Like a lot of people I got self-reflective when I read that Steve Jobs had died. The public outpouring and memorial reflects his iconic status to so many people, and my friends know how I feel about it… which is to say it doesn’t really matter how I feel because I didn’t know the man or ever cross paths with him. I admire his achievement and recognize that he, like all of us, was a flawed man… but hey, there are certainly people less deserving (e.g. anyone in Hollywood) so if people want to make Jobs a heroic figure of epic proportions, go for it.

I never crossed paths with him but I did have a rather interesting encounter in the span of less than a minute with him. A little over 3 years ago my wife and I were eating lunch at La Strada in Palo Alto with our son and my wife was pregnant at the time, and pretty far along.

My son was asking to go to the Apple store and as I was helping my wife up a man sitting at the table (we were outside) next to us looked at my son and smiled, then my wife and me… I held his gaze for a few seconds and we walked away, only later did I realize it was Jobs. He really didn’t look like the Steve Jobs that was familiar to so many of us at the time, the physical transformation had really taken hold.

Two things about that encounter really struck a chord with me, the first being how ordinary Jobs lived what is in every respect an extraordinary life. You get used to the billionaires in this town pretending to be normal everyday kind of folks who just happen to have security details and live in gated compounds in the wealthiest zipcodes on the planet but Jobs really did it. He walked around Palo Alto, stopped in to the store on University Ave., sat at the sidewalk tables and benches at local restaurants, and people seemed to leave him alone.

The other part of my encounter, the one that really sticks with me, is how warm his smile was. It was eery but in a nice kind of way, which is a nice bookend for me to the Steve Jobs that is often recounted.

[Cross-posted at Venture Chronicles]