Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
ENTER SCULLEY
The Pepsi Challenge
With John Sculley, 1984
The Courtship
Mike Markkula had never wanted to be Apple’s president. He liked designing his new houses, 
flying his private plane, and living high off his stock options; he did not relish adjudicating 
conflict or curating high-maintenance egos. He had stepped into the role reluctantly, after he felt 
compelled to ease out Mike Scott, and he promised his wife the gig would be temporary. By the 
end of 1982, after almost two years, she gave him an order: Find a replacement right away.
Jobs knew that he was not ready to run the company himself, even though there was a part of 
him that wanted to try. Despite his arrogance, he could be self-aware. Markkula agreed; he told 
Jobs that he was still a bit too rough-edged and immature to be Apple’s president. So they 
launched a search for someone from the outside.
The person they most wanted was Don Estridge, who had built IBM’s personal computer 
division from scratch and launched a PC that, even though Jobs and his team disparaged it, was 
now outselling Apple’s. Estridge had sheltered his division in Boca Raton, Florida, safely 
removed from the corporate mentality of Armonk, New York. Like Jobs, he was driven and 
inspiring, but unlike Jobs, he had the ability to allow others to think that his brilliant ideas were 
their own. Jobs flew to Boca Raton with the offer of a $1 million salary and a $1 million signing 
bonus, but Estridge turned him down. He was not the type who would jump ship to join the 
enemy. He also enjoyed being part of the establishment, a member of the Navy rather than a 
pirate. He was discomforted by Jobs’s tales of ripping off the phone company. When asked where 
he worked, he loved to be able to answer “IBM.”
So Jobs and Markkula enlisted Gerry Roche, a gregarious corporate headhunter, to find 
someone else. They decided not to focus on technology executives; what they needed was a 
consumer marketer who knew advertising and had the corporate polish that would play well on 
Wall Street. Roche set his sights on the hottest consumer marketing wizard of the moment, John 
Sculley, president of the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo, whose Pepsi Challenge campaign had 
been an advertising and publicity triumph. When Jobs gave a talk to Stanford business students, he 
heard good things about Sculley, who had spoken to the class earlier. So he told Roche he would 
be happy to meet him.
Sculley’s background was very different from Jobs’s. His mother was an Upper East Side 
Manhattan matron who wore white gloves when she went out, and his father was a proper Wall 

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Street lawyer. Sculley was sent off to St. Mark’s School, then got his undergraduate degree from 
Brown and a business degree from Wharton. He had risen through the ranks at PepsiCo as an 
innovative marketer and advertiser, with little passion for product development or information 
technology.
Sculley flew to Los Angeles to spend Christmas with his two 
teenage children from a previous marriage. He took them to visit a computer store, where he 
was struck by how poorly the products were marketed. When his kids asked why he was so 
interested, he said he was planning to go up to Cupertino to meet Steve Jobs. They were totally 
blown away. They had grown up among movie stars, but to them Jobs was a true celebrity. It 
made Sculley take more seriously the prospect of being hired as his boss.
When he arrived at Apple headquarters, Sculley was startled by the unassuming offices and 
casual atmosphere. “Most people were less formally dressed than PepsiCo’s maintenance staff,” 
he noted. Over lunch Jobs picked quietly at his salad, but when Sculley declared that most 
executives found computers more trouble than they were worth, Jobs clicked into evangelical 
mode. “We want to change the way people use computers,” he said.
On the flight home Sculley outlined his thoughts. The result was an eight-page memo on 
marketing computers to consumers and business executives. It was a bit sophomoric in parts, filled 
with underlined phrases, diagrams, and boxes, but it revealed his newfound enthusiasm for 
figuring out ways to sell something more interesting than soda. Among his recommendations: 
“Invest in in-store merchandizing that romances the consumer with Apple’s potential to enrich 
their life!” He was still reluctant to leave Pepsi, but Jobs intrigued him. “I was taken by this 
young, impetuous genius and thought it would be fun to get to know him a little better,” he 
recalled.
