I wanted to express my gratitude for Steve. Not for all the things that the worlds knows, but for a couple of things that he did for me personally.
The first was in the early 90′s when Steve was at NeXT. My startup at the time had some ideas about how to help make the NeXT machine’s operating system better even than a Mac for electronic publishing application. We went to visit Steve to ask for some funding. I explained our ideas and situation and what we could do for NeXT. He like what he heard, but said that in his view the best software was written by starving software developers in garages and that providing funding to them would distort their values. Or something to that effect. Starving we were. But then he did something truly generous. He loaned us 14 new NeXT machines (at about $10k each) to help us, and then never asked for them back. I can’t tell you what this meant to us and to me.
The second was after he was back at Apple in the late 90′s. I found that Steve, despite being CEO, always had time to meet with me about new ideas. He even made time for a fellow developer, Michael Hoffman, when I asked Steve if we could come to One Infinite Loop and meet with him so Michael could present some cool new ideas to improve the Mac Finder. I think one of Steve’s greatest strengths was his ability to recognize talent and attract it. I guess making time for new people and ideas was part of his greatness.
On both counts, and all the better known ones, I’m indebted to Steve.
