Latest / The Innovation Show / Geoffrey Cain — Steve Jobs in Exile: NeXT, Failure, Revenge and the Remaking of a Visionary

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Geoffrey Cain — Steve Jobs in Exile: NeXT, Failure, Revenge and the Remaking of a Visionary · The Innovation Show

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  the way that I like to frame these questions, and I come from a
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  background as a journalist, is what failures allowed you to find success?
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  And what did you learn from those failures?
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  Steve Jobs, we don't remember this about him.
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  It's something that history tends to forget because these are uncomfortable
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  truths about what it takes to win in life.
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  Steve Jobs was nearly bankrupt in the early 1990s.
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  He was almost out of money.
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  He was down according to the people who know him, down to his last $150 million,
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  which sounds like a lot of money to us, but he was burning $50 million a year,
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  so he only had three more years of, cash.
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  He had no investors.
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  They all abandoned him because he was losing money.
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  His products were failing one after another, and this was his final chance.
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  He, knew it.
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  His friends knew it.
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  If these failures in this period of his life had continued he would have
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  been written out of history, and there would be no Apple today as we know it.
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  Apple would have probably gone out of business because he would
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  not have been able to return to Apple and make it great again.
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  I hope you're enjoying our Business Biography series and this book,
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  brilliant book on Steve Jobs in Exile.
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  It's with thanks to our friends at Kyndryl who run and the technology
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  With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed
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  smarter decisions, faster innovation, and a lasting competitive edge.
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  You can find Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute, K-Y-N-D-R-Y-L, at kyndryl.com.
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  today's book tells the largely unexplored story of the dozen years Steve Jobs
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  spent building NeXT Computer in the
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  aftermath of his firing from Apple, the company he founded in 1985.
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  This period would see Jobs at his most creative, most
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  vulnerable, and most intense.
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  It would redefine him as a designer and a leader, ultimately leading to
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  the later resurgence and dominance of Apple following his triumphant return.
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  Yet, this crucial period remains woefully under-covered.
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  And I might add, and I'm gonna pick up a different book, we're not covering
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  this book, because in a way, when you read today's book, you realize this
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  book was very much edited and very much controlled the corporate narrative.
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  Today's book tells a totally different story using a treasure trove of new
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  material, including dozens of hours of unbroadcast footage of Jobs at NeXT
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  meetings, retreats, new interviews, and unpublished oral histories with Jobs and
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  his colleagues, new first-hand material, and countless internal documents.
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  This book is the definitive history of the most remarkable
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  period in the life of Steve Jobs.
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  It is a pleasure to welcome the author of Steve Jobs in Exile:
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  The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of a Technology Visionary.
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  Geoffrey Cain, welcome to the show.
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  Good to be here, Aidan.
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  Good to see you
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  Great to have you with us, man.
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  I want to tell our audience, I had organized to interview Geoffrey about
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  his other brilliant book about Samsung, and in the meantime, he has a baby girl.
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  Congratulations for that, man.
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  Appreciate it
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  And then he drops this baby on the world, too and man, is it such an eye-opener
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  because it tells you the true story.
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  And maybe we'll start off and share about the amazing access to sources, the source
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  materials you had for this, because…
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  And maybe talk about the difference between that book and the Jobs
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  Isaacson story, because this is the unvarnished version.
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  Aidan, good question.
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  The original Walter Isaacson biography, "Steve Jobs," is the first history.
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  This is first time that Steve Jobs had given his notebooks, old audio
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  recordings, all his old files, his interviews to Walter Isaacson, who
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  is the defining, one of the leading biographers of our generation.
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  So certainly a major work of history.
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  It's a it's a book that tells the story of Steve and his journey
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  from Apple to Apple, you could say.
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  That he started out as this this bratty visionary who certainly was very
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  intelligent, creative, had great ideas that he wanted to put out in the world.
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  And he was fired from Apple in the end, went on this detour into
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  NeXT Computer and Pixar, and then returned to Apple and was triumphant.
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  "Steve Jobs" by Walter Isaacson is the big book on Steve Jobs.
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  That's the first book, and since then there have been more
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  biographies that build on what Wa- Walter Isaacson accomplished.
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  So my book, "Steve Jobs in Exile," is the latest of the Steve Jobs biographies,
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  but I have taken a different track.
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  I I've, been looking at this from a different angle, and the question I
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  was asking is: what happens when a visionary like Steve Jobs, who is the
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  king of entrepreneurs, this person who is the greatest hero, if you're
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  in technology or business, you study his life, you study his products,
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  you study his his decision-making processes in business schools, in
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  corporate boardrooms among CEOs.
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  This is the man who everybody's-- they know and they swear
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  that they know his story.
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  But the question I wanted to ask is: what is it like to be
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  Steve Jobs when you're failing?
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  did Steve Jobs have to do to become the Steve Jobs who we all know?
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  every hero out there, you look at any hero in our society
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  both fiction and nonfiction.
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  You can look at ancient mythology.
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  You can look at even "Star Wars." You can look at Theodore
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  Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington.
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  Everybody who has made a mark on the world, almost everybody, has gone
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  through the wilderness at some point And what do I mean by wilderness?
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  The wilderness is the time you are facing your greatest tests, when you are
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  learning what it takes to be a leader, and it's a period that so many great
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  leaders have to pass through before they can truly tap into their real power.
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  So this is a book about what it takes to lead Apple, what
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  it takes to become Steve Jobs.
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  You A lot of people have that creativity in them.
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  A lot of people are brilliant, but they don't go through those
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  wilderness years, and that's why they never tap into their true power.
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  Steve Jobs found that, and he found that at his company called NeXT Computer,
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  and that's what the book is about
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  Brilliant man.
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  And I was sharing with you before, I'm writing my current book, and the
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  whole idea is that when you whitewash or varnish the stories like has been
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  done, and whether it was done or not, I mean, it's done brilliantly by Isaacson
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  and, and it's no disregard to that or disrespect to the work that he's done, but
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  it's not helpful for people who strive.
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  And I- we talked about this concept of survivorship bias, where you pick the few
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  that survive as the exemplar, and it is not helpful for anybody else trying to
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  help, to ha- trying to strive for that, genius or that, that accomplishment.
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  And in a way, that's what was done with Jobs.
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  And when you read your book, you see very much how close he was to failure, how
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  badly he treated many of his colleagues, how badly he treated many of his suppliers
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  and people who wanted to collaborate.
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  And just the, fact that he had this vision didn't mean that he was a
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  brilliant leader, didn't mini- mean that he was a brilliant business person.
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  In fact, in many ways, if you're a good person and you try to lead to a certain
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  amount of morals, you couldn't have done what Steve Jobs did and survived.
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  And he's lucky because a couple of things went his way.
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  There's a lot in there, but maybe you wanna share that, theme of
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  the idea of survivorship bias.
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  You look at famous people today, successful people.
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  As a society, we tend to bias ourselves towards their successes.
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  We ask, "How did you make this successful thing?
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  How did you make this beautiful painting?
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  How did you make this wonderful product, this iPhone?
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  How did you lead your country to victory?"
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  These are the things that we often ask, especially as journalists, and
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  that is what survivorship bias is.
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  But not many people step back and look a little bit earlier.
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  So the way that I like to frame these questions, and I come from a
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  background as a journalist, is what failures allowed you to find success?
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  And what did you learn from those failures?
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  Steve Jobs, we don't remember this about him.
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  It's something that history tends to forget because these are uncomfortable
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  truths about what it takes to win in life.
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  Steve Jobs was nearly bankrupt in the early 1990s.
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  He was almost out of money.
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  He was down according to the people who know him, down to his last $150 million,
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  which sounds like a lot of money to us, but he was burning $50 million a year,
• 9:15
  so he only had three more years of, cash.
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  He had no investors.
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  They all abandoned him because he was losing money.
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  His products were failing one after another, and this was his final chance.
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  He, knew it.
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  His friends knew it.
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  If these failures in this period of his life had continued he would have
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  been written out of history, and there would be no Apple today as we know it.
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  Apple would have probably gone out of business because he would
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  not have been able to return to Apple and make it great again.
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  This is an example of a story where, you know, NeXT Computer is a, company
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  in which so much of the technology that we use at Apple now, especially
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  the software, comes from NeXT and comes from what Steve learned at NeXT.
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  But if anything gone just slightly differently if the, trajectory had
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  changed at certain points and Steve had done something differently,
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  our entire technological world today would be radically different.
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  We would not have the iPhone as we know it.
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  We would not have the same smartphones.
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  We wouldn't have the same operating systems.
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  Even the way that we create software, the way that we create apps, and the
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  way that we create these uter- user inter-interfaces everything would be
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  transformed in some different system that we wouldn't even know about, and
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  Steve Jobs would just be a footnote.
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  He would be one of those guys somewhere in a history book that you come across,
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  but doesn't really matter quite as much.
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  It's only because Steve through a mixture of perseverance, of a an ability to
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  learn, to absorb those lessons, and a bit of luck, that's why he was able to
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  become the Steve Jobs who we now know.
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  I love that, and I think it's such an important aspect.
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  I often think about this idea of quantum universe and there's v-
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  s- several variations or multiple variations of the same track going on.
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  And what you said there, I thought about how Henry Ford had initially looked to
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  have an electric car, and it was only because the market wanted gasoline or
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  whatever happened, and we have gasoline.
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  And you go, "Well, what would have that meant to the environment?
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  What have, would that meant to oil as a supply across the world?" And that's
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  one of the things I took from this book, is that those things and the drive
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  and the pain that he was to work with, demanding things from software engineers,
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  leaning over their shoulders as you tell us, asking them to change things when
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  they're in the middle of things under unbelievably tight deadlines, and how
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  it redirected the course of history.
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  But I thought we'd sh- share about the origin, where you pick up the story.
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  So the story picks up, it's April 11, 1985, only two years after Jobs
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  has recruited John Sculley, and Sculley has organized to fire Jobs.
