Some 17 years before The Back of the Napkin was published, and before death-by-PowerPoint was a familiar refrain, Steve Jobs was not only a master of the slide presentation, he was a clear and thoughtful presenter at the whiteboard as well. I love this old presentation below featuring Steve Jobs at the whiteboard as he methodically, yet passionately, explains NeXT's positioning and future growth opportunities. Sure, his projections did not pan out and NeXT never really enjoyed large commercial success, but NeXT's influence in the computer industry was big (and Jobs would go on to sell NeXT and its object-oriented operating system to Apple in 1996 for over $400 million...and the rest, as they say, is history).

A lot of what Steve covers in this short "chalk talk" are the kind of things an entrepreneur would cover in a pitch: The market, the competition, sales and the channel, challenges and solutions, etc. This is a good and interesting presentation, but many people — especially business educators — will find the content illuminating as well. Steve states the fundamental questions right from the start: "Who is our target customer? Why are they selecting our product over the competition's? What distribution channels are we going to use?" The video is quite low-rez which makes reading the whiteboard difficult, but this is well worth a look.

Part 1


Part 2

An early Jobs demo on interpersonal computing
If you still have not had enough of going down Memory Lane, then check out this NeXT demo by Steve Jobs circa 1991-92. Pretty impressive stuff actually, especially when you consider that this was before most people ever heard of the internet or email, etc. (There are three additional parts to this demo on YouTube: 2, 3, 4.)

H/T to Jan Schultink.