book if you want to hear a discussion of it before making the commitment to dive in:
- 99% of "rags-to-riches" stories start past 40.
The selfmade millionaires under 40 are statistical outliers ;)
(Not strictly "auto"biographies, but most of them have ghostwriters anyway)
"Virgin Rebel" (Richard Branson) "Return to the little Kingdom" (Steve Jobs) "Enter the Dragon" (Theo Paphitis)
(There are lots more, but they are in my bookshelf at home...)
- Apple in its early days nearly failed at every stage of its development. See "Return To The Little Kingdom" by Moritz.
Jobs was a very quick learner, though. For example, he soon realized he needed outside management help.
> We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s
Jobs saw opportunity where everybody else did not (including Woz). I worked at a company in the 70s that was far better positioned to develop an Apple-like computer, but utterly failed to see the opportunity. This was hardly unique.
- I've read it in other histories, like Return to the Little Kingdom.
- It's also hard to claim the account in "Return to the Little Kingdom" at https://archive.org/details/returntolittleki0000mori_u2z0/pa... is derived from that in "Accidental Empires" at https://archive.org/details/1996-accidental-empires/page/185... .
RttLK says:
> Since, in Scott’s mind, the computer gave birth to the business he assigned Wozniak number one, Jobs number two, Markkula number three, Fernandez number four, Holt number five, and Wigginton number six, reserved number seven for himself, and gave Espinosa number eight.
AE says:
> The badges included a name and an individual employee number, the latter based on the order in which workers joined the company. Steve Wozniak was declared employee number 1, Steve Jobs was number 2, and so on.
The former has more details and different intention for the initial numbering.
- There are so many things that might have happened but for one key decision. You can't spend the rest of your life wondering "what if?"
But it can be tempting!
In my case, I had the opportunity to be the first programmer at Apple. I told the story on Reddit a few years ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/h4n5w/
As you can imagine, I have wondered "what if?" more than a few times. :-)
But "what if?" can work both ways. I could have become a billionaire and one of the most famous people in Silicon Valley. Or Steve could have driven me from the mild depression I'd occasionally experienced into full-blown mental illness, as happened with one of Apple's earliest employees. You just don't know which way it could have turned out.
The other story on the front page today about Regis McKenna reminds me of one of the more remarkable coincidences I've encountered.
As I told in the Reddit story, when I walked out of Apple's answering service in 1976 I thought to myself, "Those guys are flakes! They're never going to make it."
It was one of those things that sticks in your mind. I remember vividly to this day exactly where I was walking and the exact words that were in my head.
A couple of years ago I was reading Michael Moritz's Return to the Little Kingdom and ran across this:
At first there was great uncertainty at the Regis McKenna Agency about Apple's prospects. The account executive, Frank Burge, explained, "People who knew Markkula and Apple wondered whether they would make it. We kept saying 'These guys are flakes. They’re never going to make it.'"
Other than "these" vs. "those", it's the exact same words I was thinking.
It was definitely a strange feeling to run across that quote!