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  And just to put this in context, at the time, Apple was also failing, and
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  Steve had entered into secret talks to sell Apple to General Electric.
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  A lot of people won't know that.
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  Maybe we'll pick up the story from there
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  Apple was hitting one of its worst years in 1985, which was the year
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  that Steve Jobs was being sidelined.
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  What had happened is that Steve had recruited John Sculley,
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  the former PepsiCo CEO.
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  There's the famous line, "Do you wanna come join me and change the world, or do
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  you want to make sugar water the rest of your life?" And John Sculley said, "Of
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  course, I'm gonna join Steve Jobs because this man is charismatic, he's brilliant,
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  and he's changing the world with his computers." But what realized upon getting
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  deeper into Apple as its new CEO is, was that Steve was horrific to work with.
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  He was a monster in these early years.
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  He was immature, certainly brilliant, certainly visionary, but immature,
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  unable to work with people crass.
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  He would fire people on the spot, scream at them, yell at them, tell
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  them that they're not good enough.
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  He was just not he was not the kind of leader who people
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  at Apple wanted to work with.
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  And what made it worse, this is something that in, the history tends to forget,
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  is that the original Macintosh, the, and the early computers that Steve
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  envisioned did not do well on the market.
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  He had his brilliant vision.
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  He wanted to put his vision out into the world, but he wasn't thinking about what
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  people really needed from these computers.
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  It was more of an ego trip for him, unfortunately.
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  and so what ended up happening in 1985, the spring of 1985, is when things started
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  going south between John and Steve.
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  John said that Steve was getting out of control.
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  He needed to be brought back in.
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  John was the CEO.
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  Steve, and this is something that we tend to forget, Steve was not the CEO of Apple.
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  He was the chairman of the board, but he only led the Macintosh unit, and he was
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  behaving as if Apple were his company.
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  But John Sculley the people around him said Steve, this is not your company.
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  Yes, you were a co-founder, but you have to work with teams." And so John
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  eventually got the board together, said, "Look, this is not working.
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  I cannot have Steve interfering with my job as CEO.
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  He needs to be brought to heel, and I am the boss here, and this is the
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  company that I'm going to lead." And the board sided with John.
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  So Steve was sent off into a kind of exile that summer not the full exile
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  of this book quite yet, but the exile of the summer of 1985 when he had been
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  stripped of all actual authority at Apple.
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  He was being shunned because he was seen as an outcast in Silicon Valley.
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  And these are the interesting, quiet moments that we often
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  overlook in the life of Steve Jobs.
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  We tend to think of those, keynotes and the pr- the brilliant
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  presentations he gave and the applauding the applauding crowds.
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  But this period of his life when he was suddenly exiled by the company he
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  co-founded became something different because it started off in quietude.
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  was sitting outside of his home at night, looking up at the stars, trying to figure
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  out what he wanted to do with his life.
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  He had a girlfriend named Tina.
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  They went off to Europe together.
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  They were wandering the streets of Italy.
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  They even entertained staying in Europe together, maybe making that his future.
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  Steve thought about returning to the US.
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  He considered entering politics decided that he didn't want to because he
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  had never even voted in his life, and he was just like "I, don't know
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  anything about politics." So it's a really unusual time in the life of
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  Steve Jobs because really see a man adrift, a man who history remembers as
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  a great visionary, but a man who was deeply uncertain about his own future
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  and the things that he was creating.
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  It took a while for Steve to recollect himself and to to,
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  get his bearings back together.
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  But it was this summer of 1985 that set the stage it's one of those summers
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  the people who were there with Steve said that he was a different Steve.
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  He was adrift.
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  He was he was gone.
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  They didn't really know where he was going, but he wasn't the
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  man who could command a room.
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  He was the man who just wasn't sure if he wanted to do this anymore.
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  And if he decided that he didn't want to do this anymore, know, he
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  would've gone off to Europe and just become an expat in Italy or France
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  or somewhere looking at paintings.
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  And in some quantum universe, he's, he did that.
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  Yeah, there's some
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  alternate universe out there where there's a, there's an elderly
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  Steve Jobs with a long beard taking art lessons in Paris right now
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  And he has an orchard of apples, not Apple computers.
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  Brilliant.
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  Yeah.
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  But one of the people I, I thought was interesting was the Mac
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  financial controller, Susan Barnes, and she re- previously reported
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  to Jobs and now he was gone.
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  And Apple rented an office across the road, and she said it was
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  amazing to see how ostracized he was, and she felt it was really cruel.
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  And it made me think, and I'm sure you've worked with people like this or
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  witnessed people like this, Geoffrey, who when they're in positions of power,
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  people obey and talk to them and come see them when they're around them.
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  And then either they lose their job in some reshuffling in an or- in a reorg,
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  or they retire and nobody calls them.
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  Nobody shows up to them, and they're like, "Thank God that person's
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  gone." In a way, that's what happened to Jobs in this period.
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  Oh yeah, absolutely.
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  And I've seen that close and up front too.
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  I used to work in Washington DC government circles, and that's just a fact of life.
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  One day you're the one day you're the rooster on the block and the
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  next day you're the, feather duster.
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  And that's what happened to Steve Jobs this summer.
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  One day he was at the top of the world.
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  He was on the cover of magazines and on TV.
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  He was a celebrity in those early days.
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  But suddenly when he was fired, all that came crashing down and it
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  really led him adrift into this world
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  internal questioning, of internal a, kind of internal strife, I think.
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  Steve talked about that summer.
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  There are interviews with him and he said that he felt like he had been punched in
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  the gut and the pain was just unbearable.
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  That he had spent the whole summer just having that feeling in his gut.
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  He said these things.
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  It's it's, one of these of life that I think that a lot of us have to go through
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  at some point, and it's the realization that the success and the fame you
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  have now, it's not guaranteed forever.
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  It's necessarily often a fleeting kind of success.
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  And the good times roll, but the good times might not last.
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  So love it while you have it, but might not be where you are forever
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  There's a couple of characters I'd love to share, and I have, a weekly
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  article I call The Thursday Thought.
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  And The Thursday Thought actually, the origin came from this blog that I followed
• 19:21
  for a long time called The Monday Note, and it's by a guy called Frederic Filloux
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  and a guy called Jean-Louis Gassée.
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  And Gassée is an interesting character.
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  He shows up in Apple and very much antagonizes Steve as well.
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  Maybe we'll share a little bit about him
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  Jean-Lou- Jean-Louis Gassée is you could call him the Steve Jobs of his day.
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  He was the, alternate Steve Jobs.
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  If Steve Jobs had not become who he was eventually, Jean-Louis Gassée
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  would've been certainly second in line at most or at minimum.
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  And so anyway, so Jean-Louis Gassée was the head of Apple's France subsidiary.
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  The French subsidiary was the highest performing one
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  in the world outside the US.
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  And so Jean-Louis Gassée was really a star in the company.
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  He was approached by John Sculley, the CEO , to come into Apple and
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  to be Steve, the new Steve Jobs after Steve Jobs had been sidelined.
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  And John Sculley has said this directly in interviews.
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  He said that he saw Jean-Louis Gassée as the next Steve.
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  Um
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  Jean-Louis Gassée, flamboyant, charismatic character, fascinating
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  guy interviewed him for the book.
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  He is very smart.
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  He is a, articulate speaker.
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  He knows how to use just the right touch on the things he says.
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  Je ne sais quoi
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  yeah the, yeah, the je ne sais quoi, as the book says.
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  And during this time in his life, he had a, wonderful sense of fashion.
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  He was on the, front cover of French men's fashion magazines.
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  He really was a charismatic person who came in and took over
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  the Apple marketing division.
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  So he was brought in when Steve was sidelined, but then promoted to a
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  higher level title than what Steve had.
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  And Jean-Louis Gassée, he went in there and he, had a new vision for Apple.
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  He wanted to do this thing called Open Mac.
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  The Open Mac was the different from Steve's vision.
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  Steve wanted to have a closed system in which you couldn't you
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  you, couldn't really take out ports and, that sort of thing.
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  Jean-Louis Gassée bringing in this new regime into Apple that was gonna
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  replace the vision of Steve Jobs.
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  That's how his friends saw it.
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  And yeah, he was he, was a rival to Steve.
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  Steve did not like him.
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  There were instances y- over the years, Steve had called him evil
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  at one point to a journalist.
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  And these two men at this time at Apple, they just they didn't really
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  get along, and they just saw each other as the, opposites of each other, you
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  could say, or something like that.
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  Steve was really annoyed that somebody was coming in to take over his unit,
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  and it was gonna be Jean-Louis Gassée, who was charismatic and colorful and
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  could really replace Steve as the spiritual heart and soul of Apple.
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  It's great.
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  And I just wanted to let our audience know it's really worth reading the book
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  to discover these types of characters everywhere throughout the book.
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  One of the really important characters, and he wrote the forward to the book,
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  a brilliant forward, is Dan'l Loehn.
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  And where he crops up was that Steve, in that wilderness when he was in, in
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  Italy, in Paris, traveling around, he decided to put some structure on his
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  thinking, and he wrote down his favorite projects from the last 10 years at Apple.
• 22:42
  And one of the trends that emerged was his desire to around- his attraction
• 22:48
  to education-related initiatives.
• 22:51
  And this is where Dan'l a- appeared, because he was responsible for the
• 22:55
  education division, one of the most lucrative, and probably saved Apple
• 22:59
  at a certain point from shutdown.
• 23:02
  I- and actually, they went through quarterly losses and factory
• 23:05
  shutdowns, including here in Ireland.
• 23:07
  Maybe we'll share a little bit about Dan'l because he comes up time and
• 23:10
  time again, and also had an interesting postscript after Apple, after NeXT,
• 23:16
  which was his time in the museum
• 23:19
  Dan'l Lewin was the right-hand man to Steve Jobs during this period.
• 23:24
  He was the man who created something called the Apple University Consortium,
• 23:29
  and it was an effort to get Apple computers into universities and also to
• 23:35
  schools, elementary and high schools.
