Growing up in the city of Kolkata in India, a young Chet Kapoor , now the CEO of data and AI company DataStax, would often turn to the pages of A Little Kingdom, a book about the meteoric rise of Steve Jobs and his enterprise Apple , and dream big.

“I was fascinated. I wanted to work for Steve Jobs ,” Kapoor tells Fortune —and that’s exactly what he did.

His first order of business was moving from India to the States in 1983 before taking on “a bunch of computer classes” to prime himself for any role in the vicinity of the late Apple founder.

Kapoor accomplished that dream just a few years later when he bagged an internship at NeXT Computer—although he admits he was essentially the intern to the intern.

“I was the guy that got coffee for the guy that made coffee,” he laughs

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