Breaking Through the Legend of Steve Jobs
He spent twelve years in exile from Apple. But the man I uncovered during those difficult years was far more than the tyrant depicted in movies.
Steve Jobs and Macintosh computer, January 1984, by Bernard Gotfryd.
We often think of Steve Jobs as difficult or a “tyrant.” But writing Steve Jobs in Exile, I found all kinds of evidence that the tyrant story is incomplete.
At NeXT, the company Jobs founded after his 1985 ouster from Apple, he sprang a trick question on job candidates. “Are you the best software developer in your field?” If they said no, he’d shoot back: “Then I’d rather talk to them!”
He was screening for people who would push back on him. His instinct shaped how he built teams.
I spent almost four years reporting this book, and Steve’s recruiting pattern surprised me. Jobs’ hiring bar was unforgiving, but he wasn’t looking for people he could boss around, contrary to popular myth. He wanted people with conviction. “Zero is better than a negative,” he said about his approach to choosing the right people. He went looking for champion swimmers, musicians, and surfers, people with edge.
Leo Hourvitz, one of his early NeXT software developers, told me the company was “an intellectually contentious environment.” Your ideas survived only if you could win over every smart person in the room. You were conditioned for intellectual warfare.
When NeXT alumni later moved on to other companies, their new colleagues asked them to dial back the intensity.
What did standing up to Jobs look like inside the NeXT building? His CFO, Susan Barnes, once eked out a $50 million credit line from J.P. Morgan to keep NeXT alive. Jobs treated the money like found cash. “If we can’t pay it back,” he told her, “too bad.”
“No,” Susan replied. “You cannot do that. We’re not going to do things that aren’t part of the agreements we make with people who helped us build this thing.”
The NeXT Computer logo by Paul Rand.
Susan wasn't alone. Another time, marketing chief Dan’l Lewin called Jobs’ bluff in a confrontation over sales. NeXT couldn’t move its expensive computers, and Jobs blamed the marketing team. Dan’l refused to take the heat. “We’re so far away from selling anybody anything right now,” he told him. “You don’t want to hear it, but this is not a problem in sales.”
The pattern followed Jobs back to Apple. Later, after Steve and his NeXT team joined Apple in a $429 million acquisition, software chief Avie Tevanian wrote Jobs an email admitting he no longer felt like challenging him, and the loss of fight scared him.
Jobs replied that same day: “Please continue to challenge me. It’s the way we get to the right decisions, and I enjoy it too.”
When Jobs returned to Apple as iCEO in 1997, he rebuilt the board with the same principle in mind. According to Pixar cofounder Ed Catmull, Jobs looked for board members “who were unafraid to debate and disagree.”
If anyone understood this about Steve, it was Catmull. He worked with Jobs for twenty-five years and learned how to get things done with this difficult personality. “Steve does not want to be guided in his thinking,” he told me. “He wants to know what the facts are on which to base something.” Once, Catmull disagreed with Jobs on a decision for three months. Eventually Jobs said: “Oh, you’re right, and that’s the end of the discussion.”
Steve Jobs unveils the iPad, January 2010. Photo courtesy of Matt Buchanan.