The Other Steve Jobs, in the Wilderness

Notes on writing Steve Jobs in Exile

“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.”

—Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement, 2005

Steve Jobs in Exile is out today. For almost four years I’ve been digging up the story behind his famous quote above.

By the time Jobs gave this speech at Stanford in 2005, the verdict was in about his contributions and that verdict was generous. Apple, the company that had once driven him out and then nearly died without him, had taken him back. By the time of his Stanford commencement speech, he had started transforming it into what would become the most valuable company in history.

Pixar, the animation studio he bought almost as a side bet, was months from a sale to Disney, which would make him Disney’s largest shareholder. The iPod had become a cultural icon, and the iPhone was only a few years away. With so much settled behind you, it costs nothing to say your worst humiliation was the best thing that ever happened to you.

I wanted to study Steve’s twelve years in the wilderness, before the ending was obvious.

Jobs was thirty when Apple pushed him out in 1985 and then founded NeXT Computer to build advanced machines for university departments and intelligence agencies. He was forty-two when Apple acquired his company and brought him back.

Twelve years sit between those dates, and most biographies cross them fast, the way you would walk through a hallway between two rooms, but without realizing all the action in the hallway. Once I started digging, the story turned out far bigger than I had expected.

(I’m doing a Reddit AMA today at noon Eastern. Details at the end of this post.)

Before the Case for the Book, the Case Against the Book

Before any of the digging, I had to talk myself into the book at all, and the case against it was easy to make. There were already more than a dozen Steve Jobs books, and several of them were good. I read most of them, going back decades.

But the more I read, the more I saw the narrative take shape. The classic Steve lore almost always was told in two parts: Apple part 1, from when he cofounded the company with Woz in his parents’ garage to when he was driven out in 1985. Then he supposedly wandered aimlessly in the wilderness. And then came his second act at Apple, starting with his return in 1997 and his saving of the company. That’s when he made Apple great, as the story goes.

People wanted a verdict on him. Genius or tyrant, cruel or generous, visionary or impossible to work for. My reporting does not sort that cleanly. Nobody had treated the exile as the story. The people who built NeXT with Steve told me that the hardest, most formative years were the “wilderness years” between his time at Apple often skipped over.

I had read enough about Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Churchill to recognize the shape of these “middle years.” The figures we study tend to have a wilderness stretch first, a long run of failure, before they achieve preeminence. Jobs was a founder, not a president, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But the pattern was familiar enough that I wanted to see if there was anything to it.

A Steve Jobs Archive, Unread for Fifteen Years

In 2023, I first went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to see the papers of Steve’s close colleague named Pat Crecine. I expected them already picked over by researchers before me. To my surprise, they weren’t. As a vice president at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s, Crecine took a seat on the NeXT board with Steve. He kept the records: detailed letters between him and Steve, board minutes, financial statements, strategy and planning documents. After he died in 2008, his family gave the collection to the university.

The archivist told me I was the first person in about fifteen years to ask for some of these boxes. This stopped me. Jobs is the most written-about entrepreneur in recent history. There are shelves of books, films, oral histories, along with fan websites and blog accounts by witnesses in the room. And yet a piece of the original NeXT record had been sitting in a vault in Pittsburgh for fifteen years.

I left renewed, and with a pressing question: if a Steve Jobs archive was hiding in plain sight, what else would I find?

The First Cofounder

Archival boxes can only take you so far. Board minutes record that a committee made a decision, but they don’t tell you who was shouting, or who had stopped speaking to whom. For the inside story I had to find the people who were in the room.

The first NeXT cofounder I met was Dan’l Lewin, who took a big risk and left Apple with Steve in 1985. We traded emails and calls for the better part of a year. Then I flew out to California to meet him, and over many months we spent dozens of hours together—out on the central coast, and around the Bay—him talking, me listening. During that stretch he decided to open his private archive of Steve and NeXT materials that he had stored in his home since 1985.

Dan’l knew Steve longer than many people in this book. He grew up in what he calls a circus. His father and uncles were professional wrestlers, and the family kept an African lion and a chimp loose in the house. When the chaos got to be too much, he would sit on the curb and flip stones into the street.

He swam competitively, was good at math, went to Princeton, and wrote his undergraduate paper on Bob Dylan. He met Steve in 1977, while selling tape recorders for Sony out of an office next door to Apple. He remembered him as “stinky, with holes in the jeans.” They stayed close for the next three decades, close enough to fall out hard at NeXT, and close enough to mend their relationship. When Steve’s adoptive father died in 1993, Dan’l was one of the few people with Steve at the burial.

Dan’l was the first of more than a hundred people who generously helped me bring this book to life. (He also wrote the foreword.)

Photos courtesy of Doug Menuez.

The Wild West

Almost everyone I interviewed used those two words for the NeXT years. Wild West. They did not mean the failures, though there were plenty of those. They meant the thrill. Nobody knew where the frontier was, and working for Steve put you on the cutting edge. Even with punishing hours and failing products, they described those years as the adventure of their lives, the most memorable times in their careers.

NeXT’s computer, called the Cube for its perfect cube shape, failed as a product. But as an incubator of talent, NeXT did not fail at all. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web on a NeXT machine. John Carmack built Doom on one. NeXT’s operating system was so advanced that it became the software foundation for Apple, and the fuel for Apple’s renaissance with the iPod and iPhone when Steve returned later.

Steve Off Camera

That vindication came later. While it was happening, NeXT looked like a slow failure. Fortune asked whether Steve Jobs was a snake-oil salesman, and once NeXT closed its hardware division, laying off more than half of its staff, his closest colleagues estimated he was two or three years from personal bankruptcy.

That is the stretch I went looking into. I expected to find the genius-or-tyrant caricature of Steve people still argue about. But I found another side of him that I didn’t anticipate.

Here is one scene. Before Toy Story was in theaters, a twenty-seven-year-old woman was dying of breast cancer. She had a two-year-old and weeks, maybe days, left. Her last wish was to watch Toy Story with her little girl. She had no claim on Steve Jobs; she was a relative of a NeXT salesman’s sister-in-law. The salesman brought her wishes to Steve. He said no at first. The film wasn’t out, and he worried a copy would leak.

A few days later Steve changed his mind. He sent a team from Pixar to New York with videotapes and a box of toys. In the woman’s living room, where she lay in a hospital bed, they stood up Woody and Buzz and ran a private premiere. Her daughter climbed onto the bed with her and the toys. Afterward the Pixar staff packed up, and the little girl fell asleep holding Woody. Five days later, her mother died.

Ed Catmull, who ran Pixar with Steve, said he did this kind of thing more than once and never wanted it known. The wilderness is where the caricature falls away and the person shows up. That is the Steve in this book.

Courtesy Doug Menuez.

Two things, while I have you.

At noon Eastern time today, I’m doing a Reddit AMA. Ask me anything about the reporting, the archives, NeXT, Steve, the parts that didn’t make it into the book. I’ll be on the r/Apple subreddit channel for a couple of hours.

And on May 26, four of the people who built NeXT and Apple with Steve Jobs will be on a stage together with me. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View is hosting a live book talk, featuring Dan’l Lewin, Bud Tribble, Avie Tevanian, Rich Page, and me. The in-person seats are gone, but the museum is streaming it. If this essay made you want to hear these people tell the story in their own words, sign up to watch live.