• 23:37
  The goal was that if you could get Apple into schools, you
• 23:40
  can find young customers.
• 23:42
  They'll show their families, maybe their families will buy some, and th- these
• 23:45
  will become lifelong Apple customers.
• 23:47
  And in a sense, that was correct because look at what happened.
• 23:50
  Look at how at least i- in the US, Apple computers were in a lot of elementary
• 23:55
  schools, and a, lot of that generation, the millennials, the Gen Xers, they
• 23:59
  grew up and they became Apple nerds.
• 24:01
  They, loved the iPhone and, all that sort of thing.
• 24:04
  So smart marketing is something if you're a business student, worth studying as
• 24:08
  a model to really capture an audience.
• 24:10
  And Dan'l Lewin was the architect of this idea of putting Apple
• 24:15
  computers in universities.
• 24:17
  But a man at the front lines, what he kept finding at universities was that,
• 24:23
  look these were not high schools where you only needed a little Macintosh
• 24:27
  that could type and draw and you could teach students how to use a computer.
• 24:31
  These were major research institutions where scientists were doing
• 24:35
  cutting-edge laboratory work, and they did not want a little Macintosh
• 24:40
  necessarily to draw and paint on.
• 24:42
  They wanted a supercomputer that could handle futuristic modeling at the time.
• 24:48
  Whether that was biology or physics or whatever it might be.
• 24:53
  saw-- This was-- Remember, you have to remember what
• 24:56
  technology was like in the 1980s.
• 24:58
  These kinds of capabilities were so far ahead of the era.
• 25:02
  It's not like today where you can open any laptop and you
• 25:05
  have ChatGPT talking to you.
• 25:07
  This was a time when the leading edge was just starting to come, and the next
• 25:14
  generation of computers, everybody was predicting, was going to solve some of the
• 25:19
  greatest scientific questions of our time.
• 25:22
  So what they told Dan'l was "Stop." we don't just wanna
• 25:25
  see your little Macintosh.
• 25:27
  We wanna see serious computing power so bring us that." And what happened with,
• 25:33
  the help of Dan'l and other executives at, and other employees and executives
• 25:38
  at Apple, was that they decided to create a new product called the Big Mac.
• 25:43
  So this is a Macintosh that was supercharged, something called the 3M
• 25:49
  machine, which was gonna be the next generation of computer at the time.
• 25:53
  The 3M machine was gonna be the one that they would put in these laboratories.
• 25:58
  But what it what ended So this was Steve's brainchild, and what ended up happening
• 26:03
  was that when Steve was sidelined, Jean-Louis Gassée came in and canceled it.
• 26:08
  So everybody who had been working with Steve on the 3M h- was so
• 26:13
  upset, and they decided, "You know what, Steve You've been sidelined.
• 26:18
  Apple's not working for you anymore.
• 26:20
  You're 30 years old, which in Steve years is old.
• 26:24
  He was always a young success- su- young successful person.
• 26:27
  And they said, "Look, let's go start a new company.
• 26:31
  Screw Apple.
• 26:32
  We don't need Apple.
• 26:33
  Let's do something new here, and let's create this 3M machine
• 26:36
  that's going to change the world."
• 26:39
  Before we go there, because this is a chapter you entitled
• 26:42
  Mutiny, where these people leave.
• 26:44
  But I just wanted to give a flavor of the almost a red thread throughout the
• 26:50
  whole book, which is his desire for revenge on John Sculley and his desire
• 26:57
  to, to show that he's successful apart from Apple and how they're ruining Apple.
• 27:03
  But meanwhile, inside Apple, after his departure, even though some people were
• 27:07
  initially happy that he had gone they, chafed under John's staid leadership.
• 27:13
  They missed Steve's vision and flair and his, even his intensity.
• 27:17
  And even there, they wore T-shirts saying, "We want our jobs back." Maybe
• 27:22
  we'll tell a bit of that, about that, and that ongoing poisonous desire to
• 27:29
  show Sculley's terrible and I'm great
• 27:32
  Y- a lot of what Steve did he, he left Apple in September 1985, he founded his
• 27:39
  company called NeXT Computer, which was going to make these new cutting-edge
• 27:43
  machines for universities specifically.
• 27:46
  But Steve was starting out on the wrong foot in this journey
• 27:51
  because he wasn't doing this necessarily to change the world.
• 27:56
  He said that he was changing the world, but at a deeper level what he
• 28:00
  was doing was he was trying to get revenge against Apple and John Sculley.
• 28:06
  his reasons for founding NeXT were not entirely pure.
• 28:10
  There was an ego to this.
• 28:15
  the people around him talked about this when I interviewed them.
• 28:18
  They said that Steve wanted nothing more than to get revenge on John Sculley and
• 28:24
  show that he could be a success, that he could beat Apple, that he could beat
• 28:28
  John that he was gonna s- show John who's really who's the real genius in here.
• 28:33
  It's not John, it's Steve.
• 28:35
  And y- when you're starting a business this is not a reason to start a business.
• 28:41
  It's unfortunate, and this is what set up Steve for the troubles that
• 28:46
  were to come because he wasn't making decisions because he wanted
• 28:50
  necessarily to sell a great product.
• 28:52
  He wasn't thinking about the customer.
• 28:54
  He wasn't thinking about what the world needs from him.
• 28:58
  He was really at a fundamental level thinking about what NeXT Computer
• 29:03
  can do for Steve in the early years.
• 29:07
  And what NeXT Computer could do for Steve was to give him the
• 29:09
  satisfaction of being a genius.
• 29:12
  Steve was w- Steve was essentially building a monument to himself and to
• 29:17
  his own vision, but failing to think about the people around him who were
• 29:21
  there helping him, the talent that he was hiring, what the customers needed,
• 29:26
  what the investors wanted him to do.
• 29:28
  was really thinking about himself, and this is an example of the narcissistic
• 29:34
  leader just getting too out of control and making a series of bad decisions that's
• 29:39
  gonna set them up for failure later.
• 29:42
  I, it's such an important thing to call out, I think, that narcissistic
• 29:45
  leader, because many leaders of startups or founders don't have the
• 29:51
  skills they need to lead a company.
• 29:53
  They may have the skills to find a company, but to actually lead it
• 29:58
  on, like we saw here with Steve, and it takes a very special type of
• 30:02
  employee to actually tolerate that.
• 30:04
  And I wanted to lead here because th- there's these important people who were
• 30:09
  the original Nexters, these people who left, and Steve tricked Apple into this.
• 30:15
  He entered into John's office and handed him an envelope with the low-level
• 30:19
  employees, I'm doing inverted commas here for people only listening to us,
• 30:23
  who he wanted to come with him, and this was part of his deal of leaving.
• 30:27
  It was Rich Page, Dan'l Lewin, Bud Tribble, Susan Barnes, and George Crow.
• 30:32
  And John looked up shocked and said, "These aren't low-level employees."
• 30:38
  Let's tell a little bit of story about how he departed Apple and the, es-
• 30:43
  essentially the lawsuit that happened as a result of that, and how much
• 30:48
  both Apple and NeXT spent on that lawsuit, and eventually what came of it
• 30:52
  Steve was not known in those early years for being you know, totally honest.
• 30:57
  He he was known to, to either fudge the truth or outright lie.
• 31:01
  And one of the things he said going into John Sculley's office this one
• 31:05
  morning in September 1985 was, "Yes, I'm taking five employees with me, but
• 31:10
  don't worry, they're just low-level employees, so it's gonna be okay."
• 31:13
  But once John saw the list, he said, "Wait a second, Steve.
• 31:17
  These are not low-level employees.
• 31:19
  These are stars in the company.
• 31:22
  You're taking people who are doing great work." And John
• 31:27
  just didn't know what to say.
• 31:28
  So they met with the board, and the board said, "Look th- this is we can't have
• 31:34
  this situation." John-- They, accused John of not showing enough leadership.
• 31:39
  They said, "Steve has just walked off with these employees that we
• 31:43
  wanted to keep here." And finally, they decided in the end that the only
• 31:48
  solution was to sue Steve Jobs and another employee named Rich Page.
• 31:54
  So what's interesting is that one of the first things Apple did was sue Steve,
• 31:58
  its co- its co-founder, they didn't even sue NeXT Computer, the company.
• 32:02
  They actually literally just sued Steve and Rich.
• 32:06
  One of the first things that happened is as the NeXT Computer founders
• 32:09
  were all gathering at Steve's house, they were preparing their
• 32:12
  next steps preparing the logo, thinking about the name and so forth.
• 32:16
  Suddenly a a server process server shows up from the court and says,
• 32:21
  "Okay, you're being sued by Apple."
• 32:23
  And they're like for what?
• 32:24
  We don't even have a product.
• 32:25
  We don't have anything here.
• 32:27
  We we, literally, we don't have money in the bank.
• 32:30
  We don't have we literally just registered our name with the California
• 32:34
  Secretary of State a few years ago." And they were just flabbergasted,
• 32:38
  and it's like, what is this?
• 32:41
  It's it, was the kind of situation where it sent chills down the spines
• 32:46
  of the co-founders of NeXT because they were asking themselves, "Did I
• 32:50
  just make the wrong choice? Am I going to be a part of this company with
• 32:54
  Steve that's about to go down with a giant legal bill?" Apple is retaining
• 32:59
  every single lawyer in Silicon Valley.
• 33:01
  No, almost nobody wants to represent NeXT Computer, which is a unknown company
• 33:06
  and is up against the it's, the David and Goliath battle of Silicon Valley.
• 33:13
  So it just, it, it became this fiasco, and they had to defend themselves while
• 33:18
  having their, bank account dried up without even having a product and figure
• 33:23
  out a way to prove to a judge in, San Jose courthouse "We, don't have a product.
• 33:31
  We, can't steal intellectual property from Apple.
• 33:34
  What is it that we stole when we don't actually have anything that
• 33:37
  we're selling at the moment?" And it was a tough case because they really
• 33:42
  were fighting the giant of the time.
