Steve Jobs

prevent that, he said, the administration needed to be a lot more business-friendly. He described how easy it was to build a factory in China, and said that it was almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs.
    Jobs also attacked America’s education system, saying that it was hopelessly antiquated and crippled by union work rules. Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for educationreform. Teachers should be treated as professionals, he said, not as industrial assembly-line workers. Principals should be able to hire and fire them based on how good they were. Schools should be staying open until at least 6 p.m. and be in session eleven months of the year. It was absurd, he added, that American classrooms were still based on teachers standing at a board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.
    Jobs offered to put together a group of six or seven CEOs who could really explain the innovation challenges facing America, and the president accepted. So Jobs made a list of people for a Washington meeting to be held in December. Unfortunately, after Valerie Jarrett and other presidential aides had added names, the list had expanded to more than twenty, with GE’s Jeffrey Immelt in the lead. Jobs sent Jarrett an email saying it was a bloated list and he had no intention of coming. In fact his health problems had flared anew by then, so he would not have been able to go in any case, as Doerr privately explained to the president.
    In February 2011, Doerr began making plans to host a small dinner for President Obama in Silicon Valley. He and Jobs, along with their wives, went to dinner at Evvia, a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto, to draw up a tight guest list. The dozen chosen tech titans included Google’s Eric Schmidt, Yahoo’s Carol Bartz, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Cisco’s John Chambers, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Genentech’s Art Levinson, and Netflix’s Reed Hastings. Jobs’s attention to the details of the dinner extended to the food. Doerr sent him the proposed menu, and he responded that some of the dishes proposed by the caterer—shrimp, cod, lentil salad—were far too fancy “and not who you are, John.” He particularly objected to the dessert that was planned, a cream pie tricked out with chocolate truffles, but the White House advance staff overruled him by telling the caterer that the president liked cream pie. Because Jobs had lost so much weight that he was easily chilled, Doerr kept the house so warm that Zuckerberg found himself sweating profusely.
    Jobs, sitting next to the president, kicked off the dinner by saying, “Regardless of our political persuasions, I want you to know that we’rehere to do whatever you ask to help our country.” Despite that, the dinner initially became a litany of suggestions of what the president could do for the businesses there. Chambers, for example, pushed a proposal for a repatriation tax holiday that would allow major corporations to avoid tax payments on overseas profits if they brought them back to the United States for investment during a certain period. The president was annoyed, and so was Zuckerberg, who turned to Valerie Jarrett, sitting to his right, and whispered, “We should be talking about what’s important to the country. Why is he just talking about what’s good for him?”
    Doerr was able to refocus the discussion by calling on everyone to suggest a list of action items. When Jobs’s turn came, he stressed the need for more trained engineers and suggested that any foreign students who earned an engineering degree in the United States should be given a visa to stay in the country. Obama said that could be done only in the context of the “Dream Act,” which would allow illegal aliens who arrived as minors and finished high school to become legal residents—something that the Republicans had blocked. Jobs found this an annoying example of how politics can lead to paralysis. “The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done,” he recalled. “It infuriates me.”
    Jobs went on to urge that a way be found to train more American engineers. Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, he said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. “You