Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell Tells Us How to Find the Next Steve Jobs

What does it take to be the next Steve Jobs? “Enthusiasm and creativity,” says Nolan Bushnell, author of Finding the Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent (co-written with Gene Stone).

If Bushnell’s name sounds familiar, it should be. He’s often referred to as the father of the video game industry. He founded Atari in 1972 and created the first video game, Pong. He also founded kid-fave Chuck E Cheese as well as several other start-ups along the way so he knows a thing or two about what it takes to succeed.

What you may not know is Bushnell's Atari hired Steve Jobs to work at Atari long before Jobs became the visionary CEO at Apple.

At the time, Jobs was unkempt and difficult to work with and probably wouldn’t get hired today, says Bushnell.

“To most potential employers, he'd just seem like a jerk in bad clothing,” he writes. “And yet a jerk in bad clothing can be exactly the right guy to give your company the highest market capitalization in the world."

Bushnell saw something in the young Jobs, and they developed a life-long friendship that lasted until Jobs’ death in 2011.

“He had passion, he had drive, he was gonna go somewhere, and you knew he was. It was that simple,” he told me when we chatted at the recent International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Here’s more from our interview with Nolan Bushnell on hiring, nurturing and keeping creative talent:

Q: What’s Finding the Next Steve Jobs  about?

It’s really about how you create ecosystems because what a lot of people think is that creativity is more about this brilliant spark of imagination, the light bulb goes off or lightning strikes. It’s really more about the hard work that goes into figuring out the ways to solve all the problems that happens with innovation.

Q: Your new company, Brainrush, is looking to improve education. Do we need to teach kids differently?

I think we should definitely be teaching kids differently? The job market is gonna be so vastly different in the next 20 to 30 years, it’s almost impossible to figure out exactly what to train kids for because most of the jobs that are going to be available in 20 years haven’t been invented yet.

What do we do about it? The best way is have these curious, enthusiastic, creative problem solvers – that always works.

Q: What is the concept of BrainRush?

BrainRush is about brain science and education, teaches 10-20 times faster than classrooms, and we’ve tested it and done really well, getting at least a 10 times acceleration.

What I believe is that gets common core out of the way so we can now have a lot of projects and things that are much more relevant to the future.

 Q: We hear a lot from kids that they aren’t engaged; in fact, look at the Tumblr founder David Karp who was busy building websites in his spare time?

What’s happening today is that all that info is available so people say 'why should I learn it?' As soon as I want to know it, I’ll just look it up, I’ll just Google it.

But also enthusiasm is something that’s being trained out of kids, school is boring when you have a world that’s immersed in this technology. School can’t keep up.

Q: So how do you identify the next Steve Jobs and spark their creativity?

I really look for enthusiasm and creativity before I hire somebody. I never look for credentials, in fact one of the guys that invented the Atari VCS (game console) was a high school dropout.

Hiding in plain sight is Steve Jobs himself who had some college experience. These are not outliers from the sense that if you have passion, you have creativity. I mean, Steve Jobs, I’d come into work and he’d be sleeping under his desk, but he had passion, he had drive, he was gonna go somewhere and you knew he was. It was that simple.

You can watch the full video interview via Mommy Tech Summit: 

Image Credit: Wired Creative Commons and Andrea Smith