The last time my family members and other “normals” introduced ME to a technology was ICQ. This time its WhatsApp. Literally everybody, NOT in my tech circles, is using it on their phone for, well, IM’ing. How could a Sequoia-backed app built by ex-Yahoo’s in the valley with 10’s of millions of users, 500,000 new downloads a day and 1 billion messages a day go so unnoticed by the technorati for this long?

It’s a much needed lesson for us Internet entrepreneurs in pure product focus. Build something normal people want, obsessively iterate until they love it, and let them be your marketing team. Shut up, listen, build, repeat. It’s the little things (e.g. WhatsApp’s contact integration) that make startups win big, not the press or networking parties. We’re so addicted to buzz-crack these days as startups that we often lose sight of class 101. We’re so concerned with building our “personal brand” that we put ourselves before our company. You have to dig to even figure out who founded WhatsApp. Co-founder’s Jan Koum and Brian Action list their titles on LinkedIn as “QA Testing” and “Brian Action” respectively. Respect. 

Back to work.

The passing of an icon marks the creation of a legend. Steve Jobs is now legendary. Some are calling him the Edison or Henry Ford of our time. A pioneer of the digital age. A creative genius who could see and create the future. Those are deserving titles but what strikes me since his passing is the very personal impact he’s had on people’s lives. People are truly sad, as if a family member died. It’s an emotion usually reserved for the death of a loved artist, princess or President. Never before, on such a global scale, for a businessman. 

Like most of the people I’ve spoken to, I can’t shake the deep sense of selfish loss. I never met the man, but he obviously effected me, both personally and professionally, more than I even professed prior to his death. Yes, I was and am a fan boy of what the man built and how he built it. In a time when entrepreneurs were told to never use words like “revolutionary” and “magical” in their pitches, he resusitated their authenticity and taught us to not “be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” As literally every thought leader in startupville preached the virtues of democratic company and product building, Jobs, the stern, partner-less, benevolent dictator showed us that “its not the customers job to know what they want.” He had a vision of the future of tech, music and film and he gave it to us without asking. He left all his inspired prodigies wondering, is that the path of true innovation? My way?

I’m a repeat entrepreneur but a first time CEO. I’m what they call a “product CEO”. I’m addicted to the creative process of dreaming up, designing and deploying products that are used and loved by millions of people. I was fortunate (read: lucky) to get a few shots at it in my career and currently as the leader of an amazing team at BillGuard. I’m on the obsessive-complusive side of UX design. I’ll spend hours in photoshop on a pixel worth of layout, margin, alignment, bevel or shade, although I’m not an artist. I spend every morning thinking about what I can remove from the product to let its simple, core value shine. Those that work with me have been on the receiving end of edit minutia that admittedly must be so dam annoying. But its who I am and what I believe makes or breaks a consumer product/company. Steve Jobs justified my disorder. He was my hero for that. As a CEO I find myself regularly asking “What would Steve do?”. I think most of my peers do, if not subconsciously. We owe him so much gratitude for that.

His storied life left us with immortal inspiration as entrepreneurs, leaders and people. On death he reminds us: “Almost everything–all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure–these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”