Joanna Hoffman

**Joanna Karine Hoffman** (born July 27, 1953) is an American marketing executive. She was one of the original members of both the Macintosh team at Apple Computer, and the NeXT team.

## Early life and education

Hoffman was born in Poland, the daughter of film director Jerzy Hoffman and his Armenian former wife Marlena Nazarian. She lived with her mother in the Armenian SSR until age 10, when she went to live with her father in Warsaw, Poland. In 1967, her mother married an American and moved to Buffalo, New York. Hoffman joined them in the United States in 1968. Hoffman quickly became fluent in English and excelled in school.

She has a background in anthropology, physics, and linguistics, a Bachelor of Science in Humanities and Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and pursued a doctorate (which she did not complete) in archaeology at the University of Chicago at the Oriental Institute. In 1979, she was scheduled to travel to Iran for an archaeology dig. She stopped in Poland to visit her grandmother and received word from Iran that she would have to return to the United States because of the Iranian Revolution.

## Career

Hoffman was on a leave of absence from the University of Chicago when she was encouraged by her friends to attend a lecture at Xerox PARC in California. While there, she had "a heated discussion after the lecture" with Jef Raskin. The discussion focused on "what computers should look like and how they should improve people's lives." Raskin was so impressed with Hoffman that he asked her to interview for a position at Apple Computer. She began on the Macintosh project in October 1980 as part of Raskin's initial team of Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, and Brian Howard. At the time she began, the Mac was "still a research project" Her position "constituted the entire Macintosh marketing team for the first year and a half of the project." She also wrote the "first draft of the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines." Hoffman would eventually run the International Marketing Team which brought the Mac to Europe and Asia. She later followed Steve Jobs to NeXT, as one of its original members.

Hoffman had a reputation at both Apple and NeXT as one of the few who could successfully engage with Jobs. In both 1981 and 1982, she won a satirical award at Apple given to "the person who did the best job of standing up to Jobs”. (Jobs was aware of the award and liked it.)

During the early 1990s, Hoffman was vice president of Marketing at General Magic, retiring in 1995 to spend more time with her family. On occasion she has given public lectures discussing her early life at Apple and working with Steve Jobs.

In 2020, she was hired by the Spanish artificial intelligence company Sherpa as a consultant and the right-hand of its founder and CEO Xabi Uribe Etxebarria.

## Personal life

Hoffman is married to Alain Rossmann, a native of France, who also worked on the Mac team at Apple, with whom she has two sons. Her children attended the International School of the Peninsula in Palo Alto, where she served on the school board.

## Portrayal in media

Abigail McConnell  portrayed Hoffman in the 2013 film *jOBS*. British actress Kate Winslet portrayed Hoffman in the 2015 film *Steve Jobs*. Winslet won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture, the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.

On the nature of the relationship between Hoffman and Jobs, Winslet described her as Jobs' "work wife", and that "she was an extraordinary, feisty Eastern European person who was pretty much the only person who could actually knock sense into Steve".

## References

1. ↑ Joanna Hoffman public record accessed 11-7-2015
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 *Steve Jobs* by Walter Isaacson, Simon & Schuster. 2011.
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Patton, Phil (1989-08-06). Steve Jobs: Out for Revenge. *New York Times*. Retrieved on 2015-09-07.
4. ↑ Joanna Hoffman Interview at Makers Conference 2016 accessed 2-7-2015
5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 The Wizards behind the Macintosh. Mac-history.net. Retrieved on 2015-09-07.
6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 Terdiman, Daniel (2009-01-22). Recollections of the Mac's creators. CNET. Archived from the original on January 23, 2015. Retrieved on 2015-09-07.
7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 *Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made* by Andy Hertzfeld, O'Reilly Media, p.xxii-xxiii. 2005.
8. ↑ Jiménez, Marimar (2020-03-06). La española Sherpa ficha a Joanna Hoffman, mano derecha de Steve Jobs (es).
9. ↑ Pioneering Women in Technology – A Conversation with Joanna Hoffman, International School of the Peninsula. Archived 2017-07-30.
10. ↑ Abigail McConnell. The Internet Movie Database. Retrieved on 2017-04-16.
11. ↑ Labrecque, Jeff. "What Kate Winslet would tell her 19-year-old self today", *Entertainment Weekly*, June 22, 2015. Retrieved on 2015-06-24.
12. ↑ Kachka, Boris (August 26, 2015). How Kate Winslet Won a Role in Steve Jobs and Managed All That Sorkin Dialogue. Vulture. Retrieved on December 28, 2017.

## External links

* Joanna Hoffman at Folklore
* Joanna Hoffman at the Internet Movie Database
* Joanna Hoffman at the Apple Wiki
* Joanna Hoffman at Wikipedia

### Articles

* How Xerox PARC Helped Produce the Macintosh Business Plan by Adam Rosen at Cult of Mac (2014-01-20)