But the most important lesson to learn from Jobs has nothing to do with aesthetics.
The greatest thing Jobs designed was his business.
Apple imagined and executed definitive multi-year plans to create new products and distribute them effectively.
Forget minimum viable products.
Ever since he started Apple in 1976, Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning,
not by listening to focus groups or copying other people's success.
This is one of my favorite sentences in this entire section.
Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.
When the first iPod was released in October 2001, industry analysts couldn't see much more than, quote,
a nice feature for Macintosh users that doesn't make any difference to the rest of the world.
Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices.
But that secret was invisible to most people.
One look at the company's stock chart since then shows the harvest of this multi-year plan.
The power of planning explains the difficulty of valuing private companies.
When a big company makes an offer to acquire a successful startup, it almost always offers too much or too little.
Founders only sell when they have no more concrete visions for the company.
Definitive founders with robust plans don't sell.
When Yahoo offered to buy Facebook for a billion dollars in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it.
But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced, OK, guys, this is just a formality.
It shouldn't take more than 10 minutes.