Supporting Steve Jobs
An Iconic Apple CFO Shares His Story
Preface
Behind iconic innovator-CEOs are some incredible executives, often CFOs, and that complementary relationship between visionary innovator and stable finance pro is probably underexplored in the annals of technology. Innovators can be famously mercurial and productobsessed whereas finance professionals need to keep an organization financially viable and strong; they have an especially important governance role, which has not historically been a sexy or interesting topic for Silicon Valley historians and storytellers. However, the U.S. is growing the innovator class, and innovation is becoming a larger part of the economy., So, there is a need to better understand and appreciate this complementary, dynamic relationship. It is important for today’s finance professionals to understand how CFOs have historically supported the archetypal impulsive, strong-willed founder-innovator and founder-CEO without compromising their own values all while accomplishing key corporate objectives. There is a complementarity to the relationship that is important to economic growth and continued innovation itself.
Hence my interview with Joe Graziano, which I am publishing in four parts, starting with this Part One. I grew up next door to Joe, in Somerville, Massachusetts, an ethnic (Irish and Italian), bluecollar community just outside Boston. Our families were poor, and our parents were the children of Italian immigrants Joe and I went to grade school at St. Clement, a ten-minute walk from home. In our world, high school was important and college was the exception.
Joe and I worked hard in the 1960s through ‘90s, and as luck would have it, became successful Silicon Valley executives in technology and the life sciences, respectively. Joe became a star finance professional, and his story is worth telling he worked as treasurer of ROLM, CFO at Sun Microsystems and two-time CFO at Apple, as well as board member of Apple and Pixar, among others. In the 1990s, he was Technology CFO of the year and named to the CFO “All-Star Team.” As importantly, he was a confidante of Steve Jobs and peddled influence with him at key points. For instance, at Apple’s October 3, 1995, board meeting, Joe took what has become known as “Graziano’s Last Stand” (from a CFO article of that title), telling the board, after a tumultuous period in the company’s history, they needed to sell Apple to a better-run company quickly or bring back their ingenious, mercurial product guru and cofounder, Steve Jobs. Joe’s departure from Apple over the board’s denial of this dire situation almost certainly influenced what happened next: Apple acquired Jobs’ company, NeXT Computer, and the board appointed Jobs to run the combined company.
As Joe and I thrived in what we saw as the meritocracy of late 1900s Silicon Valley (I became CEO of several high-growth companies and was an early investor of Align Technologies, the creator of Invisalign, and Intuitive Surgical, the creator of the Da Vinci robotic surgical systems), we worked to overcome our deep-seated feelings of insecurity and not belonging. I cannot say either of us ever fully succeeded in processing the insecurity of our (very) modest backgrounds and education However, now in our later years, we have an interest in reflecting on our roles at iconic companies Joe offers important lessons that everyone who has anything to do with finance in Silicon Valley should hear or read.
Without further ado, here’s my conversation with my good friend and Silicon Valley finance guru, Joe Graziano.
CHAPTER ONE: GROWING UP GRAZIANO
brother, Anthony “Butch” Graziano, Joe Graziano, and me, c. 1954 in Somerville, Mass.
JM: You look terrific and thank you for doing this! Thanks! I just turned 81 on Thanksgiving Day.
JM: Let’s begin by talking a little bit about your background because it had a disproportionate impact on you. I dare say, of all the people who went to St. Clement School over the years, you must rank high up in its Hall of Fame. I know about your childhood, but for the benefit of readers, can we spend a little time talking about your childhood?
Sure. As you know, Joe, my parents struggled all their lives. They didn’t have much. My father was born in 1904, and my mother in 1908, the eldest in a family of nine children. At age sixteen, she had to leave high school and go to work at the shoe mills in New Hampshire. She would live up there for the week, take the train back to Boston on Friday, and give the money she earned to her father to help support the rest of the family. She worked all her life the whole time I was in elementary and high school, and then college.
I too worked all the time as a kid because my whole upbringing was one of struggle. My parents had no money. Starting at eight years old, I worked on the streets, shining shoes, selling newspapers you know, “Extra, extra, read all about it! Get your Record here!” I got mugged and dragged into alleys; I was beaten up by thugs who stole my money.
JM: I sold those same newspapers!
I took any kind of job I could. I worked in a German bakery when I was thirteen and did that all through high school.
JM: Wow! I did not have those kinds of troubles. But, regardless, my question is, “Where were our parents?”
Good question. My parents were always working I was left on my own to do as I pleased. I lived in a very tough area. As I got older, I hung with a very tough crowd. We got in a lot of trouble, and I got in a lot of fights. I’ve got a pretty good scar on my face from one. (Points to his scar.)
JM: I was there for that fight, Joey. Someone hit you with a rock!
Joe’s
Right! One of my neighborhood friends. He became a famous eye surgeon. Some bullies used to beat me up, and I finally retaliated and beat the crap out of them. Luckily, I never ended up in jail, but a lot of my friends did, and a few were killed in jail. I could have easily gone down that path.
JM: How did you manage to take a different, and dare I say, better path?
It’s interesting and kind of a miracle that I steered clear of what happened to some of my friends. Despite the fact that I was with a tough crowd, I got great values from my parents. My parents were very strict. In those days, you'd get hit with a broomstick or a belt if you did something wrong. Also, I went to a parochial school where you really learned right from wrong and developed good morals and good character; otherwise, you were thrown out Maybe school was my refuge I did very well in school I was comfortable at St Clement. It was small, with a graduating class of ninety kids, and we were taught by the very strict Sisters of Saint Joseph.
JM: Some of those sisters were wonderful, some, less so. I remember they relied on the generous application of corporal punishment for the slightest infraction. They would mete out physical punishment at the drop of a hat. Even in first grade, kids who needed to use the restroom during class were singled out and instructed to get the short-handled broom from the clothes closet and give it to the nun. She would beat the child, and then the child was allowed to use the bathroom. It was cruel and unusual punishment. Needing to use the bathroom during school hours was, I guess, a serious violation of school’s rules.
That’s true, but at the same time, I did love school. I was an honor roll student, but my family life was miserable. My mother and my father argued loudly all the time. I withdrew into my own world, and that kept me safe. Joe (Mandato), you moved away when we were in high school, and we sort of stayed in touch until we didn't.
My brother, Anthony (we called him Butch), left the house at a young age. He was a really tough guy, and he was bigger and smarter than me, but he went to a public high school, not St. Clement, and it was not a good place. He got known for being one of the tough guys, always breaking heads
Maybe it’s awful to talk about all of this because my parents worked very hard just to keep food on the table and clothes on our backs, and they never gave up on us or left us They could’ve easily said, "Screw this," like some people do. They sacrificed I've got to give them credit. Unfortunately, I also looked at them and thought, "Holy Toledo, there's no way I want to have the life they've had." I was driven I constantly said to myself, "I'm never going to fall into the trap of poverty. I don't belong here. I absolutely do not belong here. I’ve got to get out of here."
I was driven to be financially independent as soon as I could be. Of course, that was only a dream because I was hanging with that tough crowd I didn’t recognize any of this while it was happening–only upon reflection. Looking back, I often say, "How the hell did a kid from the streets of Somerville, getting in fights with cops, stealing property, and doing crazy things with a rough crowd, end up becoming a board member of Apple and a successful executive in Silicon Valley?" I don’t like to brag about it I’m just talking about the contrast of worlds because it’s crazy.
JM: You defied the odds! Let’s talk about your mother for a second because I observed her to be a strong and opinionated woman and a real character. Tell me more about her influence on you.
My mother was a huge influence on me. She grew up during World War I, the stock market crash, and the Depression. She suffered a lot, especially because she had to give up a lot of her life to help support the family. A few of her brothers went into the service in World War II, and one of them was killed and a couple were wounded. My mother became very cynical and negative. I guess she kind of knew there could be a lot better life, and she knew she didn't have that better life. She had many regrets. She
regretted getting married, which was a strange thing to experience as a child because you say, "What the hell does that mean about me and our whole family?"
I'll do a Trump weave here, as they call it. My mother was in the nursing home in her early 90s. She was starting to lose it a little, and she had mellowed out from her younger years. But, she had always been fiercely independent.
In the nursing home, she asks me, "Joe, were you ever married?"
"Yeah, Ma,” I say. “Don't you remember? I was married for about thirty-three years. Don’t you remember Mary Ann?"
"Oh, really?" she says. "Nobody should have to put up with somebody for that long."
And I say, "Well, Ma, were you ever married?"
"Me? Never!" she says
That was funny!
My mother was a cynic, she hated the government. In the late '40s and early '50s, we had a radio in the kitchen, and we’d listen to whatever show was on. We heard on the radio that all these people were suddenly getting gas cards and credit cards at stores. We couldn't really afford a car. We had this little jalopy.
"Joe,” Mom said in our kitchen, “credit debt is going to be the destruction of this country "
Of course, she firmly believed we got into World War II intentionally to get us out of the Depression. I guess today you would call her a conspiracy theorist. She was definitely not a person to accept anything someone held out as an obvious truth. As a result, I became very conservative, extremely skeptical of everything. Now, it turns out that’s also a defining part of me, and I think it's something that made me a very good accountant and financial officer. I tend to really question things, to really seek the truth, what really is the cause of something? What really makes certain things happen the way they do? People have to earn my trust and respect; it’s not a given.
JM: I took my mom to visit your mom, Sally, and your dad, many times. I remember your dad was a butcher.