So Sculley agreed to meet again when Jobs next came to New York, which happened to be for 
the January 1983 Lisa introduction at the Carlyle Hotel. After the full day of press sessions, the 
Apple team was surprised to see an unscheduled visitor come into the suite. Jobs loosened his tie 
and introduced Sculley as the president of Pepsi and a potential big corporate customer. As John 
Couch demonstrated the Lisa, Jobs chimed in with bursts of commentary, sprinkled with his 
favorite words, “revolutionary” and “incredible,” claiming it would change the nature of human 
interaction with computers.
They then headed off to the Four Seasons restaurant, a shimmering haven of elegance and 
power. As Jobs ate a special vegan meal, Sculley described Pepsi’s marketing successes. The 
Pepsi Generation 
campaign, he said, sold not a product but a lifestyle and an optimistic outlook. “I think Apple’s 
got a chance to create an Apple Generation.” Jobs enthusiastically agreed. The Pepsi Challenge 
campaign, in contrast, focused on the product; it combined ads, events, and public relations to stir 
up buzz. The ability to turn the introduction of a new product into a moment of national 
excitement was, Jobs noted, what he and Regis McKenna wanted to do at Apple.
When they finished talking, it was close to midnight. “This has been one of the most exciting 
evenings in my whole life,” Jobs said as Sculley walked him back to the Carlyle. “I can’t tell you 
how much fun I’ve had.” When he finally got home to Greenwich, Connecticut, that night, Sculley 
had trouble sleeping. Engaging with Jobs was a lot more fun than negotiating with bottlers. “It 
stimulated me, roused my long-held desire to be an architect of ideas,” he later noted. The next 
morning Roche called Sculley. “I don’t know what you guys did last night, but let me tell you, 
Steve Jobs is ecstatic,” he said.
And so the courtship continued, with Sculley playing hard but not impossible to get. Jobs flew 
east for a visit one Saturday in February and took a limo up to Greenwich. He found Sculley’s 
newly built mansion ostentatious, with its floor-to-ceiling windows, but he admired the three 
hundred-pound custom-made oak doors that were so carefully hung and balanced that they swung 
open with the touch of a finger. “Steve was fascinated by that because he is, as I am, a 
perfectionist,” Sculley recalled. Thus began the somewhat unhealthy process of a star-struck 
Sculley perceiving in Jobs qualities that he fancied in himself.
Sculley usually drove a Cadillac, but, sensing his guest’s taste, he borrowed his wife’s 
Mercedes 450SL convertible to take Jobs to see Pepsi’s 144-acre corporate headquarters, which 
was as lavish as Apple’s was austere. To Jobs, it epitomized the difference between the feisty new 

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digital economy and the Fortune 500 corporate establishment. A winding drive led through 
manicured fields and a sculpture garden (including pieces by Rodin, Moore, Calder, and 
Giacometti) to a concrete-and-glass building designed by Edward Durell Stone. Sculley’s huge 
office had a Persian rug, nine windows, a small private garden, a hideaway study, and its own 
bathroom. When Jobs saw the corporate fitness center, he was astonished that executives had an 
area, 
with its own whirlpool, separate from that of the regular employees. “That’s weird,” he said. 
Sculley hastened to agree. “As a matter of fact, I was against it, and I go over and work out 
sometimes in the employees’ area,” he said.
Their next meeting was a few weeks later in Cupertino, when Sculley stopped on his way back 
from a Pepsi bottlers’ convention in Hawaii. Mike Murray, the Macintosh marketing manager, 
took charge of preparing the team for the visit, but he was not clued in on the real agenda. 
“PepsiCo could end up purchasing literally thousands of Macs over the next few years,” he 
exulted in a memo to the Macintosh staff. “During the past year, Mr. Sculley and a certain Mr. 
Jobs have become friends. Mr. Sculley is considered to be one of the best marketing heads in the 
big leagues; as such, let’s give him a good time here.”
Jobs wanted Sculley to share his excitement about the Macintosh. “This product means more to 
me than anything I’ve done,” he said. “I want you to be the first person outside of Apple to see it.” 
He dramatically pulled the prototype out of a vinyl bag and gave a demonstration. Sculley found 
Jobs as memorable as his machine. “He seemed more a showman than a businessman. Every 
move seemed calculated, as if it was rehearsed, to create an occasion of the moment.”
