Ondrej Holzman When Steve Jobs gives you a Porsche at the age of twenty-three, you know you're going to have a great life. That's exactly the fate that befell Craig Elliott, co-founder and CEO of Pertino, a new Silicon Valley startup that's about to hit the market.
The whole story began in 1984, when Elliott was taking a year off from college and staying in Iowa. “I ended up at a local computer store and it happened to be the year the Macintosh came out. At that time, I sold more Macintoshes than anyone else in the entire United States." 52-year-old Elliott recalls today.
Thanks to this, he earned an invitation from Apple to Cupertino. "I had dinner with Steve Jobs, I spent a week with top Apple executives, and Steve gave me a Porsche," Elliott recounts, admitting that a dinner with the Apple co-founder almost ended in disaster. Jobs asked him how many Macs he actually sold. The answer was: around 125.
"Jobs at that moment shouted 'Oh my God! That is all? That's pathetic!'" Elliott describes how his big dinner went. "I leaned over and said, 'Steve, don't forget I'm your best man.' And Jobs replied, 'Yes, you're right.' The rest of the dinner took place in a relaxed atmosphere."
According to Elliott, that's exactly what Steve Jobs was - very passionate, but when you pushed him, he leveled off. Jobs also subsequently offered Elliott a job, but he was not his boss for long, as he was fired from Apple a year later. Nevertheless, Elliott worked for the apple company for a whole decade, taking care of the Internet business and e-commerce.
Just as Jobs was returning to Apple, Elliott was roped in by networking startup Packeteer, where he became CEO. Elliott later went public in 2008 and sold Packeteer to Blue Coat Systems for $268 million. After this successful transaction, he went to New Zealand, where he wanted to relax with his family and become an angel investor.
Under normal circumstances, that would probably be the end of Elliott's story, but it couldn't be for Pertin co-founder Scott Hankins. Hankins is another interesting character, by the way, because he left a lucrative position at NASA building robots to move to the Valley because he thought the tech industry was better than space.
Hankins also previously worked at Packeteer, and when Elliott went to New Zealand, Hankins kept calling him and pitching his startup ideas. Elliott kept saying no until he heard about Pertina. Because of that idea, he eventually took his money, returned to the Valley and became the executive director of the new project.
The Pertino project remains shrouded in secrecy, but when it is officially unveiled, it will offer companies a new way to build networks. So we can only look forward to what the person to whom Steve Jobs gave a Porsche at the age of 23 can still do.
very well))
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