Steve Jobs said Silicon Valley needs serendipity, but is it even possible in a Zoom world?
Late Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs stressed the importance of serendipity in Silicon Valley, by which he meant chance, unplanned encounters in person between tech employees. His successor, Tim Cook, Monday held a virtual conference for developers in front of the empty seats of the Steve Jobs Theater on Apple's Cupertino campus.
The late Steve Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, that when he commissioned the headquarters for the animated film studio Pixar, in East Bay, Jobs made sure it was an open structure, where everything converged on an atrium. Jobs believed, as Isaacson described it, that creativity is a result of serendipity. Serendipity is the specific word he used, and to Jobs, it meant in-person meetings. Jobs wanted the workplace to be optimally conducive to creating those chance encounters.
"There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat — that's crazy," Jobs is quoted as having said. "Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say 'Wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas."
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