This Was Steve Jobs' Best Kept Business Secret...

0:00in this video I'm going to talk about what just might be Steve Jobs Best Kept Business secret I'm Rob Walling a startup founder with multiple exits I've written three books on building startups and I'm an investor in more than 125 companies what I'm talking about today is having trusted advisors and mentors and relationships with people who can help guide you along your entrepreneurial Journey during this video I'm going to dive into to how many mentors Steve Jobs had how many people he let into his life and let speak into his entrepreneurial journey and help him along the way and these days especially in the bootstrapped and mostly

0:35bootstrapped startup space when people get together to form groups to advise and Mentor one another we call them startup masterminds now the term masterminds came out of a book from the 1930s but these days what it means is two or more Founders supporting each other on a recurring basis they give two-way advice and mentorship and whether it's two or four or six people that are part of a mastermind group there's advice and mentorship given in all directions and it's not just advice it's people that are alongside you for the journey cuz the Journey's long the journey is difficult you know we think in terms of years not months and having

1:121 2 four five trusted people who are alongside you for that Journey who can act as a sounding board and a sanity check can be invaluable to you as you're building your company Mastermind groups meet periodically to share progress to ask questions ask for feedback and they're lightly structured interactions that happen on a recurring basis I'm going to talk more about the specifics of masterminds towards the end of the video but right now I want to dive into how Steve Jobs surrounded himself with mentors and advisers and people that were along with him for his entrepreneurial journey to be his sounding board and his sanity check the

1:47really hard decisions he had to make along the way most of what I'm going to quote in this video is taken from the book Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson it's an Incredible Book I've actually read it twice myself but we're also going to link to a quora thread where someone asks about Steve Jobs mentors and the person who responds gave this great answer it's a nice tight summary of several sections of the book and I quote from several parts of that answer in this video while it's impossible to nail down every Mentor or adviser Steve Jobs ever had many people do think that Nolan Bushnell who was the founder of Atari

2:20was job's first mentor and according to the Isaacson book Bushnell was the entrepreneurial role model for jobs and here's a quote from a chief engineer at atar he says Nolan wouldn't take no for an answer and this was Steve's first impression of how things got done I think a lot of us have heard about Steve job's personality and it's obvious that he may have borrowed from one of his first bosses in technology Nolan Bushnell another person that jobs relied on was Mike marula this started in 1976 where he took jobs out of the model of pedaling Apple 2 computers to individual stores and started talking about

2:55thinking bigger and actually making deals with larger companies and he Led Apple to incorporate as a company in instead of remaining a partnership he pointed out to jobs that they were on their way to creating an industry he was someone who taught jobs marketing and sales really a bunch of stuff that jobs didn't have a single clue about cuz before that he had been a hippie he'd been in junior college and he had written some software although he wasn't the most advanced engineer he needed his co-founder Steve wnac to uh really invent the personal computer but jobs is quoted as talking about the beauty of the iPhone packaging and how the

3:26experience of a user opening the box is designed to set the tone of how the user perceives the product and Steve Jobs said Mike taught me that it's interesting to think that without Nolan Bushnell without Mike marula perhaps Apple doesn't become what it becomes Steve Jobs had these folks as advisers as mentors and they were sounding boards and they sanity checked for him along the way much like you would do in a mastermind group a third person who played the role of Mentor for jobs this was during the Pixar era was Intel CEO Andy Grove and according to the book he taught jobs the importance of respecting

3:58others playing nice collaborating with peers and other companies cuz before that jobs had the reputation of being emotional abusive verbally abusive and kind of a bull in a china shop and at least the way the story is told it seems Andrew Grove helped him on his entrepreneurial Journey become someone who could return to Apple and help make it into the company that it is today last one I'll talk about is John Scully so jobs actually sought out John Scully as a mentor and as a father figure and even though their relationship ended poorly when John Scully forced jobs out of the CEO job he was indeed a mentor to

4:32jobs in the early and mid 80s and there were so many others you know when I went to research this I found a list of 10 12 people there's Robert Noy the inventor of the microchip there's bill huet of hulet Packer there's Bill Campbell who is a coach later in life Steve Jobs knew the power of surrounding himself with other smart people who could give him advice be along on his entrepreneurial journey and effectively Mentor him as he had to make these hard decisions of being an entrepreneur I myself have used masterminds to great effect during my entrepreneurial career I first discovered them about 13 years ago and I