• 33:46
  And these giants, they have a lot of lawyers.
• 33:49
  They have s- you know, they have sophisticated case arguments.
• 33:52
  The case went on for a number of months.
• 33:55
  And finally it was resolved in the end, but it was just like it was one of the
• 33:59
  most stressful times in the lives of these people who were involved at Next
• 34:04
  I can imagine just joining a new company and then this is your first task.
• 34:08
  You haven't even y- got to the board, the whiteboard of what
• 34:11
  product you're gonna build.
• 34:13
  But, uh, m- maybe let's go to c- the conclusion of this.
• 34:16
  So the lawyers cost Apple 20 million, just to say.
• 34:20
  It was a huge, chunk to take out of this, and Apple wanted for, to
• 34:25
  force Steve into building premium high-performance computers only.
• 34:29
  And for Steve, this was perfect.
• 34:31
  And maybe we'll wrap this in the story of Br'er Rabbit, because
• 34:35
  that's how, how you describe it
• 34:39
  So the irony of this lawsuit is that Steve got exactly what he wanted.
• 34:45
  He was able-- So Apple was bleeding money dry.
• 34:48
  At one point, somebody, one of the Apple lawyers said that their entire
• 34:52
  legal budget for the year had just been blasted through with this lawsuit.
• 34:57
  It was backfiring because it made NeXT Computer look more
• 35:01
  important than it really was.
• 35:02
  If Apple's suing them, clearly there's something really big going on here, right?
• 35:05
  So it actually gave Steve a boost in the media, and he had his sympathizers.
• 35:10
  And finally at a certain point, about five months into the lawsuit Apple was
• 35:15
  throwing court documents at them, throwing subpoenas, saying, "You have to give us
• 35:20
  your se- give us the secrets, show us what you're doing." And NeXT Computer
• 35:24
  just said, "Look we, don't have anything to show you because there's no product.
• 35:26
  So we can keep going on.
• 35:28
  We're gonna go, we're gonna go on and on." And even at one point the judge
• 35:32
  said "This is getting ridiculous.
• 35:34
  Seriously, come on, guys just, settle." And in the end, Apple approached them
• 35:39
  with a settlement, and the settlement, ironically, was a victory handed to
• 35:45
  NeXT Computer because NeXT Computer, according to the settlement, was
• 35:49
  allowed to build a high-powered, high-performance computer for the time
• 35:55
  that would be used for universities, and that's exactly what the plan of
• 35:59
  the company was in the first place.
• 36:00
  They were gonna build a more com- a more powerful computer than Apple.
• 36:03
  So Steve washed his hands and said, "Thank you, Apple," and "All
• 36:07
  right, let's let's get started."
• 36:10
  And I'll leave for those, you'll probably be reading this to
• 36:13
  your newly born daughter at some stage, the story of Br'er Rabbit.
• 36:16
  That's the the tale that happens here, that you get exactly what
• 36:19
  you want while pretending not to get to want that thing at all.
• 36:23
  But maybe we'll just rewind a little bit, because when he exited from
• 36:27
  Apple, he needed two things fast.
• 36:29
  One, and, and I often think about this, how much of what he did was
• 36:34
  driven by this desire for revenge or this the desire to just redemption,
• 36:41
  to show redemption that he's cleverer than Apple, that he's done well.
• 36:45
  And he stoled off 21.4 million of Apple stock and invested
• 36:50
  7 million of his own money.
• 36:52
  But he did it, importantly, at the worst possible time, and
• 36:55
  it was a financial disaster.
• 36:56
  But so driven he was that he ate that loss.
• 37:00
  And the other thing was I, thought about Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
• 37:05
  It's like Jobs' hierarchy of revenge.
• 37:09
  And it was like, it was, he pushed down his the enemy, which was Pi- Bill Gates,
• 37:16
  and he even went with a name in 1985, which was NeXT Inc, which was actually
• 37:22
  a name that Microsoft was using before.
• 37:25
  Maybe we'll tell a little bit about that.
• 37:27
  That's one of the untold stories of this book, the name NeXT.
• 37:31
  This is not something that was widely known in the life of Steve
• 37:34
  Jobs back when he was around.
• 37:36
  But NeXT it's, So there was a logo designer who he hired to,
• 37:41
  to help help him choose a name.
• 37:43
  The name he was originally gonna choose was Two, Steve was
• 37:48
  thinking Two is a great name.
• 37:50
  But the logo designer, his name was Tom Suiter he, heard the
• 37:52
  name Two, and he's wait a second.
• 37:55
  You don't wanna be number two to number one.
• 37:57
  You don't wanna be the second in line.
• 37:58
  And who's number one?
• 37:59
  That must be Apple, right?
• 38:01
  So you're just, you're shooting yourself in the foot with that name." And so Tom
• 38:05
  flew to Seattle, and he was at this this event with Bill Gates talking, and it was
• 38:11
  r- you have to remember, this is the year 1985, so the CD-ROM is a new concept.
• 38:17
  People today don't even use them anymore.
• 38:19
  But Bill Gates was talking about the CD-ROM being the future of
• 38:23
  storage, the future of computing.
• 38:25
  And as he was talking he kept saying the word next.
• 38:28
  This is gonna be the next thing the next big innovation.
• 38:32
  People the, next generation of users, they're all gonna use
• 38:35
  CD-ROMs on their computers.
• 38:37
  They're gonna put their games on it and their music, and they're gonna
• 38:39
  put it into their computer, and the computer plays this, beautiful music.
• 38:44
  And the designer Tom was sitting there in the audience.
• 38:47
  He had his little notebook, and he kept thinking, "Oh next, Huh, that
• 38:52
  really rings doesn't it? It's got momentum." So he went back to Steve.
• 38:57
  He said, "I have your name: NeXT." Steve said, "I love it
• 39:02
  One of the things just on the next was you, see, right, so this is a startup.
• 39:08
  I just wanted to c- contrast the startup founders.
• 39:11
  So, Dan'l, people like Dan'l, who was going through, uh, the legal fight
• 39:15
  at the time with Apple, nearly broke.
• 39:17
  He had a mortgage, college loans, two kids, and a wife who
• 39:20
  just suffered a medical issue.
• 39:22
  And what, I found really interesting was, a- and he does this in the forward,
• 39:27
  Dan'l is, to show, "Yes, we worked for this person. Yes, we may have done
• 39:33
  financially well, but we weren't… We had a lot to endure during that time."
• 39:39
  And i- in a way, by actually going and following him, you were siding with
• 39:44
  l'enfant terrible, or the terrible infant, as Dan'l put it, which was Steve.
• 39:49
  Because at the time, it was very difficult s- 'cause Steve's reputation was poison.
• 39:54
  So it was a huge lift for these people to go and take Steve's side, because
• 40:00
  it could have been a poisoned chalice
• 40:04
  That was one of the big downers at the time.
• 40:08
  A guy like Dan'l Lewin, You have to remember everybody who joined
• 40:13
  Steve, they were relatively young.
• 40:14
  They were in their 20s and early 30s for the most part.
• 40:19
  they had mortgages, they had young kids, they still had university debt,
• 40:25
  and they had things to take care of.
• 40:26
  And it's not cheap to live in Palo Alto, Ca- California.
• 40:30
  That's even back then it was fairly expensive.
• 40:34
  And by following Steve, they were really betting their futures on
• 40:39
  somebody who was seen as a fallen star.
• 40:44
  If, say, the Apple lawsuit, let's say Apple had won or Steve had run
• 40:49
  out of money from that lawsuit, they would be all out of work.
• 40:53
  They'd just be failures.
• 40:55
  They'd be chased out.
• 40:56
  They wouldn't be able to find a good job anywhere else in the Valley.
• 40:59
  And one of the th- one of the things you have to remember about this
• 41:03
  period is that Silicon Valley was not as-- nearly as big as it is today.
• 41:08
  Nowadays, if you're a software developer, you can just move.
• 41:12
  It's like a revolving door.
• 41:13
  You just go from job to job, and you'll get raises every time.
• 41:16
  This was a time when there were only a few big companies doing everything.
• 41:19
  There were some startups, but not that many.
• 41:22
  And if Apple sued you, fired you, got around, it got around to IBM, it got
• 41:27
  to GE, it got to Intel, all the major companies of the day, and you were toast.
• 41:33
  You would, really be out and sent off maybe back to the East Coast.
• 41:38
  You go, work in a stodgy old office in New York, but you're not welcome among
• 41:42
  the, frontier technologists of the era.
• 41:45
  I mentioned there, I was hinting towards his just i- ignorance towards
• 41:50
  spend, or maybe you call it ignorance.
• 41:52
  Maybe it's a good thing.
• 41:53
  He just, how much he spent and how much he burned through.
• 41:57
  You were talking about Paul Rand, who designed the logo.
• 42:01
  Th- those type of people, they all threw in huge, like $100,000
• 42:04
  at the time was a lot of dollars.
• 42:06
  It was much more than it is worth today.
• 42:08
  But also, even when he went after advancements happening in the computer
• 42:14
  graphics industry, he went after Pixar, which was George Lucas' company.
• 42:19
  Maybe we'll share this part, because really this was one of
• 42:23
  those kind of throwaway investments that really saved him later on
• 42:27
  Pixar, was one of his big early investments.
• 42:30
  What was happening was that George Lucas had a hostile divorce and he owed his
• 42:36
  ex-wife millions upon millions of dollars.
• 42:39
  And it was so ruinous George Lucas had to sell Pixar.
• 42:43
  Pixar at the time, it was a part of Lucasfilm, the the Star Wars
• 42:47
  company, and it, was not profitable.
• 42:51
  They were making, were m- they were making a machine that
• 42:54
  only sold about 300 computers.
• 42:56
  It was supposed to design special effects for movies and so forth, but you
• 43:01
  have to remember that special effects computer graphics were a very new thing
• 43:06
  and it wasn't even clear they were gonna become a big thing in Hollywood.
• 43:10
  So Pixar s- was struggling.
