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The NeXT Years: Exile, the Cube, and the Accidental Rescue
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
After being pushed out of Apple, Steve Jobs built NeXT — a perfectionist's obsession that nearly bankrupted him and captivated Silicon Valley. Discover how a failed workstation became the unlikely foundation that would eventually save Apple itself.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
What Steve Jobs built at NeXT was never just a company. It was proof.
September of nineteen eighty-five. The board had sided with Sculley.
Jobs funded NeXT himself, somewhere between seven and twelve million dollars of his own money in the early stages. That kept the company alive but not comfortable.
One detail from this period tells you almost everything you need to know about how Jobs operated. Before the NeXT computer ever shipped, before there was a product to show the world, Jobs hired Paul Rand to design the company's logo.
Here's where the story gets harder. The NeXT computer finally shipped in nineteen eighty-eight.
But here's the thing that gets missed if you only read the sales figures. The NeXTSTEP operating system was genuinely extraordinary.
During the NeXT years, Jobs also made another investment that turned out to be transformative, though it had nothing to do with his core business. In nineteen eighty-six, he purchased the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm for around ten million dollars.
In December of nineteen ninety-six, Apple announced it was acquiring NeXT for approximately four hundred and twenty-nine million dollars. Jobs would return to Apple as an advisor.
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