Steve Chazin is Vice President of Products at Alarm.com, a technology company that focuses on the intelligently connected property. He has been in product “in one way or another” since his first job building technology for Raytheon. Steve then became Senior Director, Marketing & Account Executive and Systems Engineer at Apple, where he worked for nearly a decade. He’s remained in tech since then and has worked in various leadership roles at companies such as Avid, Ellucian, Salesforce, Symantec, Cisco, and more.
In our conversation, Steve shares how he was re-hired by Steve Jobs to help turn Apple around, specifically by leading the revamp of their educational marketing and Apple University Consortium (AUC) programs. He also talks about how after his tenure at Apple, he moved on to work for one of their direct product competitors and figured out how to draft Apple’s momentum to grow the business.
Alarm.com is probably my favorite job since Apple. We are in the business of keeping people and their loved ones safe through technology. I get to work on things I would do for my family anyway, regardless of if they were paying me.
In the past, people paid for a security panel for their home, which they rarely armed. The idea is that if you leave or go on vacation, you arm your home, and if something bad happens, someone else is watching on your behalf to send first responders. 23 years ago, Alarm.com put the first cell radio in the security panel. Now, even if your system is not armed, it’s getting telemetry from your home to understand behavioral patterns to flag when something doesn’t look right. I call this “ambient awareness.” It is a sense of what’s happening to your home and to the people you love, wherever they may be
All of our products give you an understanding of what’s happening, and now, we extend that beyond the home. I just installed one of our devices in my car so I’ll be alerted if it accelerates too fast, starts moving when it shouldn’t, or if it’s low on gas. We have outside sensors and cameras that can detect if a package has been delivered or retrieved by somebody, or if there’s an animal in your yard. These provide a new level of home awareness you want to know about.
I have so many stories from working at Apple and have written many of them on my blog. I joined Apple in 1991 when it was like a mini rocket ship. They had launched the Mac and survived their first downturn. Up until 1993, they were coasting — if you wanted Apple’s product, you had to pay their price. Microsoft started catching up, and by 1997, Windows 95 had carved away most of the unique value the Mac had at a much lower cost and in a much wider footprint.
Apple kind of lost its way after its founder had left the company many years before. I saw the writing on the wall, and by 1997, I decided that the company was going to go out of business. Most people don’t realize how close they were to dissolving. Apple turned to one of its board members, Gil Amelio, and one of his last-ditch efforts was to acquire the operating system from a company called NeXT, which was owned by Steve Jobs. This was more of a marketing plot than anything because the operating system would take years to be ported to Mac hardware.
Within about six months or so, Steve pushed Gil out, and right before that happened, I was still questioning if Apple had a future. I took a job somewhere else and wrote a note to my boss on my last day on the job. We had an email system called Applelink, and I wrote to him about what I would do if I was the CEO of Apple, and how I would focus on a few things to help turn the company around. As I went to send it, I decided to CC Steve Jobs in the email.
I sent it and forgot about it. A week or so later, I was driving when my car phone rang. It was my boss on speakerphone with Steve Jobs who had read my note, walked into my boss’s office, and cajoled me to return to the company. This is after I had already resigned and accepted another job offer. Steve said, “Come back and do the things you listed in the email.” I thought, “How often do you get to write your own job description?” and agreed.
One of them was to reconstitute what we called the Apple University Consortium. In the early days of the Mac, Apple was having problems selling it. It was unique and different, and it didn’t run any of the same software that everyone else was using. Steve Jobs saw that schools had young minds who were willing to try new things and, more likely, could write the software to help bootstrap the early days of the Mac. I suggested we do the same thing with whatever we were building for the future and bring universities together to work on this.
I saw that it was in the universities’ best interest to see Apple survive because some of them had bet their whole business around the Mac. For instance, Dartmouth College, who was my largest customer, required every student to buy a Mac.
We rebuilt that group, and every six or nine weeks, we would talk to them. Every three or four months, we’d bring them all to Apple’s campus and show them what we were working on. More importantly, this would help us understand what we needed to build and in some cases, ask them to help write the software. Some of the schools that we invited helped us port software from NeXT to the new Mac OS. In return, we gave them an open source license for it (we called it “Darwin”) so that they could extend it.
I’ve managed a lot of people and I’ve been managed by a lot of people. The secret of management is that you want people to have their own ideas and bring their whole personality to the business. There are different management styles, but in Steve’s case, if you’re not adding value, why are you around? If you want to add value, you’ve got to dig deep and suggest what you think the company should do.
The sum of a business is built by its people and their passions, yet many companies are driven top-down and so their employees wait to be told what to do. Because it’s not their idea, they’re not giving their whole self. If you think you have a better way to help your company grow, it’s incumbent upon you to share that.