• 43:13
  Steve came, Steve bought it up at a fire sale rate, and it was one of those bets
• 43:19
  where, you know, at the time it looked a bit crazy because people were asking, "Who
• 43:25
  the heck wants to turn on their TV and look at something that a computer created?
• 43:29
  It's all pixelated garbage." And there was even one-- And here's a
• 43:33
  behind-the-scenes, an outtake from the book that didn't get in there.
• 43:37
  There was an event in Beverly Hills that Steve and some of his Pixar executives
• 43:42
  went to around this time, and they showed one of the early films in the
• 43:47
  1980s that Pixar was involved in.
• 43:49
  I think it might've, it was it, was before Tin Toy.
• 43:52
  Tin Toy was a Oscar-winning film, and I can't remember
• 43:54
  what the… It was like a demo.
• 43:56
  I, don't remember the details, but they showed it and the audience watched it.
• 44:01
  It the, show finished and it was just silence in the room, and they were
• 44:05
  like, the heck did we just watch?
• 44:08
  That, that's the weirdest thing I've ever seen." So no, like Hollywood did
• 44:11
  not think Pixar was gonna be big. They didn't really see Steve as one of them.
• 44:15
  And so Steve walks in, makes this deal with George Lucas, and people are saying
• 44:19
  "Steve, is this really a good idea?
• 44:21
  You're about to buy a failing computer graphics company.
• 44:25
  You're spending $7 million to start a company that's gonna
• 44:29
  create computers for universities.
• 44:32
  You're getting spread thin.
• 44:34
  It sounds to me like you're just doing this because you want revenge against John
• 44:38
  Sculley, but is this actually your vision?
• 44:40
  Do you really think this is gonna succeed?" And Steve insisted it
• 44:44
  would, but it wasn't clear at the time that it actually would
• 44:48
  It's amazing how those stories appear time and time again.
• 44:51
  I was just, we just covered Nokia as a case study in the show, and in Nokia,
• 44:57
  the CFO recommended that they buy the networks business that they'd kind of sold
• 45:02
  to Ericsson, and nobody wanted to do it.
• 45:05
  And then they bought it, and now they're back.
• 45:06
  Nokia are back because they bought that and sold off the mobile
• 45:10
  phone businesses, and nobody wanted to let go of that identity.
• 45:13
  And you see this, just the luck that has to be luck that, uh, that… And
• 45:19
  it showed up, and as we see later on, it kind of saved, it saved Apple in
• 45:23
  the, in the end when Pixar went on to have great hits like Toy Story.
• 45:28
  But let's, shine a light little bit on Steve's temperament and
• 45:34
  how working with Steve demanded a certain type of temperament.
• 45:38
  Many people have, many people who listen to this show have worked
• 45:40
  with people like this, that in a way it's kind of like standing up
• 45:44
  to a bully, that you stand up to…
• 45:45
  Bullies don't like to be bullied, or they don't like
• 45:48
  people who can stand up to them.
• 45:49
  They like people that they can control.
• 45:51
  And to work with Steve, you had to evangelize for your
• 45:54
  ideas and for yourself.
• 45:57
  And the culture was so combative that you tell us that when NeXT veterans moved
• 46:02
  on to other companies later on, their new colleagues would tell them to dial
• 46:06
  it back a bit because they'd never seen this type of temperament showing up.
• 46:10
  But this is where you tell us about the famous shithead, hero shithead
• 46:16
  rollercoaster that many, many people went through, and the amount of
• 46:21
  telling downs people went through.
• 46:23
  There's so many case studies of this in the book that it's too many to share.
• 46:27
  Maybe you'll pick some of the examples you like to share
• 46:30
  Okay.
• 46:31
  The hero shithead rollercoaster.
• 46:33
  single NeXT and Apple executive I sat down with for this book talked
• 46:39
  about the hero shithead rollercoaster.
• 46:41
  That was like the number one topic.
• 46:42
  They were like, "If you don't understand the hero shithead rollercoaster, you
• 46:46
  do not understand Steve Jobs." So what is the hero shithead rollercoaster?
• 46:50
  his leadership style his swings in which one day you were a hero and
• 46:56
  the next day you were a shithead.
• 46:59
  One day you could be making the product that's gonna change the
• 47:02
  world, and Steve was lavishing you with praise and just talking about
• 47:07
  how great you are, playing you up in, in the meetings, company meetings.
• 47:10
  And then suddenly the next day, for whatever reason, you're a shithead,
• 47:16
  and Steve walks in and tells you're a shithead, and he says, "This is shit.
• 47:19
  What are you doing?
• 47:20
  Your product sucks.
• 47:21
  Your software sucks.
• 47:23
  Do it this way.
• 47:23
  Make it better." And then Steve would come back later and,
• 47:26
  check on it, see if it improves.
• 47:28
  The hero shithead rollercoaster was something that had no predictability.
• 47:33
  You could make a beautiful product and Steve would love it, but you could
• 47:37
  make a product that you still thought was great and Steve would hate it.
• 47:41
  And it could be within days of each other, and that's just how
• 47:44
  he was in these early years.
• 47:45
  He was mercurial.
• 47:46
  That's a word that's used about him a lot.
• 47:49
  But as a result of this hero shithead rollercoaster,
• 47:52
  everybody was on their toes.
• 47:53
  Steve was the king of the court, and to get anything done, you
• 47:58
  ultimately had to please Steve.
• 47:59
  You had to be on Steve's good side.
• 48:02
  what this did, it created an intense culture, a highly creative culture
• 48:07
  in which intellectual combat was the way that great ideas pushed through
• 48:13
  the furnace and got out to the world.
• 48:16
  So Steve wanted people who could withstand the force of his personality.
• 48:20
  He would look at them.
• 48:21
  One of the reasons he would go in and call their product shit was
• 48:24
  because he actually wanted them to fight back and defend themselves.
• 48:28
  When Steve was hiring people at NeXT he would ask them a question.
• 48:33
  He asked almost everybody this question.
• 48:35
  He said, "Are you the best person in your field?" And if they said no or
• 48:41
  hesitated or said maybe I'm second or third best," would just kick them out
• 48:46
  and say, "I wanna talk to the best person in the field, so don't waste my time."
• 48:49
  He was asking you that trick question because he wanted to see how you could
• 48:54
  defend yourself when Steve said that your ideas sucked, when he said that
• 48:58
  you're not the best person in your field.
• 49:00
  He wanted to see you say, "Steve, I am the best, and this is why my idea is
• 49:03
  best, and I'm gonna make it as great as it can be. So we're gonna get this done."
• 49:08
  That's what Steve respected in people
• 49:12
  Their team dynamics were difficult as well.
• 49:14
  I mentioned earlier on the Jobs hierarchy of revenge, but there was
• 49:18
  also his hierarchy of how he rated people, and it wasn't to do with their
• 49:24
  skillset, it was their expertise level.
• 49:26
  So what I mean here is not their level of contribution, but what they did.
• 49:30
  So for example, he'd tell us stuff like software was top of the pile to
• 49:35
  him, digital hardware team second, and then the bottom was analog.
• 49:40
  So they were essentially the plumbers, and he disregarded them that way.
• 49:44
  And as a result, they just didn't have the exposure to him, and they were
• 49:49
  probably treat… Reading between the lines, they were treated a lot worse
• 49:52
  So Steve did, in those early years, he had a hierarchy of talent and
• 49:56
  his favored group was software.
• 49:58
  The reason was because the software group was working on a a style of
• 50:03
  software development that was novel at the time called object-oriented
• 50:06
  programming, and this is the idea-- You have to remember in, in the age we're
• 50:10
  talking about, the 1980s your typical computer was just a line of code and
• 50:15
  you had to code everything by hand.
• 50:16
  There was no Claude code that could create an app for you on the spot.
• 50:21
  You literally had to go in there and just do everything, and it would take
• 50:23
  months, and then there would be one bug and it would crash the whole thing.
• 50:26
  So object-oriented programming was the next the next era of programming that
• 50:32
  Steve was pioneering, and it was this idea that you could develop software as
• 50:36
  you develop clay, that you could take these things called objects which were
• 50:41
  building blocks of software that were pre-made that you could use for anything,
• 50:45
  and you could put them together and they would interact with each other and,
• 50:49
  they would create beautiful software.
• 50:51
  So this was software as beauty and software as usability, something
• 50:55
  that was very new at the time and something that Steve valued highly.
• 50:58
  So for him, the software team was the killer team because he thought they were
• 51:03
  the ones who were gonna change the world.
• 51:05
  The digital hardware came second typically.
• 51:08
  It depends on, who you talk to, but for the most part digital hardware was second
• 51:14
  at the moment, and that was because they were making the beautiful cube computer.
• 51:18
  The-- And what NeXT Computer was known for was this cube design he had,
• 51:22
  developed an almost perfect cube with identical sides, identical angles that
• 51:28
  still sits in museums today as this example of brilliant industrial design.
• 51:32
  So Steve loved that because it was the computer as art, another idea that
• 51:36
  was still really novel at the time.
• 51:38
  But then you get to things like analog hardware engineering.
• 51:41
  That's, as you said, the plumbing, it's the cords the plugs, the outlets.
• 51:45
  Where does that all go?
• 51:47
  Steve just ignored them.
• 51:48
  He didn't really care.
• 51:49
  The one time that he did seem to care about this was a, an episode.
• 51:54
  He was gonna release a new computer at NeXT, and at the last moment he told
• 51:58
  George Crow one of the guy who headed this, unit, that you need to redo the
• 52:04
  wires because I wanna have one wire that connects to the computer and
• 52:08
  goes in goes into the wall." So any Apple fan out there will immediately
• 52:12
  recognize that as the iMac, but this was almost 10 years before the iMac.
• 52:17
  This was Steve's vision.
• 52:18
  He wanted that computer to have that one plug only because that was beauty.
• 52:22
  And George said, "Steve, you can't do that because we are only X amount
• 52:27
  of days from launch, and to do plugs and stuff, you have to get regulatory
• 52:32
  approvals, and there, there's a lot you have to do." And he just blew up.