Yeah, he had several jobs. I’ll always remember as a kid going into the butcher shop in the North End of Boston, right across the street from Paul Revere's house. He also was in business for himself once, at a poultry store in Roxbury, the equivalent of Harlem. I would get on the elevated train system and go to the store on weekends to help him out. It was a dangerous place, but the business didn’t make it. He was always working very long hours for a wage. He worked six days a week and wasn't home much. When he got home, he got beat on by my mother for not making enough money. He only knew how to work really hard but not how to work smart.
JM: Classic story of the kids of Italian American immigrants.
Yeah. Like a lot of my friends’ fathers, he just wasn’t fortunate to have had the education and the training to succeed.
JM: Your parents argued a lot, loudly!
Yell is an understatement! The whole neighborhood could hear it. It was embarrassing. I'd go crawl into a closet somewhere.
Sometimes, my mother would drive with us up to Arlington and Winchester, nicer neighborhoods, and she'd point to all the nice homes. One time, we’re in Arlington, I’m in the back of this old, late '40s Oldsmobile, and she points up at a nice house up on the hill.
She says, "A lawyer lives in that house. And I could have married him."
She had all these regrets. I’d ask myself in those moments, “So, what are we to you?” Everybody else was always better, which was not a good thing because it affected me deeply. No matter what, I subconsciously always thought everyone else was better than me. Later in life, I had to specifically focus on these feelings and overcome them
JM: Your father was an interesting character, too.
He was. Here’s a memory about him that you might remember As kids, we rode our bikes everywhere Since my parents didn’t have extra money, Christmas and birthday gifts were scant. American bikes were heavy and had fat balloon tires and only one gear. Bikes from England started to appear, mostly in Cambridge because the rich kids at Harvard and MIT had them I think you or one of the other kids got a Raleigh for Christmas
JM: Not me! I had a Huffy with fat tires.
I just remember someone got a Raleigh, and whatever the case, I wanted one in the worst way. One day, my father took me to his butcher store in Roxbury, and we went around the corner into a dark shop where there were loads of bikes. Looking around and seeing the shady characters there, I quickly figured out the bikes were stolen. In any case, my father bought one for me. It was black and looked like a Raleigh, but the controls were made of pot metal, and the saddle was not leather. Owning that bike bothered me a lot, as it implied I was not worthy of anything more. The other kids in the neighborhood aways had better things and more toys. I’m telling you this story because I’m going to come back to this idea later. Make sure I do come back to it later.
JM: I will. Listen, when it got close to graduation time from St. Clement, what were you thinking, and how did you end up choosing to go to college and choosing Merrimack? I myself borrowed $10 from Charlie Cardillo to apply to one school, and I had no sense on how, why, or where to go. But making
Though life wore down Mr. and Mrs. Graziano, they nonetheless instilled the right values in their son.
the decision to go to college is a big deal because of the cost and the absence of the counsel on how to go about it. All the adults in my life said, “Go to work at the water company or something like that. You can retire for life after 25 miserable years.” Why not do that?
Joe, it was my parents! We had no counselors or prep to decide, but my parents understood how important it was it was a chance to “get ahead.” My mother really knew I should go to college. She was a very, very street-smart woman who, as I have said, also became very cynical and negative. I chose Merrimack because it was a small school like St. Clement, and the tuition was low. We never had any money, and when I was deciding to go to college, we as usual couldn't afford anything I commuted to college in a carpool. I was the first person in my large, extended family to go to college.
In 1962, my father passed away at the age of 58 from a brain tumor. It was a defining moment because I almost dropped out. For the last two years of college, my mother and I lived in the projects run by the public housing authority, on Mystic Ave. in Somerville. I worked the entire time I was in school and college I had jobs that were all heavy labor, working in factories, driving trucks and delivering goods, that type of thing. The projects and the jobs kept me going, though I said to myself, “I cannot possibly live my whole life the way I’m living it now.”
In college, I had a tough time acclimating to a whole new world. I didn't even have enough money to buy my textbooks. For many of my courses, I never bought or even had a textbook.
When I went into business, after college, I had this mental image of being lesser than other people in business because of my upbringing and not going to an Ivy League school. It took a while to shake that off and understand that I didn’t need to care about those things. I learned that others were not necessarily smarter or better than me. I've had Rhodes Scholars and people from the top schools in the country working for me. But, it took a while to realize that I could hold my own at that level.
Note from me, Joe Mandato: I want to share this excerpt from a book someone gave me a long time ago, Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum by William Foote Whyte It’s a book about the North End of Boston when Joe and I were growing up near there. In the passage, Whyte is interviewing a man named Chick, and I think the passage expresses perfectly how inferior poor Italians felt with respect to education and social standing: “The Italian boys down here have that feeling of inferiority. I have it myself. I really mean that. When I hear that some people think I’m pretty good, I wonder what it is that I have. I can’t see it. I’m not just pretending when I say I feel inferior. That’s the truth . . . I think the only way to overcome inferiority is to go out and mingle with other people. Until you can mingle in, you will never overcome that feeling.
I asked Chick how he happened to go to Ivy University Law School.
I took a law course with Professor Martini at St. Patrick’s. I was proud that an Italian was teaching the law course. I asked him where I should go for my law studies. He suggested St. Patrick’s law school. So I made my applications, and I was going there when I met a lawyer named Marino. He asked me why I didn’t go to Ivy Law School, instead. I said: “I know my own limitations. I couldn’t get into a place like that. I’ll be content to stay in my own station.”
He told me: “Chick, don’t be a jackass. If you’ve got the marks, you can get into Ivy, and a degree from Ivy will mean much more to you than one from St. Patrick’s.”
I thought it over. I went home and talked with my mother. It would cost me $420 to go to Ivy, not counting books, or carfare. It would cost only $250 at St. Patrick’s. I made a bargain with my mother. If she would pay my tuition, I would pay for everything else. She asked me how she could be sure that I would keep to my bargain. I told her that if I didn’t, I would just drop out. So she agreed. And that’s the bargain we’ve been keeping ever since . . . I was anxious to be the first Italian boy from Cornerville to go to Ivy Law School. I made my application and sent in my marks along with a letter from Mr. Brown. He boosted me to the skies. A few days later, I heard that I was accepted.”
JM: Yeah. Being different in way that was “less-than” was a difficult thing to accept, even later in life. It's always dwelling somewhere in your mind right? What happened after college?
I went into public accounting with a small CPA firm in Danvers (Massachusetts). I moved my mother and myself out of the projects. We actually moved back into our old house on 763 Broadway in Somerville. In late 1966, I got a draft notice. I then took the exam for the Marine Corps Officer’s candidate school. Before I could accept, my younger brother Butch along with two of his friends enlisted in the Marine Corps. As a result, I was exempted.
A few years later, I got lucky. One of my college classmate's brothers was working at Ernst & Ernst, one of the “Big Eight” CPA firms. I interviewed three times and went through all kinds of testing. They hired me in the consulting division. I ended up working in both the consulting and accounting sides of the business.
In late 1968, I got married. My wife, Mary Ann, was working as a flight attendant for TWA, her regular route being Boston to San Francisco round-trip. We used to travel a lot because she had unlimited passes to travel anywhere in the world. You showed up at the gate, showed them your pass, and got on the plane. We traveled all over. We used to go to San Francisco a lot. In 1971, TWA planned to shut down its Boston base and gave Mary Ann the opportunity to transfer to San Francisco.
I was doing pretty well, but as an Italian kid from Merrimack College (Joe, I hope your readers will forgive me for saying this), I saw Ernst & Ernst as a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant firm. In my mind, there was no way I’d become a partner there. Also, I couldn't see myself being a partner in a CPA firm, anyway, which is all to say that when Mary Ann had the chance to transfer, we said, "What the hell let's go to California!"
When I asked Ernst & Ernst for a transfer, they said no. The economy in '70 was not good. Lockheed in the Bay Area was laying off thousands of people. Boeing up in Seattle had just cratered. We drove across the country, and as soon as we arrived, I needed a job. I ended up getting a job at a place on Sand Hill Road.
Sand Hill Road is now famous. In '71, it looked like a part of the Stanford University campus, which it bordered. The campus is green and picturesque as far as the eye can see. This was pure luck. For everyone who’s ever been successful, I’ve always found luck has played a big part. If they don’t tell you that, they’re not telling you the truth! There's always an element of luck! If people say, "It's all me," they're full of crap. Think about the luck of ending up in Silicon Valley before it was really Silicon Valley, but when it was on the cusp of becoming what it became.
I immediately started making a name for myself in the valley. My career took off I worked very hard, and I always did a good job, which I was proud of.
JM: Personally, I found Silicon Valley to be as close to a meritocracy as you could find, right?
Yes! I frequently say that to people. When I used to talk to students, I talked about how Silicon Valley was like an open field where I could get ahead without a lot of crap. The only time I was sort of discriminated against was in Boston, before I went to Ernst & Ernst (To be clear, I was never discriminated against at Ernst & Ernst; I just thought I might be.) I was interviewing with a large CPA firm in Boston. I had spent a lot of time at the beach that summer I tan very easily, so I was very dark skinned The partner in charge of the CPA firm looked at me during the interview. "Are you always that color?" he asked.
When he asked that question, and the way he asked it, I knew I wasn't going to be a fit But Silicon Valley it was a meritocracy. It was wide open if you really worked hard, and I benefited from that.
Joe’s brother, Anthony “Butch” Graziano, lost a leg in Vietnam and died from injuries incurred during and after Vietnam. Joe’s uncle, Anthony Guerriero, a Marine, lost his life in WWII. They are his heroes.
