One of the few contemporaries in tech that Steve Jobs openly admired was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. In Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, the Apple founder said that he admired Zuckerberg “for not selling out, for wanting to make a company.” In other words, Jobs saw a lot of himself in Zuckerberg: a young kid out to change the world.
Well, it turns out the respect was mutual. In an interview with Charlie Rose that will air later today, Zuckerberg says that Jobs’s help was formative in building Facebook.
According to Zuckerberg, Jobs advised him on how to focus his company and build the right management team.
“I had a lot of questions for him,” Zuckerberg said. The topics included, “how to build a team around you that’s focused on building as high quality and good things as you are.”
Jobs and Zuckerberg also talked about “the aesthetics and kind of mission orientation of companies,” Zuckerberg said in the interview.
Not too surprising Jobs and Zuckerberg were said to have taken walks together, and even had dinner to discuss Apple’s foray into social networking, Ping.
With all that mutual respect, though, neither CEO could ever manage to work out a deal where Facebook and Apple could work together on product. The closest they ever got was Ping, and we all know how that turned out.