5:09talked to one or two other Founders and aspiring Founders who were trying to make it work and we would get together every other week and discuss things I'll talk a little more about format later but we would talk about the hard things we were were doing the victories the failures and ask for advice so that people were alongside us on this journey I know I keep saying that but the idea here is it's not just onetime advisers it's people who really know what's going on with you and who can speak into your life and into your business and help you get where you want to go at this point

5:38I've been in three separate masterminds the longest of which has lasted 12 years and I mean no exaggeration when I say I would not be where I am today without having been in these masterminds I'm still really good friends with all the folks in the masterminds that I've been in over the years and they had a profound impact on my ability to grow companies at microcom which is the startup community that I run in person online we have found masterminds to be so powerful for keeping folks on track and for keeping people accountable but also keeping them supported and one of the most requested features if you will

6:14that we had received for many many years was could we help with Mastermind matching or where can I go to get matched up in a mastermind and so we actually started Mastermind matching about I think it was 18 months ago now and I'll talk a little more about those that detail in a bit if you want to jump to the end it's microf.com masterminds to get the full info but before I do that I want to take a step back and talk about how a mastermind group can be structured in case you already know a couple Founders who you think would be great matches for you who you think

6:42could speak into your business and could be the adviser the mentor the person to go along with you on this journey if you want to structure your own the typical Cadence of Mastermind meetings is either weekly every other week or monthly I like the ones where you have equal time for everyone so if you have three people in the group you take an hour each person takes 20 minutes if you have four or five people usually you do 90 minutes and you break it up there are also Hot Seat formats where each meeting maybe you only give a brief update and one company or one founder gets the bulk of

7:12the time to dive deep into a topic and during these masterminds like during your turn so to speak you share progress share what's going well what's not going well and then you open it up to ask for advice and sometimes you have something you're working on that you want people's advice on and other times folks will just chime in as you talk about what's going well and what's not and based on their experience and the successes and failures that they've had there's often a lot more wisdom in that group than in you as the individual there's so much more experience and so many more mistakes have been made across three

7:42four five different people that it can help you get there faster and if you want to view and download our guide for masterminds it's called microcom masterminds 101 just head to micron.com masterminds and you can click a link there and and see that whole document that we put together so realistically you might be thinking to yourself why should I consider joining a mastermind well I hope that the thought that Steve Jobs surrounded himself with Mastermind like people to help him on his journey even though he's considered one of the greatest Founders and greatest entrepreneurs of our time hopefully that carries some weight as to the value of

8:13these types of relationships and of course there's me and the hundreds I think we're approaching a thousand Mastermind matches through microf and anyone you talk to who's been in a mastermind group usually it's a rave review about the positive impact that it's had on their business but some more concrete reasons once you're in a mastermind you'll start to realize that no one else is going to understand your journey as much or care as much as the other people in your Mastermind you want your spouse you want your friend from high school you want your buddy at work to care about it but they just can't they just not like being in your

8:43Mastermind group if you've ever felt like you were off doing this journey alone without the support the mental support the Tactical support that you need just the encouragement that you're heading in the right direction that's what masterminds are for there's advice there's mentorship I've talk talked about that but the camaraderie and having someone else along for the journey to act as a sounding board and a sanity check for everything you're trying to do is invaluable and if you're able to set up your own Mastermind amazing if you already have a few founder friends this can be a great way to do it and remember to download our

9:15masterminds 101 guide but if you're looking for other like-minded bootstrapped and mostly bootstrapped startup Founders you can head to microf.com masterminds we open applications about every 3 to 4 months for Mastermind matching an application's open on January 25th just a few days after this video goes live but right now if you go to microf.com masterminds you can enter your email to be notified when the doors open applications will close on February 3rd and we will be sending out matches between February 8th and February 15th so I hope this video today helped educate you a bit about Steve Jobs and his career and the things that he felt were valuable as well as this

9:56idea of having a small community this group around you who's supporting you that we call startup masterminds thanks for joining me today I'll see you in the next video [Music]

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