It’s more of a gut feeling. When you close your eyes and imagine what Apple is good at and why people care, you have to focus on the things that differentiate the platform. That’s true for any product team — what is your reason for being? If you’re not a little better than a competitor, then why do you exist? Another way to say it is what is your enduring value over time? If you don’t have one, it’s challenging.
When you move to a startup, people leave good-paying jobs because they believe they can change the world or change their lives. They’re leaving something comfortable for something that’s almost certainly going to fail. But the reason people do that is because in startups, especially small ones, everyone can articulate why that company exists. That passion unites people and often leads to more innovative products.
The Apple University Consortium was a group of 24 universities in the US and Canada. Many of these universities were the original AUC group that Steve himself started. Many of the members knew each other — they were CIOs and the heads of IT at these schools. All of them had great ideas for what technology should do for the art of education, and they were at the intersection of using the computer both as a tool for students and for running their campus.
Computers were going to be part of the world that they were in, and the mission of these universities was to prepare students for that future. They were a great group for understanding why people were embracing or rejecting Apple’s technology.
Every quarter, we’d bring them to Cupertino to meet with Steve. We’d sit in a conference room for eight hours together, and every once in a while, Steve would kick all the Apple people out of the room to talk to the university leaders directly. He’d describe his vision for where technology should go and why they should embrace what he was working on.
During one session, Steve showed them a styrofoam model of the first iMac. He felt like he built it with these universities’ feedback and encouraged them to order many before they were released to the public. They were the only executives who ever saw the iMac while it was being built. There was a lot at stake because if the iMac failed, Apple would’ve failed. Interestingly, the iMac was electrically identical to the computers Apple had been rapidly going out of business trying to sell. They were just focusing on a different problem then, and that was the internet age.
It’s interesting — I worked at Apple when it almost went under, yet when it got stronger and I joined Avid, Steve Jobs personally wanted to put Avid out of business. He felt Apple had a good foundation in Hollywood because of Avid, which built the first digital nonlinear editor. All the major motion pictures are built on this now, and it ran exclusively on Apple hardware then. Hollywood built its foundation on the Avid Media Composer editing system and Macintosh.
Steve thought, “If Apple ever shrinks, we could at least defend our flank,” because Apple invented Firewire, which used to be the fastest connection to both digital cameras and digital drives. He went to Macromedia and acquired the assets of a product called Key Grip and renamed it Final Cut Pro, which then became his video editing tool. He had the video editing software, Firewire hard drives, and the Mac computer itself to win Hollywood. But during Apple’s downturn in 1997, Avid decided to support the Windows platform.
About a week before I joined Avid, the executive team went to Cupertino to talk to Steve about mending fences. Steve turned them down. The board told the CEO, David, to begin to package up the company to sell it because Apple was likely going to kill Avid. Soon after I joined Avid, I convinced David to take a chance knowing what Apple could and would not do.
One of my suggestions was to focus on a software-only version of Media Composer and sell it at the same price — or even twice as much — as Final Cut Pro. We grew our business almost by accident through this software-only product because Apple wanted to crush us, and everything they tried to market Final Cut Pro just helped us.
The first thing I needed to do was get Steve Jobs to co-author a press release with our CEO talking about how great the Avid product was. My PR department said, “There’s no way he’s going to approve this because he wants to crush us.” I said, “You write three paragraphs that you want to run by him. I’ll write the fourth, and I guarantee he’ll approve of my paragraph and our press release.
I wrote that all of Hollywood is built on the Avid running on Macintosh, and so Hollywood is about the Mac. He approved my paragraph, but what he didn’t know was that the box I was going to ship had both Mac software and Windows software included. I even changed our license so customers could run them both simultaneously. I predicted that customers may have moved from Mac to Windows, so why make it hard for them to use Avid?
We launched our product, Avid Xpress Pro. The Hollywood Reporter wrote a great story about it, and all of a sudden, sales took off.
A year later, Apple was still angry because Final Cut Pro was not growing and never made a dent in Avid’s business. If anything, it helped. At one of the last Macworld conferences, Steve Jobs introduced Final Cut Express, which was designed to kill our Avid Xpress Pro. They were selling it for $249. Knowing something was coming, I had our team pre-authorize a press release to drop before Steve left the stage at Macworld, which announced Avid Free DV and that we were giving it away for free. It had many of the same features as Final Cut Express, but it was $0.
We sold Media Composer to students for $295 after that, and we beat Apple at every turn. It still feels good thinking about it today. As strong as they were, we figured out how to draft their momentum to help grow our business. Customers were better off because they actually got a superior product that they’re still using today.
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