55 Facts About John Sculley

John Sculley III was born on April 6,1939 and is an American businessman, entrepreneur and investor in high-tech startups.

In May 1987, John Sculley was named Silicon Valley's top-paid executive, with an annual salary of US$10.2 million.

When John Sculley left in May 1993, Apple had $2 billion in cash and $200 million in debt.

John Sculley is recognized as an expert in marketing, in part because of his early successes at PepsiCo, notably his introduction of the Pepsi Challenge, which allowed the company to gain market share from primary rival Coca-Cola.

John Sculley used similar marketing strategies throughout the 1980s and 1990s at Apple to mass-market Macintosh personal computers, and today he continues to speak and write about disruptive marketing strategies.

John Sculley is currently invested in and involved with a number of high-tech start-up companies, including 3CInteractive, Zeta Global, Inflexion Point, Mobeam, OpenPeak, x10 Credit, Pivot Acquisition Corp.

John Sculley is currently Chairman of the PeopleTicker and SkillsVillage.

John Sculley attended high school at St Mark's School in Southborough, Massachusetts.

John Sculley received a bachelor's degree in Architectural Design from Brown University and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

John Sculley joined the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo in 1967 as a trainee, where he participated in a six-month training program at a bottling plant in Pittsburgh.

In 1970, at the age of 30, John Sculley became the company's youngest marketing vice-president.

John Sculley initiated one of the company's first consumer-research studies, an extended in-home product test in which 350 families participated.

In 1974, John Sculley became president of PepsiCo's International Food Operations division, shortly after he visited a failing potato-chip factory in Paris.

John Sculley was best known at Pepsi for the Pepsi Challenge, an advertising campaign he started in 1975 to compete against Coca-Cola to gain market share, using heavily advertised taste tests.

At the time the Pepsi Challenge was started, John Sculley was senior vice-president of United States sales and marketing operations at Pepsi.

John Sculley himself took the taste test and picked Coke instead of Pepsi.

When John Sculley started at Apple, he got a $1 million signing bonus, $1 million in annual pay and options on 350,000 Apple shares.

John Sculley used his marketing experience to help keep the aging Apple II generating much-needed cash and helped Jobs launch the Mac with the most admired consumer marketing campaign of its time.

When Jobs's Macintosh, the first of a new series of models with a pioneering black-and-white graphical user interface, was shipped to stores in January 1984, John Sculley raised the initial price to $2,495 from the originally planned $1,995, allocating the additional money to hypothetically higher profit margins and to expensive advertising campaigns.

At this point, a power struggle between Jobs and John Sculley was becoming obvious.

John Sculley had little control over the Macintosh division where Jobs was the general manager.

The Apple board of directors instructed John Sculley to "contain" Jobs and limit his ability to launch expensive forays into untested products.

John Sculley found out about Jobs's plans and called a board meeting at which Apple's board of directors sided with John Sculley and removed Jobs from his managerial duties.

John Sculley said in 2015 that Jobs never forgave him and their friendship was never repaired.

Wozniak credited the Macintosh's initial success to John Sculley, saying that he "worked to build a Macintosh market when the Apple II went away".

Under the direction of John Sculley, who had learned several painful lessons after introducing the bulky Macintosh Portable in 1989, Apple introduced the PowerBook in 1991.

Under pressure, Sculley agreed, a decision which later affected the Apple v Microsoft lawsuit.

About that time, John Sculley coined the term personal digital assistant referring to the Apple Newton, one of the world's first PDAs, a product that John Sculley oversaw and launched in 1993.

In 1987, John Sculley made several predictions in a Playboy interview.

John Sculley predicted that the Soviet Union would land a man on Mars within the next 20 years and claimed that optical storage media such as the CD-ROM would revolutionize the use of personal computers.

John Sculley later acknowledged such an act was his greatest mistake, indicating that he should instead have targeted the dominant Intel architecture.

John Sculley resigned on October 15,1993 and was replaced by German-born Michael Spindler, who had been Chief Operating Officer.

John Sculley alleged that he was misled when he was hired at Spectrum by not being told of SEC inquiries and "aggressive revenue recognition accounting" for license fees.

John Sculley has been a founding investor in MetroPCS and helped guide the company's brand marketing; MetroPCS became a multibillion-dollar public company on the New York Stock Exchange until its acquisition by T-Mobile in 2013.

John Sculley built NFO Research from $25 million to $550 million in revenue, and sold it to IPG for $850 million.

In 1997, John Sculley became the chairman of Live Picture, a California-based company, to oversee its push into high-quality, low-bandwidth imaging over the Internet.

In 1997, John Sculley co-founded PopTech with Bob Metcalfe and several other dignitaries from the technology industry.

Months later, Lynch left the company, while John Sculley continued to consult and work with small businesses, including InPhonic, whose board of directors he later joined.

John Sculley served as the vice chairman of the InPhonic board of directors.

In 2002, John Sculley endorsed and invested in the Wine Clip, a wine accessory product, which claims to accelerate the aeration of wine by exposure to magnets.

In 2004, John Sculley joined the board of directors at OpenPeak, a maker of software for wireless consumer electronics, digital media, computers, and home systems.

In March 2006, John Sculley was named Chairman of IdenTrust a San Francisco-based firm focusing on verifying identity and boosting financial security.

John Sculley had canceled Apple's first hand-held mobile tablet PenMac led by Paul Mercer with applications by Samir Arora and instead signed an agreement to work with Sharp Electronics on the Newton technology.

Also in 2003, John Sculley was interviewed by the BBC for the television documentary The World's Most Powerful episode Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates, discussing his time at Apple during the 1980s as CEO.

In 2007, Sculley co-founded the data company Zeta Global with business partner David A Steinberg, and in January 2014 the data analytics firm XL Marketing, rebranded and incorporated its resources into Zeta Interactive, re-launching it as a Big Data-Driven Marketing firm.

In 2014, John Sculley co-founded Obi Mobiles, a smartphone brand aimed at the emerging markets.

In September 2017, John Sculley distanced himself from Obi Worldphone and told that his name was used for PR only.

John Sculley has been working in the health care industry, focusing on RxAdvance, a cloud-based platform that helps pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and insurers manage chronically ill patients living at home.

John Sculley went political in the early 1990s on behalf of Republican Tom Campbell, who in 1992 was running in the California Republican primary to be the party candidate for a United States Senate seat.

John Sculley hosted a fundraiser for Campbell at his ranch in Woodside.

John Sculley had become acquainted with Hillary Clinton, serving with her on a national education council.

John Sculley sat next to Hillary Clinton during the President's first State of the Union address in January 1993.

John Sculley married Ruth, stepdaughter of PepsiCo president Donald Kendall in 1960, with whom he had two children.

In 2013, John Sculley married Diane Gibbs Poli, vice president and design coordinator for Wittman Building Corporation, and they live in Palm Beach, Florida.

In 2016, while visiting Japan, John Sculley saw Steve Jobs' autograph in a sushi restaurant, and broke down in tears.