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Steve Jobs is not really a household name, unlike his counterparts in the Information Technology industry. However, that is not to say that one cannot learn entrepreneurial skills from scrutinising his work because it is entirely possible to do so. In fact, despite his relative lack of fame, the achievements and investments that this entrepreneur has in his portfolio are nothing short of amazing.

Who Is Steve Jobs?

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco in 1955 and had a pretty unspectacular early life. He did fairly well at school but only lasted one semester at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. He had no interest in studying, only in computers. His love of computer technology came from the Hewlett-Packard Company headquarters in Palo Alto, literally! He attended lectures after school there on a regular basis, even working there in the summer with friend Steve Wozniak.

In 1974, Jobs began to work for Atari before backpacking in India for some time. When he returned to Atari, Jobs was asked to create a circuit board. He asked Steve Wozniak to help out and a great partnership was born.

The Apple Years

The first years after the creation of Apple in 1976, were a little rough for the entrepreneur. Wozniak largely took care of the internal components of the Apple computer but Jobs was responsible for the business side of the operation. The entrepreneur’s business sense was amazing considering his lack of experience. This was to become invaluable when Apple introduced the Macintosh in 1984. It was a huge success but Jobs was forced to leave the company two years later by CEO John Sculley after a series of rows that left Apple going in the wrong direction.

Steve Jobs branched out on his own and formed NeXT Computer. Although the computers Jobs designed for the company were successful, they were also expensive, which is why the company made the transition to software development. Jobs’s entrepreneurial skills made the company a success, while Apple began to decline. However, Apple eventually bought out NeXT in 1997 for the software, thus taking Jobs back to his spiritual home and netting him $429 million at the same time.

Apple thrived under Steve Jobs’s supervision. As the new CEO, he brought Apple into the new Millennium. With the iPod and iTunes becoming incredibly popular and the iPhone recently following suit, Steve Jobs became the most successful CEO of all time.

However, Jobs also has entrepreneurial aspirations in the film, or more specifically, the animation industry. He actually owns Pixar, after buying it from George Lucas in 1986 for $10 million. Given the success that Pixar experienced during the 1990s and early 2000s, this was an incredibly wise investment. Pixar’s animation has been featured in numerous Disney films, and it was Disney that eventually bought it out in a $7.4 billion deal in 2006. As a result, the entrepreneur now owns 7% of the Walt Disney Company’s stock and is the largest single shareholder, thus finding his way onto the Board of Directors.

Steve Jobs is an amazing entrepreneur with fantastic business sense and an ability to see the best possible deals out there. By being able to visualize the future, Jobs now has a fortune of $5.4 billion. With no education, he has proved that entrepreneurial ventures are possible for those people that are determined enough to make it. Steve Jobs well and truly has.