Live from Cupertino

Apple isn’t just a design and innovation powerhouse. It’s also the greatest sales machine you’ve never heard of.

Recommended Read by getAbstract!

In twenty-two years with the Cupertino band, Michael Hageloh saw it all. The era of beige boxes and clueless CEOs. The company’s near death. The return of Steve Jobs. Triumphs like the iPod, iTunes, and the iPhone. But you know that story. What you don’t know is that it was a sales operation built around music, storytelling, and passion that let Apple not only survive the hard times, but eventually change the world.

Now Michael—engineer, drummer, raconteur, and closer of nearly one billion dollars in Apple sales—takes you inside the sales culture that made Apple the world’s first trillion-dollar corporation. The big secret? Music. Music has been part of Apple’s DNA since the beginning, and in Live from Cupertino, Michael takes you inside a one-of-a-kind selling culture that’s amazingly similar to the process of taking music from rehearsal to live performance. If you’re dying to know how Apple did it, Live from Cupertino is your first chance to learn company secrets from someone who was there from the beginning.

Michael Hageloh spent twenty-two years with Apple, starting as a systems engineer before becoming a rainmaker, surviving the company’s near-bankruptcy, seeing the return of Steve Jobs, and selling products like the iPod to a skeptical world. While selling for Apple, he personally generated nearly $1 billion in revenue.

Michael also has a deep background in academia and fundraising, having served as the director of special projects for the University of South Florida’s Muma College of Business, a senior director of development, a capital campaign officer, and an event judge for Startup EDU, powered by the Kauffman Foundation.

A onetime disco drummer, Michael is a high-spirited speaker, a beat-ahead thinker, and a charismatic mentor. He is currently a chief development officer in higher education and consults globally on orchestrating rhythms for sales, marketing, and institutional advancement.