The secrecy was so extreme that, like, you din't even know what the product was going to be named. The first iphone wasn't even in the dictionary. That's right after steve launched. And we tried to then really tap into the benefits that thatat the smallness and the secrecy gave us as well.
In this wide-ranging conversation from April 2019, a16z’s Frank Chen sits down with Ken Kocienda, a longtime software engineer and designer at Apple from 2001 to 2017, who wrote a book about his career there, called Creative Selection.
They discuss Ken’s unconventional path from freelance photographer to software engineer at Apple, his work on many core products from Safari web browser to iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch and features like Autocorrect, what it was like to demo new products for Steve Jobs, and more.