• 52:37
  This is one of the key scenes of the book.
• 52:39
  And Steve said, okay.
• 52:42
  This was one of the, one of the rare times that Steve, at the time, started listening
• 52:46
  to his people and decided to back off.
• 52:48
  He was realizing that his grand vision wasn't working with everything, and
• 52:52
  he did have to listen to the experts.
• 52:54
  But to, to, your point, hardware that's not where the action happened for Steve.
• 53:00
  That was the bottom priority.
• 53:02
  But over time, he started realizing that, yes, you can create beauty
• 53:06
  with this analog hardware.
• 53:07
  You can create even a cord can be beautiful, and it doesn't just have
• 53:11
  to be the software and the screen.
• 53:13
  It's the whole machine itself.
• 53:14
  there's another side which many people who've worked with a founder
• 53:18
  have experienced as well, which is the double standards that
• 53:21
  this rule applies to you, not me.
• 53:23
  Do as I say, not as I do.
• 53:25
  And one of those was Steve's… He was so used to a champagne lifestyle,
• 53:30
  and I, by that mean a corporate, how- his corporate expenditure.
• 53:34
  And one of the things was he dropped 100K on the logo, like I mentioned earlier on.
• 53:39
  But he had brought that lady, Susan Barnes, who made the comment about
• 53:43
  him being in exile earlier on, with him as CFO, and she was trying to
• 53:47
  mind the money, mind the purse.
• 53:49
  You could see what they were burning through.
• 53:51
  And despite this, Steve one day pipes up and says, "We've stopped
• 53:55
  nickel-and-diming, and it all adds up."
• 53:58
  And then the next thing, two months later, and I'll show this on the
• 54:01
  screen, it he, takes an ad out in the paper after he learned about
• 54:07
  Chiat\Day, the famous advertising agency had been fired by Apple.
• 54:11
  Let's tell this little story just as an example of how he spent money.
• 54:16
  You mentioned the cube, for example.
• 54:18
  How much money they spent on spraying that.
• 54:21
  The, eventually the factory in Fremont, there was so much
• 54:25
  Steve went into NeXT Computer with a grand globe-changing vision.
• 54:31
  He went in this-- So we all know Steve Jobs as the scrappy guy
• 54:36
  in the garage who never took a shower and walked around barefoot.
• 54:41
  That's the guy we see in the movies.
• 54:42
  That's the guy we knew.
• 54:43
  But at this point, Steve Jobs is 30 years old.
• 54:46
  He's he's, starting to age, and he's found a taste for luxury.
• 54:51
  And so at NeXT Computer, he wants to start off as the Mercedes.
• 54:56
  He doesn't want to start off as the Ford, not like at Apple.
• 54:59
  He wants to start at the top.
• 55:01
  And so what that means is that he wants to hire the best logo designer he can
• 55:06
  find, the best designer he can find.
• 55:09
  He wants to pay $100,000 for the NeXT logo.
• 55:12
  He hired Paul Rand, who at, in this age was one of the most famous logo
• 55:17
  designers worldwide, and actually in history designed IBM's logo
• 55:22
  and many other, UPS, many other logos that are still used today.
• 55:26
  He Steve really just went, wild with his spending and what was wild about
• 55:33
  it was that this was his own money.
• 55:35
  Usually at companies you're not spending your own money.
• 55:38
  Usually it's shareholder money.
• 55:39
  It's that's how it works.
• 55:41
  It's revenue.
• 55:42
  It's the company's money.
• 55:44
  Steve literally would write the checks, pull money out of his account, write
• 55:47
  the check, and his reasoning was that by starting at the top, would set the bar
• 55:54
  high, and that, that would be what allows the NeXT computing revolution to happen.
• 55:59
  It's much harder to start at the bottom and to climb your
• 56:03
  way up, as he did at Apple.
• 56:05
  It's much better to start at the high point of the hill, and then
• 56:09
  from that hill, you can move to other hills more easily without
• 56:12
  having to descend and ascend.
• 56:13
  You're at the top already.
• 56:16
  That was, it was a gamble and it was it, was a kind of narcissistic gamble.
• 56:22
  He did have the vision, but it was really about him getting
• 56:26
  that revenge on John Sculley.
• 56:28
  And it turned out to be a mistake because he was spending all this
• 56:32
  money betting that perfection would allow for the customers to come to
• 56:39
  him, that the customers would simply realize "Oh, this guy is brilliant
• 56:43
  and his computer is brilliant."
• 56:45
  So Steve doesn't have to go out there and, sell.
• 56:48
  Steve expects that these people are gonna knock down a path to his doorway.
• 56:54
  They're gonna see this beautiful cube computer, this beautiful
• 56:57
  object-oriented programming.
• 56:59
  They're just gonna get it.
• 57:00
  They're gonna see his extremely expensive factory.
• 57:03
  Steve Jobs was making everything in-house from from the
• 57:08
  motherboard to the final product.
• 57:10
  He assembled his own robot line, like robot hands making stuff, which is
• 57:14
  very advanced for the time period.
• 57:16
  And every, robot arm in this factory had to have the exact same shade of gray.
• 57:23
  And like he, he spent money, so he, he hired I. M. Pei, the, one of
• 57:28
  the most famous architects in the world, to design a floating scar-
• 57:31
  staircase in the headquarters.
• 57:33
  He spent $10,000 on luxury chairs.
• 57:36
  Like he really went all out that by starting at this elite level
• 57:43
  as a business, that the perfection was going to guarantee success.
• 57:48
  But that was where started going south because that's not what happened, and he
• 57:53
  ran into the messy realities of the world that, look, people buy products because
• 57:58
  they want you to solve a problem for them.
• 58:00
  And your $10,000 luxury chair is not solving your problem.
• 58:04
  Your robot arms on the assembly line, yeah, that's all neat and the, computer is
• 58:09
  beautiful, but how does this giant work of art on my desk actually solve a problem?
• 58:15
  What can this do that my regular Apple or IBM PC can't do?
• 58:19
  And that's where he got tripped up, and that's where things started going south
• 58:24
  There's a lot of fake it till you make it here, where he'd made it, but he
• 58:30
  hadn't made it with this type of machine.
• 58:32
  And there's a couple of really important points here that y- you talk about
• 58:36
  his famous reality distortion field.
• 58:37
  Many founders, a lot of people have that charisma that people just listen
• 58:42
  to them and believe them, and he managed to bring some people in.
• 58:46
  You mentioned about how important this machine could be for
• 58:48
  academics, but also for governments.
• 58:51
  And somebody that was very much linked to the government, a previous war
• 58:55
  hero, was Ross Perot, and he eventually gave him 20 million for 16% share.
• 59:01
  That gave him confidence.
• 59:03
  That gave him now more money to keep a bit of runway, and also for the employees who
• 59:07
  probably couldn't believe it at the time, going, "We don't even have a product yet."
• 59:11
  So maybe let's share a bit about Ross and what he brought to the table, and
• 59:14
  eventually how he ran out of patience.
• 59:17
  So Ross Perot was an American war hero.
• 59:20
  He's also a man who ran for president.
• 59:22
  He was one of the most popular presidents not from a political
• 59:26
  party in about a century.
• 59:28
  And we see American politics today with populism.
• 59:32
  Ross Perot was the original populist before this whole thing existed.
• 59:36
  And I say that he was certainly not, y- and I'm not talking about the toxicity
• 59:41
  of today, but he was a good guy.
• 59:43
  He was a great guy who people respected.
• 59:46
  And so war hero there was one, one point where I mean-- Okay, so this kind
• 59:54
  of badass stuff doesn't happen today.
• 59:56
  Uh, in the Iranian Revolution of 1979, he hired a team of commandos,
• 1:00:01
  including his own employees, to go into Iran and rescue their employees from
• 1:00:07
  an Iranian prison and bust them out.
• 1:00:09
  So we're talking Chuck Norris like he's like the Chuck Norris of technology.
• 1:00:14
  So Ross Perot comes in, tough as nails.
• 1:00:17
  He's this military man and veteran who looks at Steve and sees something
• 1:00:22
  in him, the level of creativity that you don't see in many other places.
• 1:00:27
  And Ross, against of his advisors, decided to bet all this money on Steve.
• 1:00:33
  He really thought that Steve was gonna be creating the
• 1:00:36
  brilliant computer of the future.
• 1:00:39
  You have to realize how unusual this was.
• 1:00:41
  Today you can be a company without a product and you can
• 1:00:44
  still raise billions of dollars.
• 1:00:46
  The economy is so different today.
• 1:00:47
  But back then in the year 1986, it was expected that if an investor
• 1:00:53
  was gonna write your check, you had to demonstrate results already.
• 1:00:57
  Ross was making just an incredible bet at the time that not many sane investors
• 1:01:03
  would have made, and it was because, in part, he was taken in by Steve's charisma.
• 1:01:09
  He often said in private conversations that he saw something of himself in
• 1:01:13
  Steve, that Steve was somebody who like, y- for most people, you have to
• 1:01:18
  get to your 50s to get to that level of success, but Steve had accomplished
• 1:01:21
  it by his 20s, so clearly he was on the rise and he was gonna keep rising.
• 1:01:26
  But Ross Perot he doesn't take prisoners.
• 1:01:30
  These guys are tough and you can't fool them for long.
• 1:01:34
  The charade was happening.
• 1:01:35
  It was clear that the product was being delayed.
• 1:01:38
  NeXT Computer was not on track to release a working computer anywhere near
• 1:01:43
  the timeline that they had promised.
• 1:01:45
  And eventually that charade f- falls apart and Ross Perot and Steve Jobs
• 1:01:50
  were headed towards a collision course.
• 1:01:53
  At what point does the investor give up, and at what point does the creator
• 1:01:58
  have to drop the, fakeness and to show what he's really capable of?
• 1:02:03
  And that's what happened in this book.
• 1:02:04
  Maybe we'll say a, a word on the constant tinkering, delays.
