Meet Chet Kapoor, The Techie Who Interned With Steve Jobs & Later Sold His Company To Google

Growing up in the city of Kolkata in India, a young Chet Kapoor used to dream of working for Apple's co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs. Little did he know back then, that it was exactly what was written in his future.

¡°I was fascinated. I wanted to work for Steve Jobs,¡± Kapoor recalls¡ªand that¡¯s exactly what he did. And not only that, the Indian techie even went on to sell his company to Google for a mammoth $625 million many years later and then founded a real-time artificial intelligence company.

Landing An Internship At Steve Jobs' Company

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Also Read: Not Steve Jobs, This Man Was The First CEO Of Tech Giant Apple

His first order of business upon getting the internship in Steve Jobs' company was moving from India to the United States in the year 1983, before taking on ¡°a bunch of computer classes¡± to prime himself for any role in the vicinity of Steve Jobs.

Kapoor accomplished that dream just a few years later when he bagged an internship at NeXT Computer¡ªalthough he admits he was essentially the intern to the intern, as per Fortune.

¡°I was the guy that got coffee for the guy that made coffee,¡± he laughs. ¡°It didn¡¯t matter what I did. Janitorial services, dishes¡ªI was (just) 20 yards away from Steve Jobs.¡±

Also Read: Why Apple & Google CEOs Fought To Hire & Retain Two IITians

"Pay To Work With Your Hero"

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Even if Steve Jobs didn¡¯t know who Kapoor was, by his own account, he still thinks that working in the shadows of an esteemed entrepreneur like Steve Jobs was a formative experience¡ªone he even advises graduates to pay for.

¡°What I tell college graduates is to find a set of people you want to really work with, convince them that they need you, and then pay them to let you work for them,¡± he says, insisting that the first four years of your career shapes your personality and professional trajectory.

¡°The experience you will get from working with really smart people will pay you dividends that you cannot imagine,¡± he says. ¡°It¡¯s not the company you work for, it is the individuals you work with that define you.¡±

If you¡¯re thinking the advice sounds unaffordable during a cost-of-living crisis (as well as elitist), he argues that it¡¯s better value for those who are already spending thousands of dollars on a degree.

¡°Think about it, right? College graduates have just paid $200,000 in tuition. And I¡¯m talking to them at the end of the senior year saying, that¡¯s actually not a great use of money,¡± he explains. ¡°Let me tell you how you could have used it: Focus on the people that you work with, because that¡¯ll change your career.¡±

That being said, he did go to college himself. Chet Kapoor earned his B.S. in engineering from Arizona State University.

Also Read: Why Apple CEO Tim Cook Once Rejected Elon Musk's Offer To Acquire Tesla

His Learnings While Interning At Steve Jobs' Company

While others were at big parties, Kapoor was juggling his education with running his own consulting firm, working in fast food chains, and interning at Jobs¡¯ NeXT. A skill Kapoor was quick to learn at the young age of just 22 was how to balance profit and loss.

¡°It was not a ¡®nice to have¡¯ for me, it was important that I made money because that¡¯s how I paid for tuition,¡± he explains. ¡°So if I didn¡¯t make money, I couldn¡¯t go to school.¡±

Looking back on his life, Kapoor describes it as a ¡°hand-to-mouth existence¡± but says that there¡¯s ¡°nothing¡± like being your own boss to prepare you for leadership.

After graduating, he climbed the ranks quickly from Jobs¡¯ intern to the CEO of Gluecode, an open-source software he sold to IBM in a mere six months, in around 15 years.

¡°Every individual goes through three different stages in their career. They are individual contributors, they manage people, and then they lead managers,¡± he shrugs. ¡°So, I believe everyone has to go through that journey.¡±

But with the average CEO over 50 years old, it¡¯s clear that he went through that process at lightning speed. He believes it¡¯s down to how you show up in the early years of your career. ¡°There¡¯s no magic bullet here, you have to lead yourself, then you can lead a small team, and then you lead leaders, right? And I think it all comes down to how you think about leading yourself.¡±

Kapoor says he concentrated on the team¡¯s success over his own contributions and nailed the execution. ¡°At the end of the day, belief [in one¡¯s self] is cheap. You can read leadership books, and this and that. But if you don¡¯t lead yourself that way, you will not be able to lead people.¡±

When He Sold His Company To Google For $625 Million

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After orchestrating the sale of Gluecode to IBM for an undisclosed amount, Kapoor became the CEO of the analytics software Apigee in 2007, as per the report.

Under his leadership, the company underwent a successful rebranding. Kapoor attracted big clients like Netflix, Target, and Walgreens; and raised $87 million through a public IPO before being acquired by Google for $625 million in 2016.

Kapoor has one tip for priming a business for sale: Don¡¯t. ¡°My take would be to focus on building a business, hiring great people, getting great customers, and then everything else happens around it,¡± he says.

Even now, as CEO of the A.I. company DataStax, he says that his motto is always: ¡°We have an open-for-business sign, not a business-for-sale sign.¡±

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