Jony Ive

Brian Chesky says the pandemic was the first moment he had to be a good chief executive, because it was life or death. Before that, being better at the job was a nice-to-have that might have made Airbnb grow faster and feel less chaotic. In the crisis, either he was a good chief executive and the company survived, or he was a bad one and the company died. Guy Raz, earlier in the episode, quotes him from 2020 saying Airbnb lost 80% of the business, and Chesky puts that drop at eight weeks. He was about 38 or 39, about 12 or 13 years in, and he says he is good in a crisis.

Hands-on work, which he calls founder mode, came only from that crisis. He had not thought about Steve Jobs for eight or

David Senra, reading Leander Kahney, says Jony Ive almost quit Apple before Steve Jobs returned. Only a few months after Ive was put in charge of the design group, he was thinking of leaving. Apple was not innovating. It had lost its identity and looked to the competition for leadership.

Before Ive could quit, John Rubenstein talked him out of it. Rubenstein was his new boss, just recruited as head of hardware, the same job he had held with Steve Jobs at NeXT. He gave Ive a raise and told him they would struggle through where the company was, then make history, and that design would be valued at Apple.

Ive was still ready to leave. He sat toward the back of the room, thinking about returni

David Senra, reading Leander Kahney, says 63 million iPads were sold in 2011 versus 30 million netbooks. A single product outsold an entire product category.

In 2007, other companies were producing netbooks, and netbooks accounted for about 20 percent of the laptop market. Apple never seriously considered making one. Steve Jobs's reason was that netbooks are not better than anything. They are just cheap laptops. Jony Ive's response was to focus resources on developing the iPad. He proposed that the tablets in his lab could be Apple's answer to the netbook. He suggested a tablet was basically an inexpensive laptop without a keyboard. Refusing to make a me-too product is a stance Steve Jobs a

David Senra, reading Leander Kahney, says Apple's designers spend 10% of their time on traditional industrial design and 90% of their time working with manufacturing to implement the ideas. Traditional design means coming up with ideas, drawing, making models, and brainstorming. The rest is figuring out how to build what they drew.

Jony Ive spends months away from his family in China to manufacture the designs. He wants no limitations and starts from the ideal product, then works backwards. He tells suppliers to imagine a bucket of money in his hand and to pull out as much as they want to make it happen.

In 2003, a SARS outbreak quarantined him at Foxconn. He lived in a dormitory there for

David Senra, reading Leander Kahney, says the first reaction to the iPod was muted. The audience learned the price was $499 and the player worked only on the Mac. One early reviewer said the iPod stood for idiots price our devices. Sales stayed modest until two years later, when the iPod was made fully compatible with Windows. Apple went on to sell 450 million iPods.

The team loved music and targeted a market full of second-rate products. One of Steve Jobs's talents was spotting markets filled with second-rate products. Early MP3 players on the market functioned poorly. Jony Ive's design effort was to simplify, remove, and reduce. The team were customer number one, building a product they w

David Senra, reading Leander Kahney, says Jony Ive put a handle on the first iMac so a person would touch the machine and form a bond with it. The handle was not for carrying the computer.

Apple was running out of money, and the iMac had to be on the market in a matter of months or Apple would go out of business. Before the iMac, hardware engineering and mechanical engineering drove design. They set the enclosure size from engineering constraints, and Jony Ive's team only developed skins to wrap around it. On the return to Apple, that order was turned on its head. People were not comfortable with technology. If someone is scared of a machine, they will not touch it. Jony Ive could see his m

David Senra, reading Leander Kahney, says Jony Ive called the computer industry very inhuman and very cold because of an obsession with product attributes you can measure empirically. Design is how a product works, not only what it looks like and feels like.

On his return, Jobs cut back so his A-team, the company's best designers, engineers, programmers, and marketers, could concentrate on innovative products. Touring Apple's design studio, he was bowled over by the creativity and rigor, and by eye-catching mock-ups the previous regime had been too timid to consider. He and Ive saw eye to eye immediately and were on the same wavelength. Ive suddenly understood why he loved the company. His

David Senra, reading Leander Kahney, says Steve Jobs cut Apple to four computers because Apple could not be a profitable $12 billion company or a profitable $10 billion company, but it could be a profitable $6 billion company.

Jobs drew annual revenue on a whiteboard, a drop from $12 billion a year to $10 billion and then $7 billion, then erased the board and drew a two-by-two grid. Across the top he wrote consumer and professional. Down the side he wrote portable and desktop. Apple would sell only four machines: two notebooks and two desktops, two aimed at professionals and two aimed at consumers. The cut doomed dozens of software projects and eliminated almost every product from the hardw

David Senra, reading Leander Kahney, says Jony Ive accepted a full-time job at Apple at 27 because he was really only interested in design and was neither interested nor good at building a business.

At Tangerine he wanted to spend every minute designing and making objects. Companies said they hated the work, and in many cases they would rip the heart and soul out of the designs. He disliked running a business because he had to sell jobs, sell himself, and sell the firm. The team spent up to 90% of its time selling services. He loved to design and found the concessions needed to build the business difficult. Bob Brunner tried to recruit him multiple times. Apple hired Tangerine for design wo

David Senra, reading Leander Kahney, says Jony Ive faked a busy design studio at Tangerine by stacking the room with old prototypes whenever a client visited. Jony Ive quit and started the design firm at 23 as one of four partners. The young startup had few resources and had to hustle.

The partners worked on everything from power tools to combs and televisions to toilets. The work was consistent, but not especially challenging or prestigious. To attract and keep clients, they copied a trick from RWG, where Jony Ive had worked before. When executives from a car company came to visit, the RWG designers drove their own cars into the studio, put sheets over them, and said the cars were for a se