CHAPTER
TWO: A SILICON VALLEY CFO
In this Part Two of my four-part interview transcript with Joe Graziano, we learn about how Joe became a top finance professional in 1970s and ‘80s Silicon Valley. Working with Andy Grove offered him some formative lessons, but we especially learn about the start of Joe’s relationship with Steve Jobs. Although Joe’s street smarts and natural brilliance helped shape Apple, his relationship with Jobs was not all wine and roses. Joe’s personal anecdotes gave me a fantastic, in-the-trenches look at the finance function in the tech industry's formative years. (To read Part One, click here.)[BECCA WILL ADD LINK]
JM: Did you have great mentors along the way?
Joe Graziano: Believe it or not, the one thing I never had in life was a mentor. I know a lot of people talk about having a mentor, and I know many people try to be mentors. I think that’s a great thing, but I didn't have a lot of guidance. People in the Bay area certainly helped me with my career. They referred me to people who referred me to people, but I didn't have a mentor. For me, it was a matter of working my butt off, doing a good job, observing how everyone around me did things, and sort-of scoring points by working longer and harder than others. It was kind-of like collecting successes and then building and building and building upon them.
As a kid on the streets of Somerville, I did learn street smarts, and I’d say street smarts were my mentor. Street smarts are huge. From street smarts, you learn how to interact with people, who to trust and who not to trust, how to read situations, pattern recognition, and how to connect the dots. You're constantly absorbing situations and figuring out how best to handle them. If you're smart enough, you get through it all. I think that was a skill or attribute I had.
JM: Similar to street smarts is the idea of common sense, don’t you think?
Absolutely! Common sense is priceless. I think young people today most likely don't get that opportunity because of “helicopter parents.” Kids are shuttled to and from school and don’t play in the street like we used to do. We used to go everywhere during the day. God Almighty, our parents didn't know where the hell we were. Talk about free-range children we were everywhere. We'd get on the subway and travel to the other side of Boston at seven years old. You learn things from that, especially common sense
JM: So true. You were governed by daylight: get home before dark. So, anyhow, you’re at this NYSElisted company on Sand Hill Road . . .
Yes, so when I got to California in early June of ‘71, my first job was as the controller of a subsidiary of a public company in Menlo Park, Arcata National Corporation. Arcata National had owned Redwood Park in Arcata, California and had sold a good part of it to the government, netting Arcata National millions of dollars. A couple of Stanford Business School guys took over the company to use the proceeds to create a new subsidiary in the communications industry. They couldn't close their books because this new subsidiary was all screwed up. I went in there as a controller and worked crazy hours seven days a week and pulled off a miracle. I created the books; I created a computer system everything!
The CFO of the parent company was ecstatic with what I did, as were the auditors, Arthur Young Later I ended up becoming the CFO for two of Arcata’s subsidiaries in the communications industry. We eventually sold the communications divisions to General Dynamics. They wanted me to go to St. Louis as the financial officer. I was about thirty years old, there was no way I was going to St. Louis.
Instead, I interviewed with a person starting a new company in Palo Alto near Xerox Park, called the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), which researches the best ways to achieve safe and reliable power across the country. The president was a nuclear physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project. I was the fifth employee at the organization. I walked into a completely empty building, absolutely nothing there, and I built the financial organization from scratch. I had to create the
computer systems, hire the staff, and everything else. We had a couple hundred million dollars a year of funding, not a small amount of money, and I traveled around the country, interfacing with utility executives.
JM: Why’d you leave EPRI?
After two years, the job was getting a little boring. The guys from Arthur Young, the ones who couldn't believe what I had accomplished at Arcata, came to me
“There’s this little company called Intel that needs a corporate controller ”
Intel was doing less than $100 million a year in a little building out in the fruit fields in the southern part of the peninsula It had just a couple years earlier (note: in 1971) invented the microprocessor. The microprocessor wasn't the heart of the business yet because nobody knew what to do with it. There were no tools to program it.
I was in resumé-building mode I remember interviewing for the job. I'm in Andy Grove's office. He’s running the company, and we're chatting and he's asking me questions, and he says, "Hey, wait a second, come over here to my desk." He was a no-bullsh guy. He actually brought grown men to their knees crying. He was so, so tough but also so smart
He says, " I've got a problem I want you to solve. I'm going to tell you a whole bunch of stuff," and he starts writing things down, and I'm starting to write things down, and he's giving me all this data.
I'm going, "Oh my God, what's going on?"
Then he finally says, "Okay, now with all that, tell me the value of the ending inventory." Now, I'm a CPA. (I passed all four parts of the CPA exam at one time when I was in California, not when I was in Boston.) And I say, "Here's the value of the inventory."
He looks at me and says and I'm not exaggerating "Godda it! Why can't my people tell me that?"
I ended up taking the job, and I found out why no one could tell him that: Intel had all MBAs and no accountants in the company. However, working at Intel was one of the big mistakes I made in my career. I went because I was focused on building my resumé, but it was a terrible fit for me, a step down from what I had been doing.
I really didn't like the Intel culture. I've always considered myself good at understanding a company culture before I join. Andy Grove was a really good guy kind-of like a tyrant, always in your face, but that worked for him. The problem was, everybody else at the company tried to emulate him in terms of how they interacted with each other, even though none of them was Andy Grove. This situation created a crazy, unpleasant, nerve-racking culture. The same thing also happened later at Apple, where people tried to emulate Steve Jobs without realizing they couldn’t pull it off. They were not Steve Jobs, you know what I mean?
JM: Yeah, I do. I had a similar experience in the army when I was the aide-de camp to the Commanding General of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, General Carl W. Hughes. He gave me advice I have never forgotten: “Joe, don’t ever forget, you don’t wear the stars. Act accordingly, be respectful, and listen.” In other words, don’t try to be someone you are not. Great advice.
JM: Yeah. Don’t try to be Steve Jobs, Andy Grove, Elon Musk. Be you. Be Joe. You know? I do. I tell you, though, I got along really well with Intel company chairman Gordon Moore. He was a gem of a guy, and he taught me a great lesson. I'm in his office, and we're finalizing the full-color annual report Intel has $100 million dollars in revenue, which is small compared to its eventual size (note: $24 billion in 2024). We're doing the chairman's letter to the shareholders. Intel had already set a precedent
in the industry where they could get the audited year-end financials out to the investors within eleven days of the year end, a remarkable feat in 1975. This means the annual report has to go out January 11, 1976.
Of course, I'm in charge of that deadline. Gordon's writing his letter to the shareholders, and when we're all done, I say, "Okay, I'm going to get these things over to the printer."
"Okay,” he says, “We're going to make the deadline?"
"Well, we're sure going to try."
Gordon's a really nice guy, but he had these steely blue eyes. He looks at me and says "There's no such thing as trying "
I'm thirty-two years old, and I walk out of that office saying to myself, "Oh boy, I better hit the deadline."
He was a gem, but I was miserable. The Intel culture was terrible for me. Around the same time, my wife was involved in a very bad turbulence incident on a Lockheed L-1011. She suffered severe back and neck injuries and was laid up for about a year Considering I also was in a professional environment I didn't like, I went into a tailspin. I decided to leave Intel with no new job lined up
I was doing some consulting work when Tony Carollo, a colleague from Arcata, called me one day. He was CFO at ROLM (formed from the first letters of the last names of the founders Richeson, Oshman, Loewenstern, and Maxfield). It made telecom equipment and militarized computers and was getting ready to go public Tony was a CPA and ex-Arthur Anderson accountant, a very competent CFO.
"Joe, we need some help,” he said. “We don't have enough staff to get this IPO done right. Could you come over and help?"
I started doing it on a consulting basis, and then he wanted me to go out in the field. ROLM sold its computerized branch exchanges through independent distributors. The distributors were these flaky, small companies all over the country, and Tony wanted me to go evaluate and write reports about them. Through the reports, ROLM realized it was relying on poorly capitalized companies for its revenues. Most of them were virtually bankrupt and wouldn't help ROLM build its business for the long term. The reports caused ROLM to decide to own its distributors at a later date.
In 1977, Tony brought me on board full-time as assistant treasurer. I then became treasurer and was doing well there. ROLM was a very professional company. The CEO Ken Oshman had a doctorate and was a very smart guy, as were the founders of ROLM, people like Bob Maxfield. It was a stand-up company and was a huge success on public exchanges; we went from the NASDAQ to the NYSE.
JM: How’d you get to Apple from ROLM?
When Tony left to run ROLM’s distribution business, the ROLM Operating Companies (ROCOs), I thought I would become CFO, but I didn't. In 1979, I was treasurer when the guys from Arthur Young called me. "There’s a company over in Cupertino looking for a CFO. We think you would be a good fit"
Me: "What company is it?"
"Apple."
Me: "Apple? Who the hell names a company Apple?"
The name doesn't seem strange now, but it seemed so strange back then. “Apple.” That's not a name for a technology company!
JM: But getting a reference from ROLM over to Apple was huge. Even if Apple was smaller than ROLM, it was still Apple.
Yes, sure, and I was somewhat familiar with the Apple products because I had bought an early Apple II at ROLM. Our Treasury Department needed it for the hedging and monitoring programs we had developed for our foreign exchange management.
But it was a tiny, one-product company. It had the Apple II. It was located in a little building on Bandley Drive in Cupertino. And it was being run mostly by guys from National Semiconductor In the semiconductor industry, there was Fairchild Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, and National Semiconductor. The industry is notoriously cost conscious, and among them all, National Semiconductor was especially cheap. They managed everything in a real chintzy way.
