Three days in: what people are saying about Steve Jobs in Exile

NeXT and Apple alumni, the Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Six Colors, 9to5Mac, and others weigh in

By the spring of 1993, Steve Jobs had hit rock bottom, nearly written out of history.

Eight years earlier, Apple had pushed him out of the company he had co-founded. Since then he had been trying to build a new computer company called NeXT. But in early 1993, after nearly a decade of losses, he shut down its hardware division and laid off more than half the staff. A month later, his adoptive father Paul Jobs died.

Steve was burning his own fortune to keep NeXT alive, along with his other company, Pixar. Ed Catmull, who ran Pixar with him, later told me that Steve’s investment in Pixar alone was about half of his net worth, and that he was bankrolling two failing companies at the same time. The whole thing was a disaster by any count.

That spring, on a Sunday morning, a phone rang in the home of a Belgian tech executive in California named Dominique Trempont. He was repainting his living room, so his wife picked up.

“This is Steve Jobs.”

“Yes, and I’m the Queen of England.”

Steve spent months trying to recruit Trempont. NeXT was sitting on $400 million of debt, an enormous sum for a small company in 1993, and Steve needed someone who knew how to fix a balance sheet that was bleeding from every direction. Dominique was the guy people in Silicon Valley called when the spreadsheets were on fire.

Their first meeting was scheduled for an hour. It went seven. They walked Palo Alto’s streets while Steve evangelized NeXT’s software. Weeks later, when Dominique was hospitalized with kidney stones, Steve showed up at his bedside with an employment contract. His wife Laurene Powell Jobs also sent over a basket of food and a copy of the novel The English Patient.

After six weeks of thinking about it, Dominique signed from his hospital bed. “It took a good dose of morphine,” he told me.

“He was a great steadying force for Steve,” one colleague said of Dominique. For years Steve had been running NeXT on what he called the Deep Shit List, an ever-growing scrawl of existential threats he read aloud at all-hands meetings until people stopped listening. Dominique replaced it with the Top Ten list: ten goals, each with an owner and a deadline, reviewed every Monday morning.

He went to work on the debt, including with Canon, the largest creditor, which had stopped returning Steve's calls, having written him off. He told Steve that focus meant saying no, and Steve listened. By 1994, after nine years of losses, NeXT posted its first profit, and Steve was finally in the black, having invested (and lost) tens of millions of dollars of his own money.

Dominique watched Steve change during these years. Steve used to fuss over the exact shade of every color in the logo, the computer, the product launch. But now he was learning to let other people run things.

This week he posted his assessment of Steve Jobs in Exile on LinkedIn.

His verdict was that “Jobs 1.0 and Jobs 2.0 were materially different people,” and that the humiliations of the NeXT years are what produced the change.

He is not the only one to recount this. Other NeXT and Apple veterans have written in this week, telling me the book captures the Steve they knew.

The reviews are landing too, and they are picking up on the same thing. The Wall Street Journal called it “a study in individual magnetism and group dynamics.” Jason Snell, who has covered Apple for twenty-five years, wrote in Six Colors that it is “a surprising and sometimes gruesome (in a businessy way) story” of how Jobs failed his way into the job that would define him. 9to5Mac said it “reads like a lost season of your favorite series.” Vanity Fair ran an excerpt. And there is more landing next week.

One last thing. I’m building the next few posts around questions readers send in. The one I keep coming back to: how did Tim Berners-Lee end up inventing the World Wide Web on a NeXT computer, and what did Jobs make of it? I’ll get to that one soon.

If there is a person, a moment, or a decision in Steve’s NeXT years you have always wondered about, send it. I am reading everything.

Geoff

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