Matthew Rogers remembers Apple’s scrappy days when, as an engineer fresh out of college, he could debate ideas directly with Steve Jobs. Rogers was part of a team of only a few dozen who worked on the original iPhone—which they initially developed as a derivative of the iPod Nano, with a click wheel. But that mechanism wasn’t good enough for Jobs. He aimed for something close to perfection.
“I was 23, 24 years old, and I interacted with Steve Jobs. That’s crazy, right? But that’s the organization he ran,” Rogers told Fortune from his Silicon Valley office (he now runs food-recycling startup Mill).