Jobs had asked Hertzfeld and the gang to prepare a special screen display for Sculley’s 
amusement. “He’s really smart,” Jobs said. “You wouldn’t believe how smart he is.” The 
explanation that Sculley might buy a lot of Macintoshes for Pepsi “sounded a little bit fishy to 
me,” Hertzfeld recalled, but he and Susan Kare created a screen of Pepsi caps and cans that danced 
around with the Apple logo. Hertzfeld was so excited he began waving his arms around during the 
demo, but Sculley seemed underwhelmed. “He asked a few questions, but he didn’t seem all that 
interested,” Hertzfeld recalled. He never ended up warming to Sculley. “He was incredibly phony, 
a complete poseur,” he later said. “He pretended to be interested in technology, but he wasn’t. He 
was a marketing guy, and that is what marketing guys are: paid poseurs.”
Matters came to a head when Jobs visited New York in March 1983 and was able to convert the 
courtship into a blind and blinding romance. “I really think you’re the guy,” Jobs said as they 
walked through Central Park. “I want you to come and work with me. I can 
learn so much from you.” Jobs, who had cultivated father figures in the past, knew just how to 
play to Sculley’s ego and insecurities. It worked. “I was smitten by him,” Sculley later admitted. 
“Steve was one of the brightest people I’d ever met. I shared with him a passion for ideas.”
Sculley, who was interested in art history, steered them toward the Metropolitan Museum for a 
little test of whether Jobs was really willing to learn from others. “I wanted to see how well he 
could take coaching in a subject where he had no background,” he recalled. As they strolled 
through the Greek and Roman antiquities, Sculley expounded on the difference between the 
Archaic sculpture of the sixth century 
B.C.
and the Periclean sculptures a century later. Jobs, who 
loved to pick up historical nuggets he never learned in college, seemed to soak it in. “I gained a 
sense that I could be a teacher to a brilliant student,” Sculley recalled. Once again he indulged the 
conceit that they were alike: “I saw in him a mirror image of my younger self. I, too, was 
impatient, stubborn, arrogant, impetuous. My mind exploded with ideas, often to the exclusion of 
everything else. I, too, was intolerant of those who couldn’t live up to my demands.”
As they continued their long walk, Sculley confided that on vacations he went to the Left Bank 
in Paris to draw in his sketchbook; if he hadn’t become a businessman, he would be an artist. Jobs 
replied that if he weren’t working with computers, he could see himself as a poet in Paris. They 
continued down Broadway to Colony Records on Forty-ninth Street, where Jobs showed Sculley 
the music he liked, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Ella Fitzgerald, and the Windham Hill jazz 
artists. Then they walked all the way back up to the San Remo on Central Park West and Seventy-
fourth, where Jobs was planning to buy a two-story tower penthouse apartment.
The consummation occurred outside the penthouse on one of the terraces, with Sculley sticking 
close to the wall because he was afraid of heights. First they discussed money. “I told him I 

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needed $1 million in salary, $1 million for a sign-up bonus,” said Sculley. Jobs claimed that would 
be doable. “Even if I have to pay for it out of my own pocket,” he said. “We’ll have to solve those 
problems, because you’re the best person I’ve ever met. I know you’re perfect for Apple, and 
Apple deserves the best.” He added that never before had he worked for someone he 
really respected, but he knew that Sculley was the person who could teach him the most. Jobs 
gave him his unblinking stare.
Sculley uttered one last demurral, a token suggestion that maybe they should just be friends and 
he could offer Jobs advice from the sidelines. “Any time you’re in New York, I’d love to spend 
time with you.” He later recounted the climactic moment: “Steve’s head dropped as he stared at 
his feet. After a weighty, uncomfortable pause, he issued a challenge that would haunt me for 
days. ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to 
change the world?’”
Sculley felt as if he had been punched in the stomach. There was no response possible other 
than to acquiesce. “He had an uncanny ability to always get what he wanted, to size up a person 
and know exactly what to say to reach a person,” Sculley recalled. “I realized for the first time in 
four months that I couldn’t say no.” The winter sun was beginning to set. They left the apartment 
and walked back across the park to the Carlyle.