When Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) co-founder Steve Jobs was in high school, he once picked up the phone and dialed Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) co-founder Bill Hewlett and asked for leftover electronic parts, a cold call that unexpectedly turned into his first real job.
Cold Call That Changed Young Steve Jobs’ Life
In a 1994 interview archived by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, Jobs recalled how Hewlett personally answered the phone after the 12-year-old found his number in the local phone book in Mountain View, California.
“He laughed and he gave me the spare parts to build the frequency counter and he gave me a job that summer at Hewlett-Packard, working on the assembly line putting nuts and bolts together on frequency counters,” Jobs said. “He got me a job in the place that built them and I was in heaven.”
Jobs Says Asking Separates Doers From Dreamers
Jobs used the story to highlight a broader point about initiative. “I’ve always found something to be very true, which is most people don’t get those experiences because they never ask,” he said in the same interview. “I’ve never found anybody that didn’t want to help me if I asked them for help.”
Being willing to reach out and risk looking foolish is what separates “the people who do things from the people who just dream about them,” Jobs argued. He framed fear of rejection as the real barrier, not access to influential people. “You’ve got to be willing to crash and burn, with people on the phone, with starting a company, with whatever,” Jobs said. “If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.”
Cold Outreach And Internships Still Open Doors
As per a separate account shared by CNBC in 2017, decades later, future Birchbox co-founder Katia Beauchamp flipped the script and tried Jobs’ own tactic on him. Just before starting Harvard Business School in 2008, she cold-emailed Jobs to ask for the same student discount on a MacBook Air that the school offered on an IBM ThinkPad. He replied in under 24 hours and granted the deal, she later recounted, calling cold outreach a cornerstone of her career.
Jobs’ early HP role also highlights how formative internships and student jobs can be. The National Association of Colleges and Employers has repeatedly found that employers heavily favor candidates with practical experience, and that internships are among the most effective recruiting tools. In a tougher market where nearly 60% of recent graduates report still searching for a first job, internships and work experience often become the decisive tiebreaker.
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