The first guy I met in my interview was Mike Smith. Nothing against him, but you need to understand, I was coming from this really professional environment at ROLM Mike is kind of a short guy with a pot belly, and he’s wearing a grungy T-shirt with yellow armpit stains.
"Oh my God," I say to myself.
When I finish up with him, he says, "Well, you need to talk to Steve.”
So, I go into an office, and there's Steve.
“Gosh,” I’m thinking. “He’s about twenty-two years old.” He's got long hair and dirty jeans. I’m thirty-six We start talking, and I realize, "Oh my God. He's so full of himself. He's absolutely, completely full of himself. My God almighty!” Of course, he's telling me how he's going to change the world. Meanwhile, here I am, a natural, lifelong skeptic. Keep in mind, I’m wearing my Ralph Lauren suit, vest and a Polo tie. I always bought expensive, nice clothes. I dressed very well.
"Oh, really?" I say about his plans.
"No, really," Steve says.
Here's the worst thing about the interview, though. While I'm talking to him, and while he's telling me all about him and Apple, he’s wearing Birkenstock sandals. He was a flat-out hippie. He kicks off his sandals, and he puts his bare feet up on the Godda desk!
JM: Oh my God! Tell me more!
Yeah. I'm looking at him, his dirty feet are up, and I'm looking right at his feet, talking to him through his dirty toes. I'm shell shocked. I’m thinking, "Jesus Chr . I'm supposed to leave ROLM for this? At ROLM, I'm king of the hill. I'm the treasurer. I'm well regarded. It's a very professional organization. We're doing well. The stock's booming.” As I fly down to Beverly Hills for the investor conference, I say to myself, "I don't think I could work for this Apple company."
I called the recruiters. "Hey, look, just take me off the list. I'm not interested." I didn't even wait to see whether I was going to get an offer. At ROLM, things were going fine. I wasn’t CFO, but I was paid very well and liked the company.
About a year and a half later, in ’81, I got a call again. ROLM had hired a CFO, and I was upset about it. Don’t get me wrong I had a good job as treasurer and the CFO, Bob Dahl, was a good guy and a good CFO. By the way, he ended up going to Ascend and became CFO for Rob Ryan, who I've become very good friends with A film about Rob Ryan was just made, The Man Who Saved the Internet. I went to the premiere, and I've watched it six times because it’s really good. Rob was a Steve Jobs in a way.
So, I was willing to talk to Apple again. Meanwhile, Apple had just gone public and still needed a CFO. They had brought in Ken Zerbe, from AMI, a semiconductor company. He was a good guy, but he had so many functions reporting to him that he didn't have time to do the CFO job. I went through the
interview gauntlet again. I interviewed with Steve Jobs, who was chairman of the company, and Mike Markkula, who was a main investor, a cofounder, and was acting CEO. Ken Zerbe headed up everything that wasn't product related.
This time, I said, "Okay, if we can carve out the job and make sure I’ll really be the CFO, then I'll go for it.”
Steve was also another couple years older, and a little less hippy-ish. In fact, within a couple years, by the time the Mac came out, Steve was shopping at the same men's clothing store where I shopped in San Francisco, Wilkes Bashford, and he was wearing Brioni suits. In a few years, he went from this slovenly hippy to this really well-dressed guy with his hair cut short. If you look at the pictures of Steve introducing the Macintosh in 1984 at the Flint Center in Cupertino, he changed.
JM: You joined Apple! And it was bliss from day one, right?
Yeah, right! As soon as I joined, Steve and I started to fight a lot, like cats and dogs.
JM: He was not used to having someone challenge his way of thinking.
Oh my god, it was unbelievable how we fought. The reason is that, although the product was good, Apple was weird organizationally It was run by all these semiconductor guys and was total mayhem. We used to wear T-shirts to staff meetings that said, "Camp Run Amok." The staff meetings were complete mayhem where division managers duked it out for resources.
"What are we doing?” I’d say to Steve. “I'm the CFO, and you're trying to get me to assess profitability of all these different divisions. This makes no sense. We should really be functionally organized. We should measure Apple’s profitability as a systems company, not the at the level of the components it manufactures.”
He always replied , "No, Joe, Apple’s got to be organized like HP (note: Hewlett Packard)."
HP’s business model was not the same as Apple’s, and I told Steve he was making a mistake. I'm trying to achieve certain financial metrics, and he doesn't give a sh about metrics. He really could not care less. He was right in some respect, but you have to understand, I was the conservative finance guy. I was all about profitability, return on investment, managing the budget, and so forth. Steve was a huge risktaker, but at the same time, we were a public company.
We were two extremes, but I was trying to make some sense out of the place and keep the reporting simplified and meaningful. There was a lot of internal focus in the company and a lot of internal transfer pricing. You’d have one division arguing with the other division about how their products should be accounted for between them, all of which was completely unnecessary if Steve would just organize the company the right way
JM: Why wouldn’t he listen to you?
I don’t know maybe because Steve’s Steve. He believed no division should have more than a hundred people. Two years in, in ’83, I had an experience I won’t soon forget. We embarked on a project to launch a new computer, the Lisa, headed up by John Couch. Unfortunately, Lisa was marketed to consumers but priced more for the business market. It didn’t do well. Around that time, Steve and the board wanted to bring on John Sculley, an experienced executive
JM: From PepsiCo. I’ll always remember the famous Jobs quote recruiting Sculley by asking “Do you really want to be remembered for selling sugared water?
He brought in John Sculley to replace Mike Markkula as CEO. Steve asked me to interview John, and I did, and I got along very well with him. He was hired, and unbeknownst to me and most of the management team, Mike Markkula had been so optimistic about sales for the Lisa product line that he
had called the purchasing head and circumvented our inventory management system and ordered more inventory.
Meanwhile, John’s the new CEO, and he’s looking at a financial disaster because we had to revalue inventory. Steve calls a meeting with John and me in a new building we’re about to move into. There was an infamous love fest between Steve and John at the time, so, considering that Steve and I fight like cats and dogs, Steve starts blaming me for the inventory build-up
“Steve, I’m also shocked by the inventory levels,” I say. “I had my finance people look into it all. We all asked, ‘How the hell did this happen?’ We found out it happened outside the system ”
All of a sudden, Steve blurts out, "I think we need to get a new CFO."
JM: Jesus Chri !
Yeah, I’ll never forget it. “What the hell?” I’m thinking. “Holy sh ! Where did that come from?” When Steve says something like that, and you're sitting there as the target of the comment, it’s a punch in the gut.
JM: Oh my God. What did you do?
I went out into the parking garage behind the building. In 1979, I had purchased Mary Ann a car she always wanted, a new Mercedes 450 SL. (I had a little Ferrari, one of many that I ended up owning.)
JM: Is this where I should bring up that Raleigh you never got over not owning?
Not yet bring it up at the end. So, for some reason, I had driven Mary Ann’s car that day; she was out of town. I walked out of the building dejected as hell. I got in the car, and all I was thinking about was what he said. I backed up and turned the wheel and drove right into a big concrete post. I wasn’t familiar with that garage because it was for our new building.
JM: Oh no!
I hit the post, bang, right on the right front fender.
JM: Oh my God!
This is Mary Ann’s little baby. I call a buddy of mine
"Louie,” I say. “You need do me a favor. You need to fix this car in a day, and it must be fixed with a new Mercedes fender, not an aftermarket fender. And you must color match it."
When Mary Ann came home, the car was in the garage looking perfect. She never knew the difference.
JM: Were you worried about your job?
Of course! It knocks the wind out of you when you hear something like that, but then again, you also always know you’ve got an axe above your head. The day I came to California, I was in high-paying, highprofile jobs. You always know you're at risk. You never know what's going to happen. You have to perform. I worried about it, but I went on, just kept working, and it never came up again.
Steve was very impulsive. He'd just say something, and you learned sometimes just to ignore it. It would stay there but not bother you. That’s not to say that what Steve said didn't have meaning. I'm not trying to dismiss it, but in those environments, sometimes you just have to let it go.
JM: Yeah, that’s so true. So, you never confronted Jobs about the comment?
I never did. I reported to John Sculley. Whereas Steve and I fought all the time, John really valued me.
JM: Then how did it come to be that you left Apple the first time?
It was personal reasons as much as anything else. By '85, the Mac wasn't doing well, the Apple culture was bad, and my younger brother was dying. He had joined the Marine Corps in the late ‘60s and got his
leg blown off in Vietnam. That isn’t what killed him though. Poisoning from Agent Orange is what killed him. I was not in a good way about my brother’s illness, and I decided to leave Apple. My plan was to retire.
“I’ve got enough money,” I thought. “I don't have to work anymore." I needed a break That’s coincidentally exactly when John Sculley went around asking all the VPs for their opinions on Steve. His idea was that Steve, with his rebellious Macintosh division, was causing too much mayhem in the company.
John was asking the VPs at the company, "Should Steve still be here?"
I couldn’t believe how all the vice presidents turned on Steve. They said he should not be at the company. With that, Mike Markkula, who was the chairman, decided Apple should have only one leader and that leader should be John Sculley. I was not at the company, I had left three months earlier, but I thought firing Steve was stupid. It was a big blow to him, let me tell you. He sold all his stock, $100 million worth, and he went and started NeXT.
