Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955 and adopted at birth by a working-class couple, growing up in the heart of Silicon Valley. His adoptive father tinkering with machinery and electronic parts in the garage was his earliest inspiration; in his youth, on this land that was giving birth to an electronic revolution, he became fascinated with technology and met the electronics prodigy Wozniak, a few years his senior—two like-minded young men planting the seeds of the story to come.

There was always a seeker's quality about him. He dropped out of Reed College after just one semester, yet continued to audit courses that interested him; among them, that calligraphy class later unexpectedly shaped his almost obsessive attention to typefaces and typography. After dropping out, he traveled to India and drew close to Zen Buddhism, cultivating a preference for minimalism and focus. These seemingly business-irrelevant wanderings ultimately settled into his aesthetic sense for products.

In 1976, he and Wozniak founded Apple in a garage. The Apple II became one of the earliest hugely successful personal computers, and the Macintosh, with its graphical interface, was even more stunning at the time. Yet brilliance also came at a price—he lost a power struggle with the board and was, remarkably, cast out of the very company he had founded. This failure could have crushed a person, but it became another starting point in his life.

In his years of dormancy, he founded NeXT and bought the computer animation division that would later become Pixar. Toy Story made Pixar an instant legend, while NeXT's technology became the foundation of the new operating system after his return to Apple. In 1997, a near-bankrupt Apple invited him back; he cut away the bloated product lines and, with a translucent iMac, brought the brand back from the brink.

The true legend then unfolded: the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad appeared one after another, and time and again he redefined music, the phone, and mobile computing, pushing digital life into the palms of hundreds of millions. Even during his long battle with a pancreatic tumor, he still calmly unveiled new products on stage and left behind at Stanford the maxim "stay hungry, stay foolish." In 2011 he resigned as CEO and died of illness that same year, at just fifty-six. What he left behind was not merely a company, but a product faith that fused technology, the humanities, and aesthetics into one.