said Chet Kapur, chairman and CEO of DataStax.
data stacks
When Chet Kapoor was a teenager, he dreamed of working for tech mogul Steve Jobs.
One day, that dream became a reality when Kapur was hired as an intern at NeXT, the software company founded by Jobs.
“Steve was this iconic figure, but I didn’t know him…I was the guy who bought coffee for the people who made it,” said Steve, now at DataStax, a generative AI company. Kapur, who serves as CEO, told CNBC Make It.
“I was one step below the person who opened the door, but it didn’t matter because I was working 20 yards away from him.” [Jobs] every day. “
Mr. Kapoor rose to fame in Silicon Valley as CEO of Apigee, a cloud software company that Google acquired in 2016 in a $625 million deal. He then held leadership positions at companies such as Google and IBM.
However, he attributes much of his success to his early experience working as an intern for Jobs.
Mr. Kapur explained that he would focus more on the questions Mr. Jobs would ask during the all-hands meeting than anything else. This is because we can gain insight into Mr. Jobs’ thought process.
“That exposure was really phenomenal,” he said. “I attribute much of my success to his first two or three years at NeXT.”
“This is the person I want to go and work for.”
Ms. Kapoor, 57, was born in Kolkata, India, and recalls her mother taking her to the British Council library so she could read while she went shopping.
“I read a book called ‘Little Kingdom’ in 1983. It was written by a man named Michael Moritz,” said Kapur. “This book was about two Steves, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. It was all about Apple. I was 15 or 16 years old, so I was impressed.”
“I thought, ‘This is the person I want to go and work for,’ and I really wanted to come and work with Steve Jobs and work with him,” he added.
Cupertino, California – April 8: Apple CEO Steve Jobs made this point during a Q&A session during Apple’s special event on April 8, 2010 in Cupertino, California. Mr. Jobs announced the new iPhone OS4 software. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Justin Sullivan | Getty
Inspired by the book, Ms. Kapoor took computer classes and began applying to universities in the United States. He eventually enrolled at Arizona State University in 1986.
Meanwhile, Jobs left Apple and founded a new software company called NeXT in 1985. Then came the opportunity for Kapoor to make his dream come true.
NeXT started a program called Campus Consultants and began hiring students from the university to work part-time. Mr. Kapoor became part of it in his 1988 year.
The company asked Mr. Kapoor and a select few students to join the company as interns after graduation, where they rotated through a variety of odd jobs.
“I started working at NeXT five years after imagining that I would be working for Steve,” Kapur said.
Jobs fostered a “strong engineering culture”
Kapur said Jobs created a very “product- and design-centric” environment at NeXT.
“It all starts with what is the user experience? How do users interact with this? That’s what’s made a huge difference in the world. The geeky focus on that is really amazing. It was a thing,” said Mr. Kapur.
This is reminiscent of Apple’s culture, and Jobs said in a 1985 interview with Newsweek magazine that he enjoys “creating things.”
“What I do best is find groups of talented people and build something with them,” Jobs said. “My philosophy is that it all starts with a great product.”
While iPhone users will just see a new, clean interface, there’s a lot of “serious engineering” going on behind the scenes, Kapur explained.
“It all starts with a very strong engineering culture,” he said. “He had a very strict, methodical schedule, because otherwise he would just let it go and it would become a science project. He was very passionate about that. .”