CHAPTER THREE: APPLE’S “BOOMERANG” CFO
In this Part Three of my four-part interview transcript with Joe Graziano, we learn about how important Joe was to the finance function in Silicon Valley. Jobs comes to Joe and asks for his continued counsel on financial matters, Sun’s Scott McNealy hires Joe to help with that company’s growth, and Apple hires Joe back a second time to fix the company, agreeing to pay Joe more than its CEO. These are fascinating situations, and they lead to Joe eventually leaving Apple for good. (Click to read Part One or Part Two)[BECCA WILL ADD LINKS]
JM: That’s not the end of the story, though, with respect to your relationship with Steve Jobs or Apple, right?
No, not at all. I was doing some work on a small vacation home I had in the mountains one day in ’86 when I got a call.
“Hi Joe, it’s Steve,” he said. I’m blown away. "Why is Steve calling me?" I’m thinking.
"I want to get together with you,” he says.
I meet him at NeXT, and we do one of his famous walking meetings.
“I know we fought a lot while you were at Apple,” he says, “but I've come to think about some of the things you were trying to tell me, and you were right. I just didn't understand. I didn't know.”
In retrospect, although he did not say this directly, I think he realized that he appreciated the fact that I don't pull any punches. I think he came to realize he could always trust me to tell him what I really thought. I think he valued me because I was always honest with him. Those are all things I think I wasn’t him, so I don’t know for sure. I do know one thing he couldn't stand it when people played games and were not well grounded in their positions. If so, he was merciless, like Andy Grove.
Anyhow, I think that’s why we were able to make up.
“I'd like you to help me with a couple of things," he says.
He wanted me to help him with a deal he wanted to do with H. Ross Perot on the funding of NeXT. I helped him with that and thought nothing of it. However, during that time, he did something very kind, something I would never forget. My brother, Butch, was in Massachusetts General Hospital and didn't have much longer to live. Steve told me he was going to Boston.
"Steve,” I say. “Could you do me a favor? My brother has always admired you, and he's in the hospital. I don't know how long he's going to live. Could you go by and visit him?"
And, he does When Steve shows up in my brother’s room, my brother’s ecstatic. I don't know exactly what they talked about, but my brother knew Steve and I used to fight a lot.
He says to Steve, "Look, you understand my brother,” and he commiserates with Steve about me and my strong personality!
Steve and my brother went to the Super Bowl together when it was held at the Stanford Stadium in 1985.
JM: That was really a very big deal, right?.
Yeah. I thought that was a major thing for Steve to do. With all of Steve’s hardness that people talk about, that action shows another side of him.
Soon enough, Steve calls me again This is sometime in ’86.
"What are you doing today, Joe?"
"Why are you asking? What do you want?"
"You want to take a ride up to Marin?"
“Alright,” “I'll pick you up."
I have my beloved little Ferrari. He’s a Porsche and BMW guy. I pick him up, and all he does on the way up to San Rafael is criticize the godda car, the entire way. I had no idea what the meeting was about. We walk into a little building where two guys, John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, are sitting. They’re spinning off from Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucasfilm.
I’m thinking, “This is crazy.” Here are two guys I don't know from Adam who’ve got some big, customdesigned computer workstation. But then, they start manipulating two dimensional images of digitized X-rays, showing me things even a medical expert or technician couldn’t show anyone. It’s very cool. Today, we're used to modern medical imaging, but back then it was amazing.
Steve says, "Well, what do you think?"
“What do I think?” I say, "It's really cool, but are you telling me you're planning to go into the medical imaging business? Are you going to compete with General Electric, Toshiba, Fujitsu, Siemens, and Hewlett Packard? And you're going to build a custom computer when you could buy a Sun workstation? Gimme a break. I don't see it. I don't get it."
JM: Yeah, medical technologies have long, complex sales cycles. The industry is highly regulated. It’s cost conscious . . .
But, right after that, Steve wrote a check for $10 million, and he told them to kill the medical project and only do animated films which became Pixar.
JM: Jesus Chri ! I want to ask more about Pixar in a minute, but you went to work for Sun, right? I did. Steve asked me to consult with him, which I did. I realized I really couldn't retire on the money I had, and even if I could, I was too young there was nobody to play with. In ’87, I did some work for
John Sculley, who wanted to spin out Claris, Apple’s application software business. John wanted me to join Bill Campbell, who would be CEO, and I would be COO. (Bill later became CEO of Intuit and a counselor to Eric Schmidt, who became CEO of Google.)
Instead, though, that summer I went to work for Sun Microsystems (“Sun” stood for “Stanford University Network”) as CFO I was with a very sharp crew cofounders Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, and Bill Joy (as well as Eric Schmidt, who later became the chairman and CEO of Google). These were top-notch and very aggressive people. Sun had a so-called open system, but that was a joke everybody had their proprietary versions of Unix Even the “open system” required specialized hardware or devices or programs.
Straight away, Scott asked me to work on a possible merger of Sun and Apple. That didn’t go too far. (It did later, when I was back at Apple.) Scott next asked me to evaluate a proposal from Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, and John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins. Andy had designed the SPARC chip, a reduced instruction set microprocessor (RISC). Andy wanted to run his own company using computers based on his chip. Vinod knew that by having Kleiner Perkins fund it, we could keep the development and marketing costs off Sun’s income statement. As he was transitioning to Kleiner Perkins, he asked John Doerr, who was a Sun board member, to have Kleiner Perkins fund the project.
Scott asked for my advice on this. I reviewed the deal, and Scott called a meeting with all of them. My recommendation was not to do the deal all of the value of Sun would have been in the hands of Kleiner Perkins and Sun would have been in the position of having to buy the technology back at market value. The deal was proposed to keep the SPARC development and marketing costs from negatively impacting SUN’s earnings, but I showed that the deal was not worth doing. Scott accepted that, but the Kleiner Perkins folks were livid. Later, all of Sun’s computers were based on the SPARC chip after they transitioned from Motorola’s CPUs.
I also did another big deal for Sun. ATT wanted to invest in Sun because ATT was lagging in its computer business; Sun was a great investment opportunity anyhow. So, I structured a deal where ATT would own no more than 20 percent of Sun’s stock. The arrangement also included a put option where Sun could decide when to sell the stock to ATT at 25 percent above market. It was a landmark deal I was doing really well at Sun when I got a call from John Sculley and Mike Markkula to come back to Apple as CFO. I turned them down
JM: Somehow you ended up back at Apple, though?
They kept calling, so I went to meet with them. In the meeting at Mike’s home,, they showed me their business plan for the next couple of years. It was out of whack with what was going on in the computer industry, given the fact that computers were getting cheaper and cheaper. The plan showed Apple trying to be even more premium. It had no focus on market share, and consequently its market share was decreasing. The company was making money, but all in all, it was not a good situation.
I had a long talk with them and told them some things they should think about doing. "Well, we want you back," they said.
I said, "I've been gone for four years. You have a whole new management team there. I don't know a lot of those people. I need to speak with all of them."
I eventually interviewed every one of them. What I found out was that John was distracted with writing his book (note: Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple), and the management team wasn’t happy; it was Mutiny on the Bounty. They were pissed off and undermining him on everything he wanted to do. I later found that the board also was upset with John for writing his book and not getting Apple sold.
"I'm not coming back,” I said to John. “You have no idea what's going on among your management team." This is classic me very direct.
John was very surprised to hear about what was really going on, so then he wanted me back even more. I eventually agreed but told him, "I need a good contract."
They gave me a “no cut” contract for four years a check for one and a half million dollars, which was bigger than John’s hiring bonus. When this contract was disclosed in SEC reports, it became infamous in Silicon Valley People came to call it “a Graz” (short for Graziano): suddenly, everyone wanted a Graz.
“I want a Graz! I want a Graz! I want a Graz!”
JM: It was everywhere. Everyone knew about it. It got a lot of press.
JM: And you stayed on at Apple for a while?
Yes, John wanted me because he needed help. We ended up doing quite a bit together We brought Michael Spindler over from Europe to be COO. Eventually, the board became adamant that we needed to sell the company. We tried to do a number of deals in '89 and '90 (including a merger with Sun) and we did the very significant Power PC deal with IBM, but we didn’t sell the company After completing the IBM deal in 1991, I had a near fatal accident in December I was literally broken in half in my Mercedes 500SL. I spent two weeks in the ICU with a broken left hip and left ribs, broken tailbone, and my pelvis and sacrum were broken in three places. The entire transverse process (note: a projection of bone that allow muscle and ligaments to attach to the spine) in my back was broken, and my spleen was ruptured. The first two months of '92, I was recuperating at home.
JM: Joey, you’re lucky to be alive.
Very lucky. But back to Apple. In 1993, the board fired John Sculley because he couldn't get the company sold. We tried with ATT, GM, when H. Ross Perot was there, and even Kodak. The board especially Arthur Rock, who was also on the board of Intel was very impatient and wanted Apple sold. After John was fired, I became a member of the board.
(Note: the following things that Joe describes relate to years-worth of 1980s and ‘90s tech strategy, but I’ll try to explain. RISC processors simplify instructions to computers so they can accomplish tasks more quickly, and IBM had a breakthrough RISC processor. IBM also had been licensing the Microsoft operating system, PC-DOS. Foolishly IBM had given Microsoft the rights to DOS, which allowed Microsoft to control the PC industry. Wanting to be back in the driver’s seat, IBM developed a plan to use its own OS/2 on its RISC chip for PCs.)
