#420 The Lost Years of Steve Jobs

**vgbd** (0:00)
For a long time, people have been asking me, can you make a podcast on failure? There's a brand new book called Steve Jobs in Exile, The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary, and it was written by Geoffrey Cain. And that is what this episode is going to be about, because the book is exclusively about, it chronicles that 12 year period of exile between when Steve Jobs gets kicked out of Apple, and then he returns to Apple. It is probably the defining point of Steve Jobs' life, because you will see one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs, maybe the greatest entrepreneur to ever live, just make mistake after mistake after mistake. And the longer he's in exile, the more the pressure builds, because he's burning through his entire fortune. And yet, because we know what happens after he returns to Apple, this is somehow one of the most inspiring stories, because of Steve's refusal to quit, and then his ability to transform, to build himself into the kind of leader and entrepreneur that deserves to run Apple. And before I jump into this book, I want to read you a paragraph from another book, because I want you to keep in mind these few sentences from this other book. This book is called The Return to the Little Kingdom. That book was primarily about the first few years of the history of Apple, but there's an updated version where the author, Michael Moritz writes this, Many are familiar with the re-emergence of Apple. They may not be as familiar with the fact that it has few, if any, parallels. When did a founder ever return to the company from which he had been rudely rejected to engineer a turnaround as complete and spectacular as Apple's?
While turnarounds are difficult in any circumstances, they are doubly difficult in a technology company. It is not too much of a stretch to say that Steve founded Apple not once, but twice. And the second time, he was alone. The book that you and I are going to talk about right now, Steve Jobs in Exile, tells in great detail the personal transformation that Steve Jobs had to go through to be able to re-found Apple. I'm going to get right into the book. Every waking moment of his adult life had been spent building Apple. Long days, longer nights. Now he had no real friends, no other life to turn to. Steve decided to disappear for a while, to step away from his old life and to think. Suddenly he was gone and nobody knew where the hell he was. And they didn't know if he would come back. So Steve Jobs is going to officially get kicked out of Apple in September 1985 Before that, he stripped away of all his power. He spends the summer in Paris trying to figure out what the hell he's going to do next. He talks about this in an interview. He says, you probably had somebody punch you in the stomach and it knocks the wind out of you. If you relax, you'll start to breathe again. That's how I felt all summer long.
During the summer, he goes to Paris with his girlfriend at the time, this woman named Tina. At the time, he's wondering, he's like, okay, well, I have this fortune, maybe I'll just live a quiet life in Paris. His girlfriend wrote him a letter about this time they were together when he had a major turning point in his life. And this is what she wrote, We were on a bridge in Paris in the summer of 1985 It was overcast. We leaned against the smooth stone rail and stared at the green water rolling on below. Your world had cleaved, and then it paused, waiting to rearrange itself around whatever you chose next. I wanted to run away from what we had come before. I tried to convince you to begin a new life with me in Paris, to shed our former selves and let something else course through us. I wanted us to crawl through that black chasm of your broken world and emerge anonymous and new in simple lives, where I could cook you simple dinners and we could be together every day. Like children playing a sweet game with no purpose save the game itself. And the next sentence perfectly describes Steve Jobs. But Steve couldn't stay away from work for long. He still wanted to build and create. And so Steve gets kicked out of Apple. He decides, hey, I'm going to build a computer for the university market. I'm going to target academics. And so he winds up poaching his co-founders. I think there's like four or five co-founders of NeXT directly from Apple. This causes Apple to sue Steve Jobs. And that lawsuit is about the only thing that the company has. Says their new company had no name, no business plan, no product, only a vague vision of building computers for universities. And there's a bunch of things going against them. It says at this point, Steve wasn't yet regarded as an undisputed genius in the industry. Instead, people saw him as a terrible infant. He could sell anything, but his reputation was poisoned. When Steve tried to poach other great Apple engineers, they refused to follow him. And so one of Steve's first moves was actually surprising. And it was actually being a good idea later on. He didn't know this at the time, but this is actually gonna introduce him to Ross Perot.