What Apple’s Steve Jobs taught this CEO about leadership

After interning under Steve Jobs (AAPL), Chet Kapoor has had a fruitful career, from serving as Google's (GOOG) VP and now as the CEO of DataStax. He sat down with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi to share the inside scoop on what he learned from Steve Jobs, as the guy who got coffee for the guy who got coffee for Jobs.

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Video transcript

Steve was a phenomenal inspirational leader.

Lot to learn from, right?

How to um uh how to think about the user.

Be obsessed about the user, think about doing things very, very differently.

His, his concept of, you know, we want to promote people who are reluctant managers, right?

There were so many things that I saw that I've incorporated into what I do what I've done over the last 30 years.

But there was also a lot of, you know, he was hard, right?

I mean, inspiration was there, but, you know, innovation is hard, right?

I mean, it just, it doesn't happen by saying please go and do this.

You actually have to, you know, you have to push people and, and generally you have to get them to a place where they, they will actually deliver on something they didn't think they could deliver on.

Right.

And that is some combination of love and fear.

I have chosen to go down the the the the path of actually having a little bit more love than fear.

There are many times I saw Steve use a little bit more fear than love, but, you know, it works for different people because we all have different childhood issues.

And so, um but the goal here is to actually inspire people to do more than they ever thought and leave them by the heart, right?

And that is something that is something that Steve epitomized every day.

And, and because of that, you know, change the industry.