In those days, Apple had to move off the Motorola platform to a new RISC processor. We didn't know whether we were going to use the IBM, HP, Digital Equipment, Intel, or Tandem RISC chip. I was in charge of pursuing a deal with IBM. For over a year, I spent a lot of time with the IBM PC team in Armonk, New York, working on a multi-faceted deal. They were beside themselves that they had given the keys to the kingdom to Microsoft. Microsoft was given the rights to DOS which they developed for IBM in the early ‘80s. IBM wanted to regain its position in the PC industry and figured it could do so through us. IBM had a platform we could build on; we would merge the Mac OS and IBM’s OS/2 and possibly have a competitive enterprise-class offering.
That was the long-range plan, but the first step was just to get the companies working together on multiple projects. We signed a complicated, multi-faceted deal with IBM and Motorola to develop the PowerPC (note: known as the Apple-IBM-Motorola Alliance, or AIM.) We transitioned the whole Macintosh base to the PowerPC without a glitch, and soon thereafter, IBM decided it wanted to buy Apple
JM: You wanted that acquisition to go through. Why?
I did. It’s weird to think of this now, given the success of Apple, but we were not in a good place. We had no consumer products other than the Mac. While we increased our market share after my return, the long-term outlook was still not good. Michael Spindler had been running the place for a while, and there was infighting about our strategy, how Apple could be successful competing against Microsoft. Even if we didn’t follow Microsoft in pricing, we were always being measured against it We were going to be relegated to a tiny market share, selling our value proposition to get premium pricing Apple was being relegated to an “also-ran” position. We had small, non-sustainable market share in the PC industry.
As the only executive vice president, I was in favor of doing the deal with IBM I didn't see much alternative and when IBM made us an offer, I was happy about it. I had spent time with IBM CEO Lou Gerstner throughout the prior 18 or 24 months Only a few months before the offer, I had been with him in Chicago.
In Chicago, I asked him, "So Lou, if you don't buy us, what are you going to do?"
Always a straightforward guy, he said, "I think we'll get out of the hardware business, and we'll just focus on software."
To my chagrin, Mike Markkula, who was chairman of the board, turned down the IBM offer.
JM: That was a big disappointment.
It was, but the next events were worse. Not long after that, I was at home, and I was listening to the radio over my home intercom system while getting ready for work. The San Jose News always had a business roundup in the morning. They made an announcement that IBM had acquired Lotus. Right then, I knew there was no way IBM was going to come after us again.
Then I went to talk with Michael Spindler. At the time, he was having some real issues dealing with job stress. He would cower under his desk, literally. (Note: reporters wrote about his panic attacks in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s).
"So, Mike,” I say, “what are you going to do now?"
I know we’re going to have to lay off a whole bunch of people. Our business is sliding.
He says to me, "Well, look, forget IBM. Who wants to be a vice president at IBM? That’s not interesting. When I go to China to do business, a Chinese company might meet with me because I'm the head of Apple, not a VP at IBM."
I look at him. "I don't give a fu ,” I say. “We've got 12,000 people here. A lot of them will be getting laid off, so I don't care how you'd get treated in China."
That became the beginning of the end between him and me The actual end came a few months later, in 1995, when I went on sabbatical
JM: Is sabbatical a common thing at Apple?
Yeah, we earned a six- or seven-week sabbatical every five years. I had not taken mine, and I was in my sixth year I decided to take it, albeit keeping in touch occasionally with my staff I scheduled a bunch of events. I was an avid fly fisherman, so I went fishing in Montana. I was also an avid car racer; I raced cars for about 35 years. I had a bunch of races with my race car team on the East Coast.
So, I'm in Lime Rock, Connecticut, when Mike Markkula calls me up.
"I need you to be in Cupertino tomorrow," he says
I go, "Excuse me? I'm on my sabbatical; I have a trailer truck full of race cars and a whole crew here. My next race is at Watkins Glen in New York and after that . . ."
“Listen, you’ve got to get here,” he says.
"I can't get there."
"Charter a plane," he orders.
I use my credit card to charter a small Learjet. It’s costs me $25 grand to meet with him and Michael Spindler. I get out there the next day, and I'm in Michael Spindler's office. Mike Markkula ends up being half an hour late for the godda meeting, which is really making me angry.
Michael Spindler starts in with, “Here's a plan about how we should merge with Toshiba .” He’s telling us why this is going to be great.
Meanwhile, I'm going, "Oh my God " One of my strengths is strategic thinking and planning. As a CFO, you obviously do all the basic financial stuff, but I was really a very strategic thinker.
JM: You're a very strong, strategic CFO.
I start picking holes in the plan, when Mike Markkula looks at his watch "Oh, I’ve got a dinner. I have to go," he says.
With that, having been in the meeting for no more than fifteen or twenty minutes, he leaves I’m thinking, “Oh my God!” The next morning, I take the jet back to New York On the plane, I look at the plan for the company because my controller was in charge of everything while I was away. I'm looking at the business plan that was put together over the summer.
“This is crazy! This is nuts! We're building up inventory, there's no sign that sales are going to increase, etc.”
In New York, I call Mike. "We cannot present this plan to the board," I say.
Mike knew I was unhappy with Michael Spindler but did not want me to make an issue with the board. So, I started to call other board members about the problems I saw, and they advised me to “keep my powder dry.” That infuriated me.
A little while later, after I returned from sabbatical, Mike Markkula, Gil Amelio, Michael Spindler and I flew down on one of a Falcon to the manufacturing facility in Austin, Texas for a board meeting. I was a board member, and Michael Spindler was a board member, and I was CFO, and Michael Spindler was CEO. The whole Apple board was terrible except for Mike Markkula. I've been on a dozen boards, and the board of Apple, even the first time I was there, had a weak understanding of the business. It had ten outside board members, and most of them were figureheads who did not understand the industry. The crap we used to have to go through to educate board members was crazy. I always thought, "Oh, my God."
JM: Some boards can be the worst. I’ve experienced that too.
It’s true. So, I present my slides to the board. (I still have the files.) In my presentation, I say, "I do not approve the business plan. If you approve this business plan, the company's going to run out of cash. You need to fire Michael Spindler, and you need to bring Steve back to this company. The company has lost its soul."
A board member asks me, "Well, do you want to run the company?"
I say, "No, absolutely not! I'm not the right person to run the company. You need somebody like Steve who can really motivate the engineering team, because the strength of the company is in product design and development. And you need to get into some consumer products."
They laughed at my presentation and me. They literally laughed at me and then asked Michael and me to leave the room. This next part is classic. We’re in the cafeteria, and I'm sitting at a table with Michael
Michael's reading the Mercury News, and the headline of the business section says, “Graziano plans a coup at the Apple Board meeting.”
I'm sitting right next to him!
Anyhow, it’s also the last day of the O.J. Simpson trial, and there’s a television in the cafeteria. O.J. Simpson is sitting there, and he’s waiting for the jury to come out and decide his fate Meanwhile, Michael and I are waiting for the board to come out and decide our fates.
"O J , I know how you feel," I say. I love to make jokes during hard times. Eventually, they call us back into the boardroom “Well, Joe,” Mike Markkula says, “We heard what you said, but we’re going to back Michael.”
"Okay," I say
We agreed I would work on a transition and leave
CHAPTER FOUR: REFLECTIONS OF A SEASONED CFO
In this Part Four of my four-part interview transcript with Joe Graziano, we get lessons learned by Joe during his many years leading finance for iconic tech companies and especially for mercurial, brilliant founders and CEOs He describes what a person needs to know to work with a mercurial founder, and I think it’s incredibly helpful for any finance person working with innovators: “Anything you would say to [Steve], the first thing he would do is challenge it. He was testing. He was like a shark sensing blood. He could zone in so quickly to the weakness in someone’s argument.” Joe does not accept that a finance person should roll over and give in read this final part to get his actual advice and to learn how some of the traits that helped him succeed circle back to his impoverished childhood in Somerville. (Click to read Part One, Part Two, or Part Three)[BECCA WILL ADD LINKS]
JM: That’s it, as far as your time at Apple?
Yes. I’ve never worked full time at a job since that day. I had plenty of money, so I didn't need to work. I was fifty-two years old, and I was happy. My father had died at fifty-eight, and I had never wanted to work until I was seventy or eighty. I had always had a goal to retire before retirement age. I was more than happy to go fishing, hiking, and racing. Plus, I didn't want to be around for the Apple demise. (I would have stayed to help if they had fired Michael Spindler.)
They let Michael run Apple for another three months until the company badly missed its plan. In January, they fired Michael and put in Gil Amelio, another board member and the former head of National Semiconductor, as CEO. He was a dunce. Gil was such a bozo that the very first day he showed up at work I wasn't there and only know this from insiders who told me about it he apparently had with him his writer who was going to write the book on how he turned around Apple. That person went to every staff meeting. Can you imagine that?
JM: The ego, the ego!
He lasted eighteen months. The company’s financials really deteriorated under Gil. It was failing, going bankrupt actually.
JM: Then Apple got Steve back.
Apple ended up buying Steve’s company, NeXT, for $400 million. That didn't buy Steve; the acquisition just got them the assets and some of his people. The reason they wanted NeXT was for its Unix kernel.
JM: Its kernel?
