Steve Jobs really pulled a reality distortion field to poach Tim Cook from Compaq (in 1998, it was worth $30B+ to Apple’s $3B). All of Cook’s friends and advisors told him not to join almost-bankrupt Apple. Cook says it took Jobs one meeting to convince him: “I had gotten a call several times from the search people that [Jobs] had employed, and I kept saying no. I was happy at Compaq — or thought I was — and they were persistent. So, I finally thought, ‘you know, I’m going to go out and take the meeting. Steve created the whole industry that I’m in. I’d love the meeting.’ […] All of a sudden, he’s talking about his strategy and his vision and what he was doing. He was going 100% into consumer when everybody else in the industry had decided you couldn’t make any money in consumer. They were headed to servers and storage and the enterprise. […] I always thought following the herd was a bad idea. He showed me a bit of the design to get me interested [of what later would be called the iMac]. The way that he talked and the chemistry. I could tell I could work with him. I looked at the problems Apple had and I thought ‘you know, I can make a contribution here’ and working with [Jobs would be] the privilege of a lifetime. All of a sudden I thought, ‘I’m doing it. I’m going for it.’ You hear this voice in your ear that says, ‘Go west, young man, go west.’ [The move to Apple] didn’t make sense. And yet my gut said ‘go for it’ and I listened to my gut. There was literally no one around me that was advising me to do it.” In March 1998, Cook joined Apple as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations on a $400k base salary (and a $500k signing bonus). He was 37. Incredible gut call. *** Full episode here from 2014: youtu.be/u9Sy3qwthCw