"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"
About this Quote
Jobs is doing something he loved: turning a moral claim into an operational one. He starts with a suspicion that still reads as painfully current - that startups can be performance art for liquidity events. But the punchline isn’t virtue signaling about greed; it’s a practical threat disguised as advice. The market won’t reward tourists, because the work will eject them first.
The line "they won't luck into it" attacks the Silicon Valley myth of accidental genius. Jobs reframes success as endurance, not inspiration. That’s a quiet flex from someone who watched companies die from a thousand small failures: recruiting the wrong team, shipping too late, running out of cash, losing nerve in the middle of a brutal product cycle. His subtext is that building a company is less like having an idea and more like surviving an environment designed to grind down anyone who isn’t obsessed.
"Passion" here isn’t the Instagram version. It’s a stand-in for identity-level commitment: the kind that makes you argue about pixels, redo prototypes, and keep going when the story stops being glamorous. Coming from Jobs, that word carries a double edge. It’s both sincere and self-justifying, a way to sanctify intensity - even cruelty - as a necessary ingredient of greatness.
The context is late-90s/early-2000s startup culture and Jobs’s own mythology: a founder who was fired, returned, and rebuilt Apple by sheer force of will. He’s warning that if your primary goal is money, the inevitable misery of execution will expose you. Passion isn’t just romantic; it’s the only fuel that lasts long enough to reach product-market fit.
The line "they won't luck into it" attacks the Silicon Valley myth of accidental genius. Jobs reframes success as endurance, not inspiration. That’s a quiet flex from someone who watched companies die from a thousand small failures: recruiting the wrong team, shipping too late, running out of cash, losing nerve in the middle of a brutal product cycle. His subtext is that building a company is less like having an idea and more like surviving an environment designed to grind down anyone who isn’t obsessed.
"Passion" here isn’t the Instagram version. It’s a stand-in for identity-level commitment: the kind that makes you argue about pixels, redo prototypes, and keep going when the story stops being glamorous. Coming from Jobs, that word carries a double edge. It’s both sincere and self-justifying, a way to sanctify intensity - even cruelty - as a necessary ingredient of greatness.
The context is late-90s/early-2000s startup culture and Jobs’s own mythology: a founder who was fired, returned, and rebuilt Apple by sheer force of will. He’s warning that if your primary goal is money, the inevitable misery of execution will expose you. Passion isn’t just romantic; it’s the only fuel that lasts long enough to reach product-market fit.
Quote Details
| Topic | Startup |
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