Yeah. One project I had worked on as part of the IBM deal had to do with our efforts to modernize the Mac OS. It was designed on assembly language, a low-level programming language, which made it easy to program but not to modify Every time programmers updated the Mac OS, it was like creating a new OS all over again. We needed to get it on a modern architecture, a new kernel, which is the fundamental element an OS is built on. For the new kernel, Apple was looking at NeXT and Be, Inc. (note: Be is the systems company the former head of R&D for Apple formed after being forced out of Apple )
After Apple acquired NeXT, most of the NeXT employees worked at Apple Steve was hanging around the company a lot He saw the thing flailing, so he called the board
"Look, let me try to turn this thing around," he said.
They were so desperate at that time because Gil was failing as CEO that they said, "Okay."
That was two years after the '95 board meeting, my last one, when I told them to bring Steve back.
JM: Had you been keeping in touch with Jobs?
Yes, being on the board of Pixar, we talked fairly often.
JM: Now Steve’s back. I hope he does something about the board.
Yeah! The first thing he did is he got every board member to sign a letter of resignation, including Mike Markkula, who was the guy who had fired him in '85. Talk about revenge he finally got his revenge! He only took back one board member, the chairman and CEO of DuPont, and he created a very small board. It was Larry Ellison from Oracle, Jerry York from IBM (a finance guy, a very good guy), Bill Campbell and eventually Eric Schmidt I told Steve it was a mistake to have Eric on the board Eric was a good guy, but Google was a threat. When I was at Pixar, I’d say, "What the hell are you doing? Why do you have the head of Google on your board? He's going to go to school on everything you're doing," especially when it came time for the iPhone. But, that was later.
Anyway, Steve had a tiny board at his new Apple Right away, within a month, he borrowed $150 million from Bill Gates/Microsoft to keep Apple afloat. Gates was more than happy to do that because Microsoft was going through an FTC lawsuit for monopoly in the PC industry. Microsoft needed a viable competitor, which meant they benefited from keeping Apple alive. Gates made a fortune on the investment, but you couldn’t have predicted that because and I know now it seems silly to say, but I'll say it anyway in 1997, it wasn't clear that Apple was going to survive.
JM: Absolutely. I remember very well that was the case. It survived, though.
Because Steve streamlined the company, changed the products, and came out with those green, orange, and blue Macs. He did a good job, but it wasn’t until 2002 when the iPod came out that Apple had its first big win. Then, five years later, the iPhone came out. You're talking about almost a ten-year gap between Steve running it and it finally being on a clear success trajectory. The iPod was the beginning of the change, but the iPhone was the really huge deal. Today, it's 65-70 percent of Apple’s revenue, and related services are a big portion. It wasn't clear at all Steve was going to be successful.
JM: But, it was clear that, as Peter Drucker says, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Jobs was incredibly difficult, but he also was like a spiritual leader for Apple and its market and employees. He engineered a cult following. Did you spend time with Jobs after he returned to Apple and you retired?
Of course, because remember, Steve asked me to join the board of Pixar, and I was on the board when we took it public. Of course, I was talking to Steve all the time when I was at Pixar, and he was sharing with me various Apple strategies and stuff, which was kind of an interesting dynamic. Our dynamic was completely, hugely different from way back in the '80s.
JM: How?
We were fighting back in the early '80s, and we sort of made up in '86 at his initiative. I became a trusted advisor to him. I think after that day with the X-ray demonstration, he relied on me and trusted me. He knew I would tell him what I really thought and that it was always the truth
We had a very impressive board at Pixar, famous but capable people from the entertainment industry, and he had me in charge of the compensation and audit committees. I also made sure the CFO was doing what she or he should do.
JM: That (making sure the CFO is capable and doing what they should) is a lesson for every member of a public board.
Every meeting with Steve at Pixar was a strategy meeting, always strategy. I helped him with the structure of both the Disney deals. I remember, before Disney acquired Pixar, when I was still at Apple, Steve called me to go to a Pixar management meeting to review his strategy for distributing films. It was interesting that he relied on me for strategy much different than in the '80s. Now, he's asking me for strategic advice.
JM: Right. He was asking you for the truth, too. That’s what he valued. Sure, but it wasn't like he was a close friend of mine; we just got along.
JM: My read is that you were together a fair amount; there was a personal relationship you just would not allow yourselves to recognize and admit it. You were a hunter killer, Joe. You were tough. You and Steve were equal and opposing forces, and neither one of you would allow yourselves to appear vulnerable to the other.
Maybe, Joe, I don’t know because I have never thought about it. Steve was clearly brilliant, no ifs, ands, or buts about it, and he was a huge risk-taker. I mean, he went for the fences. One time, someone wrote an article on me that I'm like the Reggie Jackson of CFOs I strike out a lot but I hit a lot of home runs and with Steve, it was like that times a hundred. He always went for the fence, and he didn't care that he might fail He was bold enough to do something that a lot of CEOs won't do. He would be willing to cannibalize his own children (note: his own products), which a lot of companies can't do because it's too hard.
At Apple, he had a cash cow with the Apple II, but he knew if he kept milking that cow, he might never make the transition to new products. It’s a tough place to be, but he was bold enough to get out of it, bold enough to take on new technologies like the MAC in the early 80s and then the iPod, Apple Music, iPad, and iPhone before they were mainstream. He was an interesting guy to work for as a finance guy.
JM: That’s an understatement!
You know you're trying to balance financial matters, and he could be disruptive to that. Oh, and he really didn’t care about the investors. That was one of the most interesting things. He always said to me, especially in the early days, "I don't care about profits. If we make great products, the profits will come."
JM: Did you agree with that?
Well, he was right! He was right! He was absolutely right! The question was whether the market would give you the latitude to do that and whether the company could be viable. That was always an interesting debate between him and me in terms of corporate planning and setting and meeting objectives
He was unique. We obviously know that Steve was one of the principal creators of the personal computer industry. I mean Apple wasn't alone in '78, '79. There was Commodore, and a few others, but Apple certainly was a huge influence on the industry. He then changed the movie industry with modern animation that wasn’t the old Disney animation. He changed the music industry with the iPod. And he changed the telephone industry with the smartphone. It's pretty godda remarkable. You don't see many CEOs who launch and grow more than one breakthrough invention.
JM: Absolutely!
He changed history four times. Remember, it wasn’t just the iPod. It was ultimately iTunes and the distribution of single songs and so forth. So, when you think about what he did, it's truly remarkable.
JM: It's extraordinary!
When we’re long gone, people will be talking about Steve Jobs and Apple and all the things he did. Did he change the world? Absolutely! It’s easy to reflect on this now, to look back and have really pleasant thoughts. When you're going through it, though, and you're boots on the ground doing it, it doesn't seem like anything you're just doing your job. The significance of this stuff comes only in retrospect. I have the luxury of being able to age and be old enough to be able to look back over decades and say, "Holy sh , I didn't realize what I was involved in would amount to what it did."
JM: Do you think there's anything about the two of you having unhappy childhoods that was a subconscious bond?
I don't think so. Maybe the fact that he was a driven person and I was a driven person relates to our childhoods. I was trying to shun my upbringing, and to some extent, maybe he was, too. He was given up for adoption by his mother. When you're abandoned, so to speak, what does that say about what somebody thinks of you? Maybe those aspects of our childhoods showed up separately in our personalities, but I don't think it necessarily caused any special connection between us.
Steve was really tough on people, and very few people survived him. He had a pretty bad reputation People watch the movies and read the books. All are partly accurate, and none is completely accurate. The movies and books come in with a certain slant The portrayal of Steve depends on the director's or writer’s goal. (I thought Jobs, the movie in which Ashton Kutcher played Steve, captured Steve’s mannerisms and personality very well )
JM: Jobs was a classic innovator. He was ungovernable. And yet, as CFO, you had to do some governing, which may have included you doing far more than most CFOs.
Oh, yeah, to a great degree! It's interesting that at Apple to a great extent and even at Pixar, too, every board meeting with Steve was like a huge event, and John Sculley followed the same pattern. Every time we had a board meeting, the amount of work we all had to do to support the CEO going to that meeting and the presentations by the staff, all to educate these uneducated board members, I mean it was unbelievable. It was truly unbelievable. And Steve, of course, was always very proud to show them all kinds of stuff on the product side. That was his thing, to razzle-dazzle the board not to deceive them, don't get me wrong, just to impress them.
JM: Would it be inaccurate to say that those fights that you had with Steve in '81 through '85 were in some ways the governance function that wasn't being performed by the board? Because you were the one who was willing to stand up to him and challenge him. He may not have liked it, but he may have, at some level, respected it.
Yeah, that was true, in fact. I've been on boards where we had to make really tough decisions regarding the management of the company, so I know what that's like. But most boards, it's very superficial. Management does its song and dance, and today, unfortunately, governance is not a lot different than it was forty years ago. In the early days of Apple, we didn't spend much time on the administrative stuff, the stuff of the SEC. Today, ever since Enron and the financial crisis (note: ' 01 and '08, respectively), the whole nature of board meetings has changed dramatically. They're all administrative legal crap, and I hate them. That's why I stopped doing boards after 2008. In the earlier days, board meetings were more strategic and product oriented. In the later days, from at least my experience which is now getting dated, they're very legalistic, and oh my god, bogged down in so much minutia.
JM: You are so right.
For a small company, that's terrible because there's too much oversight and compliance layered onto these companies. It's very expensive, the legal costs alone It’s sad The same oversight rules apply to a little company as a huge company.
JM: Could you disagree with Jobs? And did he respect disagreement? There are a lot of people who say you want to have disagreement at a board meeting or between a CFO and a CEO. Disagreement isn’t bad, depending on the tone set and culture created.
