43 Steve Jobs Quotes on Business, Startups and Innovation

Even though he is often presented in the public as a college-dropout billionaire who built his empire from a garage, Steve Jobs was much more than that. A tremendous visionary, innovator, speaker, and entrepreneur.

Thanks to his numerous speeches and lectures, we are now able to gain insight into his daily work ethics and his views on the matters of life, business, and innovation.

As we have already tried to analyze Apple’s marketing strategy and show you how to apply some of their secrets to your own business, we now present you with 43 Steve Jobs quotes on business, startup life, and innovation.

Steve Jobs Quotes on Business

1. “I’m a tool builder. That’s how I think of myself. I want to build really good tools that I know in my gut and my heart will be valuable. And then, whatever happens, is… you can’t really predict exactly what will happen, but you can feel the direction that we’re going. And that’s about as close as you can get. Then you just standback  and get out of the way, and these things take on a life of their own.”

Steve Jobs quotes

2. On starting Apple with Steve Wozniak: “We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a 2 billion company with over 4000 employees.”

3. “I’m a long-term kind of person.”

4. “Fortunately, my training has been in doing things that take a long time. You know? I was at Apple 10 years. I would have preferred to be there the rest of my life. So I’m a long-term kind of person.”

5. “I have been trained to think in units of time that are measured in several years. With what I’ve chosen to do with my life, you know, even a small thing takes a few years. To do anything of magnitude takes at least five years, more likely seven or eight. Rightfully or wrongfully, that’s how I think.”

6. “I remember many late nights coming out of the Mac building when I would have the most incredibly powerful feelings about my life.”

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7. “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other, and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”

8. “My dream is that every person in the world will have their own Apple computer. To do that, we’ve got to be a great marketing company.”

9. “I’ll tell you what our goal is: our goal is to make the best personal computers in the world and to make products we are proud to sell and recommend to our family and friends, and, we want to do that at the lowest price we can.”

10. “None of the really bright people I knew in college went into politics. They all sensed that, in terms of making a change in the world, politics wasn’t the place to be in the late Sixties and Seventies. All of them are in business now, which is funny, because they were the same people who trekked off to India or who tried in one way or another to find some sort of truth about life.”

Steve Jobs Quotes on Startups

11. “We used to dream about this stuff. Now we get to build it. It’s pretty great.”

12. “I think this is the start of something really big. Sometimes that first step is the hardest one, and we’ve just taken it.”

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13. “The smallest company in the world can look as large as the largest company on the web.”

14. “One of the keys to Apple is Apple’s an incredibly collaborative company. You know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero. We have no committees. We are organized like a start-up. One person’s in charge of iPhone OS software, one person’s in charge of Mac hardware, one person’s in charge of iPhone hardware engineering, another person’s in charge of worldwide marketing, another person’s in charge of operations. We are organized like a startup. We are the biggest startup on the planet.”

15. “Another priority was to make Apple more entrepreneurial and startup-like. So we immediately reorganized, drastically narrowed the product line, and changed compensation for senior managers so they get a lot of stock but no cash bonuses. The upshot is that the place feels more like a young company.”

16. “But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light – that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.”

17. “We are aware that we are doing something significant. We’re here at the beginning of it and we’re able to shape how it goes.”

18. “No, we don’t know where it will lead. We just know there’s something much bigger than any of us here.”

19. “Most of the time, we’re taking things. Neither you nor I made the clothes we wear; we don’t make the food or grow the foods we eat; we use a language that was developed by other people; we use another society’s mathematics. Very rarely do we get a chance to put something back into that pool. I think we have that opportunity now.”

20. “Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.”

21. “We’re trying to use the swiftness and creativity in a younger-style company, and yet bring to bear the tremendous resources of a company the size of Apple to do large projects that you could never handle at a startup.”

22. “It’s hard to tell with these Internet startups if they’re really interested in building companies or if they’re just interested in the money. I can tell you, though: If they don’t really want to build a company, they won’t luck into it. That’s because it’s so hard that if you don’t have a passion, you’ll give up.”

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23. “Apple is built on refugees from other companies. These are the extremely bright individual contributors who were troublemakers at other companies.”

24. “We have wonderful arguments. […] If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise, good people don’t stay.”

Steve Jobs Quotes on Innovation

25. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”

26. “I contribute ideas, sure. Why would I be there if I didn’t?”

27. “We attract a different kind of person – a person who doesn’t want to wait five or ten years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her. Someone who really wants to get a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe.”

28. “I’ve always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes.”

29. “It’s very easy to take credit for the thinking. The doing is more concrete. But somebody, it’s very easy to say “Oh, I thought of these three years ago”. But usually when you dig a little deeper, you find that the people that really did it were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems as well.”

30. “Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.”

31. “The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.”

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32. “The doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person.”

33. “Leonardo [da Vinci] was the artist but he also mixed all his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. He knew about pigments, knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together, the art and the science, the thinking and the doing, was what resulted in the exceptional result.”

34. “Actually, making an insanely great product has a lot to do with the process of making the product, how you learn things and adopt new ideas and throw out old ideas.”

35. “You always have to keep pushing to innovate. Dylan could have sung protest songs forever and probably made a lot of money, but he didn’t. He had to move on, and when he did, by going electric in 1965, he alienated a lot of people. His 1966 Europe tour was his greatest.

The Beatles were the same way. They kept evolving, moving, refining their art. That’s what I’ve always tried to do – keep moving. Otherwise, as Dylan says, if you are not busy being born, you’re busy dying.”

36. “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

37. “The people who go to see our movies are trusting us with something very important – their time and their imagination. So in order to respect that trust, we have to keep changing; we have to challenge ourselves and try to surprise our audiences with something new every time.”

43 Steve Jobs Quotes on Business, Startups and Innovation

38. “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy.”

39. “Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.”

40. “It’s ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.”

41. “You can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big thing is. There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse’.”

42. “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations.”

43. “The theme of the campaign is ‘Think different’. It’s honoring the people who think different, and who move this world forward.”

If you’re looking for more inspiration (or want a second, non-Steve Jobs opinion), we have prepared an exhaustive selection of marketing and sales quotes to inspire your business efforts.

Struggling with social media and customer relations? Maybe our selection of social media and customer service quotes will get you inspired.

In case our selection of Steve Jobs quotes has inspired you to make some changes in the way you approach business, then you should definitely consider using online quizzes in your marketing strategy, as they are the perfect combination of creativity and innovation Jobs was talking about.

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