The Twelve Years Steve Jobs Was Kicked Out of Apple Were His Real Apprenticeship
After being forced out of Apple he got it wrong for twelve straight years: the perfect cube, refusing to sell to the government, driving out every investor. What actually made him Steve Jobs wasn't talent — it was this stretch of failure that history nearly erased.
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He launched a coup to become CEO and his own side ratted him out
In early 1985, Jobs plotted a coup: he first arranged to go to China with CEO John Sculley for a speech, then abruptly cancelled on his own end, planning to walk into the board while Sculley was away, demand his removal, and install himself as CEO. He told his rival Jean-Louis Gassée about the plan, and Gassée went to Sculley's house that same night to inform on him. Sculley never went to China, showed up at the meeting the next day, and the coup failed on the spot. This wasn't being swept out the door — he struck first and lost.
He paid $100,000 for a logo and anchored the whole company's spending to $100,000
Jobs hired top designer Paul Rand to do NeXT's logo, and Rand's terms were: $100,000, one design only, no revisions, paid whether you use it or not. In 1985 and 1986 that was an astronomical sum for a startup. More important was the consequence — suddenly every expense in the company was measured in units of $100,000. Meanwhile Jobs had put $7 million of his own money into NeXT, with no product yet. A single logo locked in the burn rate.
He hired people to talk back, not to obey
In the movie, Jobs yells and everyone shuts up and runs. The reality was the opposite: he hired people precisely so they would push back on him. In interviews he would ask, "Are you the best person in your field?" If the person hesitated, he'd say the interview was over — he only talked to the number one. What he wanted was people with edges, people who would defend their own ideas. Being harsh with them was his way of forcing them to prove "why your idea isn't completely stupid." He didn't want obedience; he wanted intellectual combat.
The most dangerous thing about the reality distortion field is that it fooled him too
Jobs's reality distortion field wasn't just about convincing others his ideas were flawless — it was about convincing himself. Executives would bring him numbers and tell him: if we don't raise this money by this date and sell this many cubes, the company is finished. He'd answer: we'll sell 25,000 this year. They'd say we don't even have a distribution network — who's going to sell them? He'd say: I know it'll work, because I tried it today, and it's a good computer. He wasn't lying; he genuinely believed it. That's what makes it dangerous.
He personally blew up a government contract already in hand
One of investor Ross Perot's handshake agreements was to use his sales team to sell NeXT to the federal government, the military, and intelligence agencies. In those years intelligence contractors and spies really did come and go at NeXT headquarters, never carrying business cards, saying only "I'm Sally," "I'm Bob," never giving real names. Then Jobs decided not to sell to the federal government, because that wasn't him — what he wanted was to democratize the computer, to sell to schools, to students in dorm rooms. The contract was sitting on the boardroom table ready to sign, and he said he was out. Perot left in anger.
What saved him wasn't Apple — it was the Pixar IPO and a marriage
From 1985 to 1995, Jobs personally funded both NeXT and Pixar at the same time, burning roughly $50 million a year, and he refused to take the companies public — if they collapsed, he collapsed. At the end of 1995 Pixar went public on the success of Toy Story, making him a billionaire, and that was what actually saved him financially. At the same time, his marriage to Lorraine and their child got him started on repairing himself. The turning point wasn't some business decision — it was that he finally admitted he was alone and had nearly failed completely.
After he stepped back, NeXT turned a profit for the first time
NeXT was carrying $400 million in debt, with nine years without a successful product and nine years of losses. After Jobs let go, the new CFO Dominic Trempont and a team of professional managers took over, and in 1994 NeXT recorded a small profit for the first time, finally looking like a real business. The irony is that this happened after he had largely left and shifted his energy to Pixar. What he learned wasn't to control harder — it was to admit how much damage his obsession with control had done.
One middle manager's phone call rewrote Apple's history
Apple was then negotiating to buy Jean-Louis Gassée's BeOS — the very man whose informing had driven Jobs out of Apple years earlier. Nobody at NeXT was being seriously considered. It was a NeXT middle manager, Garrett Rice, who casually called Apple to pitch, and the person who called back said he was leaving and told him to contact CTO Ellen Hancock; Rice left a voicemail, and Hancock actually called back saying she wanted to see NeXTSTEP. Only from there did the story flip. If that call had never been made, there might have been no iPod, no iPhone.
The first thing he did back at Apple was shake hands with his mortal enemy
One of the first things Jobs did after returning to Apple as CEO was sign a deal with Microsoft: Microsoft would make Word for the Mac, and invest $150 million to save Apple. The younger Jobs would never have done this — it was the great sin of betraying the temple of Apple, and Apple's faithful found it deeply controversial at the time. But that money was the transfusion that kept Apple alive; without it, Apple would have run out of cash. What he learned was: to achieve hardware-software integration, to have that kind of total control, you first need scale — and scale comes from making deals with people.
In their own words · checked verbatim
That is Steve Jobs at rock bottom, and that is a Steve Jobs that we've almost never seen before. And he was very close to being completely forgotten and written out of history.
He was saying, I have this force of personality and I want you to show me why your idea is not totally stupid, please.
It wasn't just about convincing other people that his ideas were infallible. It was also about convincing himself.
working for him was the hardest experience of my life but it was also the most beautiful
when you have talent around the pyramid gets inverted you're no longer the boss up top telling people what to do you're the ceo at the bottom and your job is to allow your talent to do their best
Steve learned the power of inspiring the people around him. But he never completely learned to be 100% honest with himself.
If you're only focused in the current moment, then it's easy to give up. But failure could be the foundation for success later.
Figures
| Jobs's personal investment in NeXT | $7 million | 10:39 |
| Canon's investment in NeXT | $100 million, for one board seat | 18:03 |
| Ross Perot's investment in NeXT | $20 million, for one board seat | 18:03 |
| Bridge financing NeXT sought from Canon when near bankruptcy in 1993 | $20 million | 19:04 |
| Jobs's personal annual burn rate | about $50 million | 28:22 |
| NeXT's debt | $400 million | 31:37 |
| Microsoft's investment in Apple | $150 million | 48:14 |
| Share of projects Jobs cut after becoming interim CEO | 70% | 55:45 |
Glossary
- reality distortion field
- Jobs's ability to make the people around him — and himself — believe his vision was flawless.
- object-oriented programming
- Breaking functionality into reusable, draggable "objects" — the foundation of NeXTSTEP and later Apple systems.
- NeXTSTEP
- NeXT's operating system, which later became the software basis for Apple's revival and the iPhone.
- iCEO
- Jobs's title when he returned to Apple in 1997, and the origin of Apple's "i" naming.
How to listen
For founders, product leads, and anyone who has lived through company politics: a look at how a genius learned delegation, compromise, and shaking hands with his enemies across twelve years of consecutive failure.
The segments at 20:06 and 37:52 are sponsor ads and can be skipped.