• 1:02:09
  Again, many people who've worked with an en- entrepreneur know what this is like.
• 1:02:13
  Leaning over your shoulder, watching your work, being a bottleneck, stuff all has
• 1:02:18
  to go through them, they have to have say, et cetera, which is important in
• 1:02:22
  the early days, but it's not scalable.
• 1:02:24
  And you think about here having strategic priorities, and we realized this recently
• 1:02:29
  , when we covered the BlackBerry story, that the strategic priorities were
• 1:02:34
  no more than targets, sales targets.
• 1:02:37
  But for NeXT, they called it the deep shit list.
• 1:02:40
  Yep
• 1:02:40
  And this was Steve going through, what's the thing that's gonna put us out of
• 1:02:44
  business next that we have to fix?
• 1:02:46
  So Steve's early strategy for the business was, "What's going to put
• 1:02:50
  us out of business and how can we fix it now?" And he ran this thing
• 1:02:53
  called the deep shit list, which was a list of problem items that he would
• 1:02:59
  list at every single company retreat.
• 1:03:01
  He'd have a big whiteboard, and he had two categories typically.
• 1:03:05
  One of them was shit list, and the other one was deep shit list.
• 1:03:08
  And if you had a product on the deep shit list, you were in real deep shit.
• 1:03:12
  That was a common phrase at NeXT.
• 1:03:15
  if you were on the deep shit list you were up for-- He would march you in
• 1:03:19
  front of the room and tear into you.
• 1:03:20
  He was not afraid to take prisoners with this one.
• 1:03:23
  But the problem became that he was building a company based on negatives
• 1:03:28
  and not so much on the positives.
• 1:03:31
  He did have the vision for his com- his cube computer, but the way that the
• 1:03:35
  company evolved was that it was a company being ruled based on shit lists and
• 1:03:43
  be- the fear of going out of business.
• 1:03:45
  They were running-- He would always say, "We're running out of money.
• 1:03:47
  We're, our product's not working. Stuff isn't working." That's no way
• 1:03:51
  to run a company, and that's even what NeXT executives would tell me in
• 1:03:54
  interviews, that you can't run an entire company based on the fear of failure.
• 1:04:00
  You have to run a company based on the true faith in what you're doing, the faith
• 1:04:06
  that the people around you can make it a success and that you can do it together.
• 1:04:10
  And so in the first half of NeXT, these early years that we're talking about,
• 1:04:14
  Steve was very much a fear-based leader.
• 1:04:16
  He thought that he could scare people's way into success.
• 1:04:21
  That if, we go out of business, you're gonna lose your job, so you better
• 1:04:24
  pay attention to the deep shit list.
• 1:04:27
  But as the story of NeXT went on this deep shit list started to fade.
• 1:04:33
  Steve started to realize that this is no way to run a company, and the way to run
• 1:04:38
  a company is that you create priorities.
• 1:04:41
  That there are maybe 10 priorities for the week.
• 1:04:45
  There-- it's not a shit list.
• 1:04:46
  It's not, "We're gonna go out of business," but it's simply, "Can we
• 1:04:49
  apply practical, pragmatic fixes and improvements to make this a better
• 1:04:53
  product?" So there was a subtle change in mindset that happened in the next years
• 1:04:59
  that showed what Steve was learning.
• 1:05:02
  It's, going from being reactive to proactive.
• 1:05:05
  And once Steve became proactive, he was able to unlock his true magic
• 1:05:10
  and to really make things happen.
• 1:05:11
  I really felt that throughout reading this, that this was fueled by bitterness,
• 1:05:17
  this project, this next project.
• 1:05:20
  And maybe later on, the Apple story was fueled by creativity.
• 1:05:26
  It was fueled from a different place, and it just shows you that fuel can get
• 1:05:30
  you so far, but you run out of that fuel.
• 1:05:32
  While when you change the source of that fuel, it actually
• 1:05:36
  can be something different.
• 1:05:37
  That's just at a metaphysical level, something that, that came to mind.
• 1:05:41
  And then the other thing, and I just wanted to say this to
• 1:05:42
  people who are out there who have worked for somebody like this.
• 1:05:45
  I have seen people operate like this, like Steve Jobs did, and they do break people,
• 1:05:50
  and they make people feel worthless.
• 1:05:52
  And those people go on to get therapy afterwards.
• 1:05:56
  And just to say to people, it's not just you.
• 1:05:59
  You can see it at this level.
• 1:06:00
  And I think that's one of the important things you call out, Geoff is, h- how
• 1:06:04
  much damage this can do to people as well
• 1:06:06
  And so many of the people who worked with Steve Jobs their, entire lives, they
• 1:06:12
  harbored anger and bitterness towards him.
• 1:06:14
  The tantrums, the tirades the, humiliation in front of entire company offices.
• 1:06:20
  People really were upset with him.
• 1:06:23
  And when Steve died, one of the things that almost everybody told
• 1:06:30
  me was that they forgave him because they realized it it was, hard.
• 1:06:39
  They had been anger- angry all those years.
• 1:06:41
  They had cried in meetings 'cause of Steve, but they had realized how much
• 1:06:46
  he had changed and transformed, and they realized that he had gone from being
• 1:06:50
  this monster brat being able to look at somebody and reach into their soul
• 1:06:57
  and pull out the greatness inside them.
• 1:07:00
  He found things inside them that they didn't know about themselves.
• 1:07:03
  And they all told me "Without Steve, without his talent for looking inside
• 1:07:10
  me, I would not be who I am today. He brought the best out of me, and he
• 1:07:16
  showed me what I'm capable of." So they mourned Steve, and they missed him.
• 1:07:20
  And they miss the fact that we don't really have a lot of leaders
• 1:07:24
  like him in the world right now.
• 1:07:25
  They, want a return to that greatness.
• 1:07:28
  So the question a lot of people ask and this is something that
• 1:07:32
  executives ask me and NeXT executives have asked me, it's right now Apple
• 1:07:37
  is a company that's struggling.
• 1:07:38
  It's not doing as great as it used to.
• 1:07:41
  AI, not its thing.
• 1:07:43
  Tim Cook stepping down possibly soon as the who's gonna be his successor?
• 1:07:47
  Nobody knows.
• 1:07:48
  But what happened to the vision?
• 1:07:50
  What happened to the innovation?
• 1:07:51
  And why is it that Apple today is not bringing the best out
• 1:07:55
  of the people who work for it?
• 1:07:57
  Like why, what happened to the old Apple under Steve, and what
• 1:08:00
  does it take to lead Apple?
• 1:08:01
  And they always go back to NeXT and they say, "This was the crucible of
• 1:08:05
  Steve's life, and this is where he learned what real greatness takes, and
• 1:08:08
  we need to go back to that at Apple now."
• 1:08:10
  Brilliant, man.
• 1:08:11
  Maybe we'll just share a couple of more things, and Geoff's kindly
• 1:08:15
  agreed to come back for a part two of this because we've only got
• 1:08:17
  through a tiny amount of the book.
• 1:08:19
  It is so deep.
• 1:08:20
  There's so many stories, and it's such a, an interesting read.
• 1:08:25
  You'll fly through reading it as well, so s- so interesting.
• 1:08:28
  One of the things on the Deep Ship list was storage.
• 1:08:32
  So if he's gonna have this mega computer, it's gonna have good
• 1:08:35
  storage, and it needed probably a different type of storage.
• 1:08:38
  And serendipitously, Canon reached out to Steve to go, "Have a look through
• 1:08:43
  our database here of patents, stuff we've been working on," because they
• 1:08:47
  saw him as this visionary that would spot something that they didn't.
• 1:08:50
  It turned out to be a master stroke and actually led to
• 1:08:53
  investment eventually from Canon
• 1:08:55
  you have to remember at, the time computers were incredibly basic units.
• 1:09:02
  You, might have like two megabytes on your computer, four megabytes.
• 1:09:05
  The typical computer in a person's home was not capable of
• 1:09:09
  anything like what we have today.
• 1:09:11
  And the question was how can we expand storage to get to that
• 1:09:14
  next level of computing for the research, for the science?
• 1:09:17
  And Canon was developing a laser disc.
• 1:09:20
  This was not like the CD-ROM, it was not a DVD.
• 1:09:23
  It was a- an alternative technology that they were gonna start pushing out.
• 1:09:28
  Steve s-so Steve was going through the offices of Canon out in Tokyo.
• 1:09:35
  They wanted to invite him out because having Steve Jobs around your office
• 1:09:39
  blessing technology was something that everybody wanted, 'cause if
• 1:09:43
  Steve took it, you would assume that it would succeed out there.
• 1:09:47
  He would do something with it.
• 1:09:48
  And so Steve spot-- it caught his eye right away.
• 1:09:51
  It's like he saw that disc and he was like, "What's that?" And he held it up,
• 1:09:54
  and it's this beautiful this gorgeous shimmering like a, mini disc, not like
• 1:10:00
  a CD, but something that's smaller.
• 1:10:03
  And it really at the time had the look of the future.
• 1:10:06
  What really caught Steve was this, with this one was it wasn't only the
• 1:10:11
  potential it could hold many more megabytes on one disc, but the beauty
• 1:10:15
  of it the shimmering beauty, the fact that it would whisper to life.
• 1:10:19
  It wasn't noisy like the typical hard drive at the time.
• 1:10:22
  It i-if you can remember old computers, the discs were really loud.
• 1:10:26
  They would make these grinding noises sometimes.
• 1:10:29
  But this was true audio and visual beauty bundled together into a little disc.
• 1:10:35
  And so Steve bet the future of NeXT on it.
• 1:10:39
  He, wanted this to be the core of the computer.
• 1:10:41
  He said, "No hard drives." Now, can you imagine that today, like
• 1:10:46
  a computer with no hard drives?
• 1:10:49
  It's like you have to wonder what he was thinking, but this shows, like,
• 1:10:53
  how creat- how creatively he was thinking about what he was doing.
