When Steve Jobs adopted "thinkdifferent" as Apple's mantra in the late 1990s, the company's ads featuredAlbert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Amelia Earhart and a constellation of otherstarry-eyed oddballs who reshaped society.
Nolan Bushnell never appeared in those tributes, even thoughApple was riffing on an iconoclastic philosophy he embraced while running videogame pioneer Atari in the early 1970s. Atari's refusal to be corralled by thestatus quo was one of the reasons Jobs went to work there in 1974 as anunkempt, contemptuous 19-year-old. Bushnell says Jobs offended some Atariemployees so much that Bushnell eventually told Jobs to work nights when oneelse was around.
Bushnell, though, says he always saw something special inJobs, who evidently came to appreciate his eccentric boss, too. The tworemained in touch until shortly before Jobs died in October 2011 after a longbattle with pancreatic cancer.
That bond inspired Bushnell to write a book about theunorthodox thinking that fosters the kinds of breakthroughs that became Jobs'hallmark as the co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc. Apple built its first personalcomputers with some of the parts from Atari's early video game machines. AfterJobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple in 1976, Apple also adopted parts of anAtari culture that strived to make work seem like play. That includedpizza-and-beer parties and company retreats to the beach.
"I have always been pretty proud about thatconnection," Bushnell said in an interview. "I know Steve was alwaystrying to take ideas and turn them upside down, just like I did."
Bushnell, now 70, could have reaped even more from hisrelationship with Jobs if he hadn't turned down an offer from his formeremployee to invest $50,000 in Apple during its formative stages. Had he seizedthat opportunity, Bushnell would have owned one-third of Apple, which is nowworth about $425 billion — more than any other company in the world.
Bushnell's newly released book, "Finding The Next SteveJobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent," is the latestchapter in a diverse career that spans more than 20 different startups that heeither launched on his own or groomed at Catalyst Technologies, a businessincubator that he once ran.
He has often pursued ideas before the technology needed tosupport them was advanced enough to create a mass market. Bushnell financedEtak, an automobile mapping system created in 1983 by the navigator of hisyacht and later sold to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Bushnell also dabbled inelectronic commerce during the 1980s by launching ByVideo, which took onlineorders through kiosks set up in airports and other locations. In his mostcostly mistake, Bushnell lost nearly all of a $28 million investment inAndrobot, another 1980s-era startup. It developed 3-foot-(a meter)tall robotsthat were supposed to serve the dual role of companion and butler. (Bushnellrelied on Apple's computers to control the early models.)
Bushnell's best-known accomplishments came at Atari, whichhelped launch the modern video game industry with the 1972 release of"Pong," and at the Chuck E Cheese restaurant chain, which specializesin pizza, arcade entertainment and musical performances by animatronic animals.It's an odyssey that led actor Leonardo DiCaprio to obtain the film rights toBushnell's life for a possible movie starring DiCaprio in the lead role.
While at Atari, Bushnell began to break the corporate mold,creating a template that is now common through much of Silicon Valley. Heallowed employees to turn Atari's lobby into a cross between a video gamearcade and the Amazon jungle. He started holding keg parties and hiring livebands to play for his employees after work. He encouraged workers to nap duringtheir shifts, reasoning that a short rest would stimulate more creativity whenthey were awake. He also promised a summer sabbatical every seven years.
He advertised job openings at Atari with taglines such as,"Confusing work with play every day" and "Work harder at havingfun than ever before." When job applicants came in for interviews, hewould ask brain-teasing questions such as: "What is a mole?";"Why do tracks run counter-clockwise?" and "What is the order ofthese numbers: 8, 5, 4, 9, 1, 7, 6, 3, 2?"
Bushnell hadn't been attracting much attention in recentyears until Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography on Jobs came out in 2011,just after Jobs' death. It reminded readers of Bushnell's early ties to the manbehind the Macintosh computer, iPod, iPhone and iPad.
Suddenly, everyone was asking Bushnell about what it waslike to be Jobs' first boss. Publisher Tim Sanders of Net Minds persuaded himto write a book linked to Jobs, even though Bushnell had already finished writinga science fiction novel about a video game hatched through nanotechnology in2071.
"The idea is to become a best-selling author first andthen the rest of my books will be slam dunks," Bushnell said. To get hisliterary career rolling, Bushnell relied on veteran ghostwriter Gene Stone, whoalso has written other books, including "Forks Over Knives," underhis own name.
Bushnell's book doesn't provide intimate details about whatJobs was like after he dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, andwent to work as a technician in 1974 at Atari in Los Gatos, California. He hadtwo stints there, sandwiched around a trip to India. During his second stint atAtari, in 1975, Jobs worked on a "Pong" knock-off called"Breakout" with the help of his longtime friend Wozniak, who did mostof the engineering work on the video game, even though he wasn't being paid byAtari. Jobs left Atari for good in 1976 when he co-founded Apple with Wozniak,who had been designing engineering calculators at Hewlett-Packard Co.
Jobs and Bushnell kept in touch. They would periodicallymeet over tea or during walks to hash out business ideas. After Bushnell movedto Los Angeles with his family 13 years ago, he didn't talk to Jobs asfrequently, though he made a final visit about six months before he died.
There are only a few anecdotes about Bushnell's interactionwith Jobs at Atari and about those meetings around Silicon Valley.
The book instead serves as a primer on how to ensure acompany doesn't turn into a mind-numbing bureaucracy that smothers existingemployees and scares off rule-bending innovators such as Jobs.
Bushnell dispenses his advice in vignettes that hammer on afew points. The basics: Make work fun; weed out the naysayers; celebratefailure, and then learn from it; allow employees to take short naps during theday; and don't shy away from hiring talented people just because they looksloppy or lack college credentials.
Many of these principles have become tenets in SiliconValley's laid-back, risk-taking atmosphere, but Bushnell believes they remainalien concepts in most of corporate America.
"The truth is that very few companies would hire Steve,even today," Bushnell writes in his book. "Why? Because he was anoutlier. To most potential employers, he'd just seem like a jerk in badclothing."
Bushnell says he is worried that Apple is starting to losethe magic touch that Jobs brought to the company. It's a concern shared by manyinvestors, who have been bailing out of Apple's stock amid tougher competitionfor the iPhone and the iPad and the lack of a new product line since Tim Cookbecame the company's CEO shortly before Jobs' death. Apple's market value hasdropped by 36 percent, or about $235 billion, from its all-time high reachedlast September.
The incremental steps that Apple has been taking with theiPod, iPhone and iPad have been fine, Bushnell says, but not enough to provethe company is still thinking differently.
"To really maintain the cutting edge that they live on,they will have to do some radical things that resonate," Bushnell said."They probably have three more years before they really have to dosomething big. I hope they are working on it right now."
Bushnell is still keeping busy himself. When heisn't writing, he is running his latest startup, Brainrush, which is trying toturn the process of learning into a game-like experience. He says he hopes tofix an educational system that he believes is "incorrect, inefficient andbureaucratic — all the things you don't want to see in your workforce of thefuture."