I finally got around to reading the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson that’s been sitting on my bookshelf for months. It’s a great read and I’ve found myself captivated by the stories and lessons that can be found in Steve Jobs’ life. One story in particular jumped out at me:
One day Jobs came into the cubicle of Larry Kenyon, an engineer who was working on the Macintosh operating system, and complained that it was taking too long to boot up. Kenyon started to explain, but Jobs cut him off. “If it could save a person’s life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time? he asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. “Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster,” Adkinson recalled. “Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture.”
At Torbit, we believe that speed really matters. We have a simple, but audacious goal. We think the internet is too slow and we’re doing our best to fix it. It’s humbling to think about the collective amount of time (and lives) we’ve already helped save. It’s the reason why we founded this company. It’s the motivation behind what we do every day.