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Interning for Apple founder Steve Jobs offered valuable business insights to Chet Kapoor CEO of DataStax
(Photo: Chet Kapoor.)
May 18, 2024
Working as an intern for Steve Jobs’s NeXT was the most important career decision for Chet Kapoor, Chief Executive of DataStax. “I can attribute a large portion of my success to my first two or three years at NeXT,” Kapoor, 57, told CNBC.
While at NeXT, from 1989 to 1993, Kapoor got coffee for the person who made coffee for Jobs. But eager to be around Jobs, Kapoor focused on the questions that Jobs asked because it offered insights into his thought process.
Jobs, Kapoor says, had a maniacal focus on how a user is going to interact with a product. Everything Jobs did, Kapoor told CNBC, started “with a very strong engineering culture...He drove a very hard, regimented schedule because otherwise…it becomes a science project,” and not a business.
DataStax, which Kapoor joined as CEO in 2019, is an artificial intelligence (AI) company based in San Jose, California. Its products enable customers to store and manage large amounts of data, including by using scalable AI agents and generative AI. In 2022, DataStax raised $115 million in a funding round valuing it at $1.6 billion, according to TechCrunch.
Kapoor grew up in Kolkatta, India. He got interested in technology after reading a book from the British Council library. It was The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer, 1984, by Michael Moritz The book tells the story of the eight-year growth of Apple, from its founding by Steve Jobs in a Silicon Valley garage to a major business.
Kapoor decided he wanted to work for Jobs and started studying computer science. In 1986, Kapoor moved to the U.S. to study Computer Science at Arizona State University. While at the university he found a part-time job with NeXT and upon graduation he joined NeXT full-time as an intern.
Earlier, prior to DataStax, Kapoor was in leadership roles including at Google and IBM. In 2007, he became the CEO of Apigee, a provider of application programming interface (API) management. APIs — the mechanism developers use to interface and integrate with outside apps and services — are the hubs through which companies, partners and customers interact in the digital and mobile marketplace. Among its hundreds of customers were Walgreens, AT&T, Bechtel, Burberry, and First Data. In 2016, Google bought Apigee for $625 million.
Kapoor’s advice to those starting out on their career journey is to find people you admire, convince them of your value and consider paying them to allow you to work alongside them, he told Fortune.
He added that experience working for smart people pays dividends that are hard to imagine. Also, it’s the people you work with, not the company, which matters.
During one’s career, the list of failures will far exceed the list of successes, Kapoor told a blogger for Unusual Ventures. “When you miss a shot, spend some time thinking about why you missed and then move on, QUICKLY,” he added. Champions do not obsess about the last shot. “They practice. They pivot. And they define success as the team winning.”