{"id":247752,"date":"2025-09-23T02:12:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T02:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/247752\/"},"modified":"2025-09-23T02:12:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T02:12:11","slug":"steve-jobs-intern-went-on-to-sell-his-company-to-google-for-625-million-he-now-advises-grads-to-pay-to-work-for-impressive-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/247752\/","title":{"rendered":"Steve Jobs\u2019 intern went on to sell his company to Google for $625 million\u2014he now advises grads to pay to work for impressive people"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Growing up in the city of Kolkata in India, a young Chet Kapoor<\/a>, now the CEO of data and AI company DataStax, would often turn to the pages of A Little Kingdom, a book about the meteoric rise of Steve Jobs and his enterprise Apple<\/a>, and dream big.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was fascinated. I wanted to work for Steve Jobs<\/a>,\u201d Kapoor tells Fortune\u2014and that\u2019s exactly what he did.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

His first order of business was moving from India to the States in 1983 before taking on \u201ca bunch of computer classes\u201d to prime himself for any role in the vicinity of the late Apple founder.<\/p>\n

Kapoor accomplished that dream just a few years later when he bagged an internship at NeXT<\/a> Computer\u2014although he admits he was essentially the intern to the intern.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was the guy that got coffee for the guy that made coffee,\u201d he laughs. \u201cIt didn\u2019t matter what I did. Janitorial services, dishes\u2014I was 20 yards away from Steve Jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if Jobs didn\u2019t know who Kapoor was, by his own account, he still thinks that working in the shadows of an esteemed entrepreneur was a formative experience\u2014one he even advises graduates to pay for.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I tell college graduates is to find a set of people you want to really work with, convince them that they need you, and then pay them to let you work for them,\u201d he says, insisting the first four years of your career shapes your personality and professional trajectory.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe experience you will get from working with really smart people will pay you dividends that you cannot imagine,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s not the company you work for, it is the individuals you work with that define you.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re thinking the advice sounds unaffordable during a cost-of-living crisis<\/a> (as well as elitist), he argues it\u2019s better value for those who are already spending thousands of dollars on a degree.<\/p>\n

\u201cThink about it, right? College graduates have just paid $200,000 in tuition<\/a>. And I\u2019m talking to them at the end of the senior year saying, that\u2019s actually not a great use of money,\u201d he explains. \u201cLet me tell you how you could have used it: Focus on the people that you work with, because that\u2019ll change your career.\u201d<\/p>\n

That being said, Kapoor did go to college himself.<\/p>\n

While others were at frat parties, Kapoor was juggling his education with running his own consulting firm, working in fast food chains, and interning at Jobs\u2019 NeXT.<\/p>\n

A skill Kapoor was quick to learn at just 22 years old was how to balance profit and loss.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was not a \u2018nice to have\u2019 for me, it was important that I made money because that\u2019s how I paid for tuition,\u201d he explains. \u201cSo if I didn\u2019t make money, I couldn\u2019t go to school.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking back on his life, Kapoor describes it as a \u201chand-to-mouth existence\u201d but says that there\u2019s \u201cnothing\u201d like being your own boss to prepare you for leadership.<\/p>\n

After graduating, he climbed the ranks quickly from Jobs\u2019 intern to the CEO of Gluecode, an open-source software he sold to IBM<\/a> in a mere six months, in around 15 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery individual goes through three different stages in their career. They are individual contributors, they manage people, and then they lead managers,\u201d he shrugs. \u201cSo, I believe everyone has to go through that journey.\u201d<\/p>\n

But with the average CEO over 50 years old<\/a>, it\u2019s clear he went through that process at lightning speed. He said he believes it\u2019s down to how you show up in the early years of your career.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no magic bullet here, you have to lead yourself, then you can lead a small team, and then you lead leaders, right? And I think it all comes down to how you think about leading yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kapoor says he concentrated on the team\u2019s success over his own contributions and nailed the execution.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the end of the day, belief [in one\u2019s self] is cheap. You can read leadership books, and this and that. But if you don\u2019t lead yourself that way, you will not be able to lead people.\u201d<\/p>\n

After orchestrating the sale of Gluecode to IBM for an undisclosed amount, Kapoor became the CEO of the analytics software Apigee in 2007.<\/p>\n

Under his helm, the company underwent a successful rebranding; attracted big clients like Netflix<\/a>, Target<\/a>, and Walgreens; and raised $87 million through a public IPO before being acquired by Google<\/a> for $625 million in 2016.<\/p>\n

Kapoor has one tip for priming a business for sale: Don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy take would be to focus on building a business, hiring great people, getting great customers, and then everything else happens around it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Even now, he says that his motto is always: \u201cWe have an open-for-business sign, not a business-for-sale sign.\u201d<\/p>\n

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com<\/a> on July 10, 2023.<\/p>\n

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Growing up in the city of Kolkata in India, a young Chet Kapoor, now the CEO of data…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":247753,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[31171,64,131560,71736,420,88478,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-247752","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-ai-company","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-chet-kapoor","11":"tag-college-graduates","12":"tag-jobs","13":"tag-steve-jobs","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115251193026649259","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/247753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}