It’s just about a week since Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s latest gizmo, the iPad, and excitement in the media and throughout social networking websites has barely died down.
Jobs himself has assumed a nearly-god like status among techies and business gurus in the last decade.Interestingly, there are many details in Jobs’s own biography that entrepreneurs can take inspiration from. It is particularly his early life, when Jobs was a young entrepreneur looking to launch a fledgling computer company.
Reading through the pre-business life of Jobs, one doesn’t get the image of a fledgling corporate guru. Instead, one sees Jobs as a bit of a hippie. He did two years at Reed College, a small liberal arts college in Oregon, before dropping out. Then he went to India satisfy his curiosity about eastern religion. It was only when he returned to America and started a computer club called Homebrew Computer Club with Steve Wozniak that wheels for Apple started rolling.
After launching their start-up called Apple Computer Company selling circuit boards Jobs and Wozniak became fascinated by the possibility of creating and marketing personal computers. The start-up money they raised was their own, but their idea was golden, as we know now. Personal computing was an untapped niche in computing and Apple’s vision of its potentials has radically changed the way people live their lives now.
It’s important for entrepreneurs to keep in mind that even Apple was once only an idea. Apple’s technological advances may be what define it, but it took a man like Jobs who had vision and belief to make the company what it is. Everyone with a new business concept should look to a man like Jobs, who has no college degree, and find inspiration.
He advised Stanford grads in 2005 to “stay hungry and stay foolish”. And we think that remains salient advice for those looking to launch their own business at the current time.