Fifteen years without Steve Jobs — the eulogy I wrote the day after
Fifteen years ago this week, we lost Steve Jobs. In India, where I was, the news came on Dussehra — the day our calendar sets aside to insist that good is never finally defeated. I have never been able to hold those two things in the same morning. I just went numb.
Four months earlier, I had been in the room. On 6 June 2011, I sat in a hall in San Francisco and watched him walk on stage to introduce iCloud, iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion. It was his last keynote. He was thin; he spoke softly; and the whole room still leaned toward him the way it always had. I had flown in from Lucknow to be there, and I did not know I was saying goodbye.
What I wrote then
The day after he died, still numb, I wrote a note to my team and posted it on our company blog. I was a young founder, my English imperfect, my grief anything but. Here is the heart of it, in my own words from October 2011:
"My mind has been numb, as I could not accept the fact that the man I have idolized since my childhood was no more… Steve was the greatest entrepreneur, visionary and CEO of our times. He created Apple and all the products which changed the world for the better."
Fifteen years later, I would not change the feeling in a single line of it.
What I admired — then and now
What I admired in him was never the products. It was the refusal. He built one of the world's great companies before he was thirty, was pushed out of it, and came back twelve years later to build something larger still — not by winning over the people who had doubted him, but by outlasting them. As I put it then:
"People doubted his vision, ridiculed him, but he always had a belief in his vision to change the world, and through sheer determination, did it."
He would hold a thing back, cut it, delay it, and absorb the criticism — rather than ship something that did not yet work. He trusted his own eye when no one else would. And there was a strange mercy in the timing: he left at the summit, his work finished and finally understood, on the one day of the year that is about good refusing to lose.
What I'd add now
Here is the one thing I would add, fifteen years on — and I'll be honest that a founder is adding it, because anyone who knows me knows I've been a salesman my whole life and I'm not going to pretend otherwise today.
The standard he held — don't call a thing done until you can prove it works; earn the trust the name on it implies — turned out to be the whole of what I've spent my career trying to do. In 2011 the hard problem was getting your files to sync. Today it's getting AI past a good demo and into something that actually holds up in production, on real data, when no one is watching. That gap is exactly the work we do at NewGenApps, and yes — I hope you'll remember that.
But mostly, this week, I wanted to do what I did fifteen years ago, with better grammar and a clearer head: say thank you.
"Steve, the NewGenApps team and I are forever grateful to you. Yours was a life worth living."
I still believe he's somewhere ahead of us, impatient with the design of things, sketching a better one for the rest of us.
Rest, Steve.
— Anurag Rastogi, founder, NewGenApps (building, and still building, since 2008)