• 1:10:58
  So Steve bet the farm on this little disc.
• 1:11:03
  And this is where things went awry because the disc was so far ahead
• 1:11:09
  of its time that it wasn't gonna be able to make it to the market and
• 1:11:12
  make any significant difference.
• 1:11:14
  It became one of the most expensive components in the computer.
• 1:11:19
  was certainly beautiful, but it was so new that it was
• 1:11:23
  untested and it broke down a lot.
• 1:11:25
  It only worked on NeXT computers, which meant that you couldn't swap
• 1:11:29
  it and use it on your PC or your Mac.
• 1:11:32
  You, could only use it on NeXT, which is very limiting.
• 1:11:35
  And it had a number of other problems too.
• 1:11:37
  Office dust would kill it.
• 1:11:39
  A lot of them were returned.
• 1:11:40
  The, typical disc I learned from looking-- I looked through archives
• 1:11:44
  that showed that most discs died after a few months, and even the replacement
• 1:11:48
  discs also died, the disc drives.
• 1:11:52
  It's a product that had so much potential and it's such a Steve Jobs product 'cause
• 1:11:55
  it's so beautiful, but It's not practical.
• 1:12:00
  so this is one of the reasons why NeXT failed early on, was because Steve would
• 1:12:05
  not give up on this idea of having disk.
• 1:12:10
  He, in the end, he put a hard drive on the computer too, not his plan, the disk
• 1:12:15
  was so bad they had to have a hard drive.
• 1:12:17
  So it's like it ruined the whole point of it, and then no one was using
• 1:12:20
  the disk when the computer came out because they were just so unreliable.
• 1:12:24
  It, the whole thing just became a fiasco.
• 1:12:26
  So what's the lesson here?
• 1:12:28
  Beauty is not enough.
• 1:12:30
  Elegance futurism these things are great ideas that we can all try to
• 1:12:35
  live up to, but you also have to be practical for the times that you live in.
• 1:12:40
  And if the industry is going in one direction, sometimes you actually
• 1:12:44
  have to follow the industry.
• 1:12:45
  You cannot just splinter off and do your own thing.
• 1:12:48
  A lot of companies have learned that one the hard way.
• 1:12:50
  Also Sony.
• 1:12:51
  There are lots of examples of companies that have fallen on this
• 1:12:54
  idea of a not invented here syndrome of having "We're gonna have our own
• 1:12:58
  tech that nobody else can use." And it did not work for Steve at NeXT.
• 1:13:02
  And so what he had to learn was how to be practical, how to build, a company
• 1:13:08
  that's useful to people, that's practical, and then from there you can go create
• 1:13:13
  your walled garden at Apple later.
• 1:13:15
  You have to get the foundations in place first before you can just build
• 1:13:19
  your own thing that nobody else can use
• 1:13:22
  there was an interview with him and Walt Mossberg, and he famously said that Apple
• 1:13:27
  betted on technologies in their spring.
• 1:13:30
  And I felt here he was forcing, trying to force, a season before
• 1:13:34
  spring and trying to force this technology onto the world as well.
• 1:13:38
  M- last thing would just be, we've seen how he burned relationships with people.
• 1:13:43
  For example, in Fremont, he went through five or six office managers,
• 1:13:47
  and used to take the stock back as well.
• 1:13:49
  So those people didn't benefit from stock, they just left.
• 1:13:52
  And I thought about how many people both were interviewed by him who were burned,
• 1:13:58
  and how many people who just went, "I've had enough of this," over time,
• 1:14:01
  including board members over the years.
• 1:14:03
  We saw it in Next as well.
• 1:14:04
  But one of the other things he burned, and you see how
• 1:14:07
  self-destructive he was relationships.
• 1:14:09
  Some of those relationships, for example, IBM the business retailer as well who sold
• 1:14:16
  the, basically an early day, warehouse Best Buy type company that, that sold, and
• 1:14:22
  just how critical he was of them, of their practices, looking over their shoulders,
• 1:14:27
  even redesigning their PowerPoints
• 1:14:29
  So that's-- that was a company called Businessland, and it's one
• 1:14:33
  of those big firms that's been forgotten today but was actually quite
• 1:14:36
  important in the life of Steve Jobs.
• 1:14:38
  It was a distributor similar to Best Buy, something like that.
• 1:14:42
  But what they did, what they were famous for, is that they had a field force.
• 1:14:45
  So they wouldn't just sell computers at their shops.
• 1:14:48
  They would have this, force that would go out and sell you computers
• 1:14:51
  for your company, and then they would show up and fix them on demand.
• 1:14:55
  This was a major retailer at the time.
• 1:14:59
  And Steve was so lucky that they took an interest in NeXT because this is
• 1:15:05
  one of the partnerships that could have made or break the company.
• 1:15:09
  But Steve being Steve, s- he's still immature at this--
• 1:15:13
  he's about 35 at this, time.
• 1:15:16
  He's still immature.
• 1:15:17
  He's not quite learned the lessons of his failures yet, and he immediately
• 1:15:22
  moves to alienate Businessland.
• 1:15:24
  He tells them "Your stores suck. They're ugly." Businessland is a
• 1:15:28
  big box retailer they're selling those old beige computers for cheap.
• 1:15:33
  They sell them in bulk to companies.
• 1:15:34
  And you have to remember big companies, don't give a shit if
• 1:15:39
  your computer is a perfect cube.
• 1:15:41
  That's not even something they think about.
• 1:15:42
  They just want beige box machine.
• 1:15:44
  You, turn it on, it works.
• 1:15:46
  You type data into it, it works.
• 1:15:48
  It can be used across the company.
• 1:15:50
  They want portability, they want scale, they want these other things
• 1:15:53
  that Steve Jobs is not offering them.
• 1:15:58
  The NeXT sales force is extremely tightly controlled.
• 1:16:01
  NeXT has these salesmen who go around the country, and will not let Businessland,
• 1:16:07
  partners, actually sell a computer.
• 1:16:09
  These guys, wouldn't be able to sell it because it's just too
• 1:16:13
  hard to sell in the first place.
• 1:16:14
  But as the deal would move forward, the NeXT people would come in, take control
• 1:16:19
  of the deal, try to sell it for them.
• 1:16:20
  But even the NeXT salesmen couldn't sell it 'cause it was just like,
• 1:16:24
  how do you sell a NeXT computer?
• 1:16:26
  So what's the next best solution if the sales force can't do this?
• 1:16:31
  You call Steve Jobs.
• 1:16:32
  And what is Steve Jobs brilliant at doing?
• 1:16:35
  He's brilliant at standing on a stage and telling you why his
• 1:16:38
  vision is great and then getting you to sign on the dotted line.
• 1:16:41
  So Steve would come out, and they did this thing called Steve on a Stick.
• 1:16:44
  That's literally the phrase they use.
• 1:16:47
  Steve would give his theatrical introduction, talk about how
• 1:16:50
  great the NeXT machine is, and then he would sign a deal.
• 1:16:53
  They would buy 100 computers or so.
• 1:16:55
  became the lifeline of the business.
• 1:16:57
  They were literally selling computers based on the celebrity
• 1:17:00
  of Steve Jobs and how much people wanted to be around Steve Jobs.
• 1:17:04
  But the actual sales force couldn't sell a computer because they couldn't explain
• 1:17:10
  to corporate clients why does it matter that the cube is a perfect black paint.
• 1:17:17
  Who cares?
• 1:17:19
  Steve could, explain that, but nobody else could.
• 1:17:22
  I will come back, man, because this, the, I've, I was just looking at my notes
• 1:17:26
  here and I'm like, , you're out of time.
• 1:17:27
  You have a young baby there with you as well.
• 1:17:29
  I gotta leave you in peace, but it, it is so much more.
• 1:17:32
  We're gonna come back.
• 1:17:33
  I mentioned the reality distortion field that Steve had, but the next
• 1:17:37
  piece we'll talk about is when reality distorts back and reality shows up and
• 1:17:41
  goes, "Uh, this ain't working for us."
• 1:17:43
  So I will share links to many of the conversations that you
• 1:17:48
  had, many of the YouTube videos.
• 1:17:50
  But where is, people wanna reach out and find you, Geoff, where's the best place?
• 1:17:53
  So I'm on social media.
• 1:17:55
  I'm on LinkedIn, GCain, G-C-A-I-N.
• 1:17:58
  I'm on X which is at my name, so Geoffrey_Cain.
• 1:18:03
  You can find me at my website, Geoffreycain.net.
• 1:18:05
  And yeah, I'm always always happy to hear from readers if you have any thoughts,
• 1:18:10
  anything that jumps out at you from this book, always happy to hear from you.
• 1:18:13
  So just shoot me a message over on X and I'll get back to you.
• 1:18:16
  I'm holding up a copy of the book here.
• 1:18:18
  This is not the cover though, so I'm gonna flash it up on the screen and
• 1:18:21
  show you the cover that is out there.
• 1:18:22
  It's brand new book, . Been in your mind for a long time.
• 1:18:25
  Been in the mind of many, many people who've worked for
• 1:18:28
  Steve Jobs over the years.
• 1:18:29
  The research is fantastic.
• 1:18:32
  I also recommend Geoff's other book, Samsung Rising, which we're gonna cover
• 1:18:35
  in the future when the baby's grown up a little bit and you have a little bit
• 1:18:39
  more sleep under the belt as well, Geoff.
• 1:18:42
  Author of Steve Jobs in Exile, Geoffrey Cain, thank you for joining us.
• 1:18:46
  Thank you, Aidan
• 1:18:47
  I hope you're enjoying our Business Biography series it's with thanks to
• 1:18:50
  our friends at Kyndryl who run and the technology systems that drive advantage
• 1:18:55
  for the world's leading businesses.
• 1:18:57
  With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed
• 1:19:01
  service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness the power of technology for
• 1:19:05
  smarter decisions, faster innovation, and a lasting competitive edge.
• 1:19:09
  You can find Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute, K-Y-N-D-R-Y-L, at kyndryl.com.