- When Steve Jobs was just 12 years old, he called up HP cofounder Bill Hewlett to ask for spare parts to build a frequency counter. That phone call got him the tools, and a job. His philosophy remained invaluable to his growth in founding Apple.
At the age of 12, most people are worrying about their school crush or a science project that’s due next week. But Steve Jobs had his mind on something else as a tween: spare parts needed to build a frequency counter. So he found Hewlett Packard (HP) cofounder Bill Hewlett’s phone number in the yellow pages and called him up for a favor.
“I never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help. I always call them up,” Jobs said in a 1994 interview, archived by the Silicon Valley Historical Association.
Jobs recalled that Hewlett laughed when Jobs introduced himself as a 12-year-old highschooler in need of the parts. But ultimately, he offered him the components—and a job. The HP cofounder was so impressed by his drive that he set him up with a summer job at the company, putting nuts and bolts together on frequency counters.
“He got me a job in the place they built them, and I was in heaven,” Jobs said. “I’ve never found anyone who says ‘no,’ or hung up the phone when I called. I just asked.”
That opportunity was the launchpad for Jobs’ wider career success, eventually cofounding $3.5 trillion company Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in 1976. And Jobs has carried that learning experience with him, saying he had tried to repay that debt of gratitude by helping others when they were in need of an opportunity.
The hardest part for many might be plucking up the courage to reach out—it can be daunting to hit up a company and hope that a leader is able to give an opportunity. And it could seem like the late 1960’s, when Jobs reached out to Hewlett about the spare parts, could have been an easier time to get that support. After all, most Fortune 500 CEOs’ phone numbers are extremely tricky to find now. But Jobs contends that leaders are more willing to help than people may expect.
“Most people never pick up the phone and call, most people never ask. And that’s what separates sometimes the people that do things from the people that just dream about them,” Jobs said. “You gotta act. And you’ve got to be willing to fail.”
Billionaires taking a chance, and finding early success
Jobs wasn’t the only billionaire CEO who jump-started their career as a teenager chasing their dreams of success.
Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates used to sneak out of the house when he was 13 to practice coding at a local company, Computer Center Corp., across town. At the time, computers weren’t a household staple yet. So he’d be at the Seattle-based business until the wee hours of the morning, sometimes as late as 2 a.m., testing out his own bespoke code in exchange for his services fixing programming bugs for Computer Center Corp.
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Without that access and early on-hands experience, Gates said he might not have advanced forward in his career and launched a $3.1 billion tech company.
“We were kids…none of us had any real computer experience,” Gates wrote in his memoir, Source Code: My Beginnings. “Without that lucky break of free computer time—call it my first 500 hours—the next 9,500 hours might not have happened at all.”
Warren Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, also discovered his entrepreneurial passion early on in life. At the age of six he started selling gum in his neighborhood; when Buffett was 13, he got his first job as a paperboy—and even deducted the bike from his taxes. He got the itch to start his own company, so he launched a pinball business as a teenager for just $25. It later sold for over $1,000 after just one year. It may pale in comparison to Berkshire Hathaway’s $989 billion market cap—but it laid the foundation for him to be the worshipped entrepreneur he is today.
