Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell: 'There Are Steve Jobses All Around Us'

But there are plenty of creative, talented visionaries out there today who have the potential to innovate and disrupt the tech industry just like Jobs did.

In Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell's book, "Finding the Next Steve Jobs—How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent," Bushnell discusses how to find and hire people who have the potential to be as effective as Jobs.

Before Jobs cofounded Apple alongside Steve Wozniak, the pair worked for Bushnell over at Atari. Bushnell also infamously turned down the opportunity to own one third of Apple in its early days.

In an interview with AllThingsD's Eric Johnson, Bushnell talked about how we're looking for the next Jobs because he "took a failing computer company" and "turned it into the highest-market-cap company in the world."

But in fact, we already have tons of Jobses around us, Bushnell says.

"Really, what is happening is that they're being edited out of importance," Bushnell tells Johnson. "Right now, Google is doing some great things, but Hewlett-Packard is trying to commit suicide. Every company needs to have a skunkworks, to try things that have a high probability of failing. You try to minimize failure, but at the same time, if you're not willing to try things that are inherently risky, you're not going to make progress."

That's likely why Bushnell speaks so highly of Google, which has a history of experimenting with projects that may or may not see the light of day.

Google X, the search giant's special projects division, is responsible for self-driving cars and Project Glass. And it's reportedly already at work on its next "moonshot."