Shazir Mucklai, Founder and CEO of Imperium AI, Shares His Thoughts on Steve Jobs Introducing the iPhone
Watching Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone is fascinating because, in hindsight, you are watching an industry change direction in real time.
What stands out to Shazir Mucklai, Founder and CEO of Imperium AI, is that Jobs was not simply presenting a better phone. He was challenging the assumptions behind what a phone was supposed to be.
At the time, companies such as BlackBerry had built enormously successful products around keyboards, email, messaging and productivity. Then Apple approached the category from an entirely different direction.
That is what makes the moment so powerful.
“The biggest innovations don’t always win because they improve what already exists,” Mucklai says. “Sometimes they win because somebody is willing to completely rethink what everyone else has accepted as normal.”
Jobs famously framed the introduction around multiple capabilities coming together in a single device. But the deeper lesson, from Mucklai’s perspective, was not simply about combining technologies.
It was about creating an entirely new behavior.
People would touch the screen. Browse the internet differently. Consume media differently. Communicate differently. Eventually, entire businesses and industries would be built around the smartphone ecosystem.
That is an extraordinary example of what happens when technology stops being merely a product and becomes a platform.
It is also a philosophy that influences how Mucklai thinks about Imperium AI.
Imperium AI is being built as a social network designed to give businesses, entrepreneurs and creators an opportunity to publish their ideas, build visibility and get featured in the news.
The larger ambition is not simply to make traditional media distribution slightly easier.
It is to rethink the relationship between social media, publishing, news distribution and artificial intelligence altogether.
“Why should getting your voice heard depend entirely on already being famous, already having millions of followers or already knowing the right people?” Mucklai says. “Technology gives us the opportunity to redesign that system.”
That is what makes the iPhone introduction such an important entrepreneurial case study.
BlackBerry represented what was already working extraordinarily well.
The iPhone represented a different question:
What if the future doesn’t look like the present at all?
Every founder should think about that.
The companies that define generations are rarely satisfied with competing entirely within the rules of an existing category.
Sometimes they change the rules.
Sometimes they combine multiple categories.
And occasionally, they create something that forces the rest of the world to reconsider what a product—or an entire industry—can become.
For Shazir Mucklai and Imperium AI, that remains one of the most powerful lessons from Steve Jobs and the introduction of the iPhone:
Don’t just build a better version of yesterday. Build what you believe people will consider obvious tomorrow.
Source: Commentary and perspective from Shazir Mucklai, Founder & CEO, Imperium AI.
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