I think, down deep, he respected disagreement. The thing you have to understand is how it would normally work with Steve. Anything you would say to him, the first thing he would do is challenge it. He was testing. He was like a shark sensing blood. He could zone in so quickly to the weakness in someone’s
argument. If he smelled blood or weakness, if he sensed that the person had really not understood what they're saying or gone deep enough, it was mayhem. That's when he would destroy somebody.
That's just the way he operated, and boy, you better have thought through what you're going to tell him and be able to defend your position because he would counter and counter. It was a test. He could destroy most people so quickly The board typically wouldn't challenge him much The board members came to meetings to absorb information and get educated. If there was a crisis, maybe they would get involved.
JM: In 1983, when Jobs said, "Maybe we need a new CFO," you didn't follow up on it. You didn't lose your composure. You didn't complain to HR. You didn't go and talk to the board. You just kept going to work. How did you do that? I’m asking this for the benefit of young CFOs in today’s tech world.
I did put a dent in my wife's car, Joe!
Look, I was hurt very much in that moment, but I wasn't destroyed I just figured he was mulling things around, sounding off, that's all. I had a good relationship with John Sculley, and I hadn't really done anything wrong. See, the trouble was that Steve thought I was the cause of the inventory buildup, and that was later proven wrong; it was proven that Mike Markkula had ordered all that stuff.
Also, coincidentally, at the same time, I got a call from Microsoft about becoming CFO, but I didn’t pursue that. Then later, in the 90’s, after doing the IBM deal, Microsoft called again but I again did not pursue it.
JM: I forgot an obvious question, was Sculley the right guy. Was he too much of a big company guy, a bureaucrat?
I liked John and got along with him very well. He worked very hard to understand the industry. It’s debatable about him being the right guy. As a marketing guy, he understood the value of Apple’s GUI and engineering talent, but he didn’t broaden the product line as Steve eventually did.
JM: Let's say somebody today is a CFO with a mercurial, impulsive innovator-founder, what is your advice for them?
A few things.
First, in most cases, not all, you have to give a lot of leeway to the founder. They have to be proven right or wrong, and we always talk about the ones who were right. We rarely talk about the ones who failed. So, you have to give them the benefit of the doubt, and you need to support them. At the same time, you yourself need to have a strong enough foundation to do what you're supposed to do as a CFO. You've got a whole bunch of fiduciary responsibilities, and you can’t waver. You can't just buckle. This never happened to me, but at some companies, you may be pressured to do something you shouldn't do. That would be awful. That would be a huge mistake.
I never had that happen, nor would I have allowed it to happen. People have to be aware that their ethics may be challenged and they have to do the right thing. Ethical questions come across your desk every day. People have to be aware. It’s not always easy when there’s an innovator pounding you over the head about products and investors pounding you about profits, right?
Second, you’ve got to be strong enough to operate with all that stuff going on. You have a founder who may be actually chaotic in a lot of ways. And yet, you’ve got to be a counterbalancing force in terms of the way the company's run. Yet, you're not going to stifle the founder. Those founders and their personalities are too strong. The very fact that they're there, that they got the funding that they got to get as far as they did. They're there for a reason, and that's good. Overall, that's good.
The whole entrepreneurial personality and mindset, and what I saw in all these different people over the years, is a book in itself. I mean, I got to work with the people at Intel, Sun, Apple, and Pixar. They’re
all very entrepreneurial. They’re all creators. They’re all doing significant things. And I had to support them.
The third thing is you can't ever kid yourself as a CFO that you could do what they could do. You’ve got to do what you are supposed to do and do it well. I always think about Colette Kress, the CFO of NVIDIA. Oh my God almighty, what a powerhouse of a company and a CFO Everybody there is making hundreds of millions of dollars and they're growing like a banshee. The CFO she owns the business. You get on a conference call with Jensen Huang and Colette Kress, and wow, she understands the business.
JM: What you are saying is she is integral to Huang’s success. You cannot be with a founder and not truly understand their business. I think I was way more than a finance guy. I had an ability to translate everything into the financial world, and I could also deal with the product and technology sides That's why I was involved in many deals that had to do with the technology. You have to have the ability to be way up at 10,000 feet and then go all the way down into the details, to think through quickly what it takes to make something. Not everybody can do that.
JM: the way I see it, you were the power behind the throne. You were very smart, you were trusted (which is so important), and you were strategic to me the most critical skill set of the best CFOs.
I don’t know about any power behind a throne, but I appreciate the compliment. I would agree that I was trusted and strategic. I guess some people, when they hear an idea, can never conceptualize what it really takes to make that idea work, all the steps, the planning steps. Whereas, I think one of my skills was seeing the big picture without losing sight of the details. I operated at all different levels, but I always gravitated more to the more strategic side of the business. Lastly, in technology, you have to understand the technology. You can't participate without understanding it. It's critical.
JM: Joey, I'm certainly very proud of you for what you have achieved. This from a guy with more success than I've had. Thank you.
JM: Bullroar! Not even close, Joey, not even close! Speaking of which . . . in 1992, my parents got to see you get your honorary doctorate degree in business from your alma mater, and that was special. Once you saw that life could be a meritocracy, in Silicon Valley, you found yourself. Would you agree with that?
Yeah, I think that's right. Today, they’re talking about, and we’re seeing examples of, replacing DEI with MEI meritocracy excellence and intelligence. And I'm big on that I was always that way with my people too. I always hired very, very good people, gave them some headway and rewarded them, and I helped a lot of people become very successful people.
JM: Did you see the East Coast or specifically the Boston area as less of a meritocracy than Silicon Valley?
I did, but that’s because when I was growing up, it was a completely different environment. My brother got out of Chelsea Naval Hospital after spending almost a year recovering from his injuries and worked for the Veterans Administration as head of the prosthetics unit. He was a smart guy, and so, he got a bit of a taste of success The question is, how do you get into the right environment where you can even take that first step?
I was lucky because I ended up deciding to leave my roots and move out to what became Silicon Valley, a very big decision I think I made the most of it, but then again, what would've happened if I had stuck with Apple longer than I did? It’s not worth going down that road because I was fifty-two years old, and I made a conscious decision: that's it. I'm done.
A lot of people have asked me about that, and I’ve always said, "No, I was happy to stop at that point.” I don't want to start racking my brain with would've, could’ve, should’ve." I had a long, successful career as a CFO.
JM: Indeed. Hey, Joey, you wanted me to circle back to the story about the stolen, knock-off Raleigh bike your father got you.
I did, thanks! Having that crummy stolen bike weighed on me heavily as I grew older. I kept saying to myself, “I don’t want to end up struggling through life getting nowhere as my parents did.”
Once I started making some money, I bought many “Raleighs” for myself. After college and moving out of the projects, I bought a new car, which my parents could never afford. Then after moving to California, in 1971, I purchased my first home, in San Mateo, for a cost of $50,000, when the going price for a similar home in Massachusetts was about $15,000. My friends and family in Massachusetts thought I had gone mad!
Then came a $200,000 home in Saratoga in 1977 on a one-acre lot, once again viewed by my east coast family & friends as nuts. I added a pool and a big garage. At one time I owned eight Ferraris. I got my first one after making my first million in 1979. Later, I added several multi-million-dollar race cars to my collection (all sold for a profit after I stopped racing). I sold one very rare Ferrari a 1966 275 GTB/Competizione (the first of only twelve made) to John McCaw of McCaw cellular after I raced it for several years. It was gorgeous but not a good race car. Instead of viewing it as a work of art, I decided to sell it for $900,000. Later, it became worth $15 million and is now worth about $10 million!
In 2004, I sold the home in Saratoga for $2.4 million and built a gorgeous home in Montana with a 5,000-foot car barn. Today, I only kept my 1990 Ferrari F40, which I have owned since new and is worth about $3 million. I have about a dozen other classics. Recently, I bought a 2024 Corvette Z06 hard-top convertible, a crazy fast car.
Look, the thrust of the bike story and maybe my life story is that I’ve never gotten over the “Raleigh." I’ve rewarded myself time and time again with homes, airplanes, cars, motorcycles, jewelry, expensive clothes. and more. Some would say I need a shrink! I don’t disagree, but I’m not going to see one.
JM: Don’t we both! Joe, thanks for collaborating on this interview and article. You've been extraordinary, and this is very special. It really is.
Thanks to you, Joe, for making me take a trip down memory lane and for giving me time to savor my good fortune and be grateful to my parents, my family, and especially my brother for their
Joe says “I seem to always be making up for that stolen, knock-off Raleigh! Pictured are his house in Paso Robles and his 1990 Ferrari F40.
sacrifices. None of this would have happened otherwise.
Today, Joe Graziano is lightyears away from the Broadway, Ball Square, and Winter Hill, neighborhoods where we grew up in Somerville, and lightyears away from his family’s subsequent barren apartment at the Mystic Ave. (Boston) Public Housing Authority. He and his wife, Betty, live in a vast Paso Robles, CA home (half of which is garage space for his beloved classic car collection) with 200 acres that include 28 acres of grapes and 40 acres of walnuts in. He describes the farm as a pain in the butt. “I’m CFO chief farming officer and the pay is terrible,” he says, but I know in reality he loves it; he recently proudly sent me videos of his wife shooting the wild boars that destroy their crops.
Joe and I agree vehemently, and emotionally, that we have been very fortunate to be able to capitalize on the many opportunities that came our way in life.
Joe Mandato is a former leader of several high-growth medtech companies and continues his work as an investor, board director, university lecturer, and author.
Joe is an avid nature photographer.
