Not long ago we learned from Apple’s then-CEO the story behind the day Apple fired Steve Jobs. Many of Jobs’s colleagues remember anecdotes and memorable episodes about him. Following the timeline, today we’ll see what happened shortly after Steve Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT: what the atmosphere was like in this new company and how an apparently trivial decision, like moving a car to a different spot, could have determined its future.
The Porsches that had to be hidden
In 1985, Randy Adams, a young software engineer who had recently sold his first company, received a call from Jobs that changed his life. As Forbes reports, Jobs wanted to hire him to work at NeXT and, with his usual charisma, left him a very direct message: “You're blowing it, Randy. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and you're blowing it.”
Randy Adams accepted, and shortly thereafter, to celebrate, with part of the money from the sale of his company, he bought a Porsche 911 at the same time as Jobs. They used to park them together, far from the other cars, taking up three parking spaces between the two of them to avoid any dings or scratches. But one day, Jobs burst into Adams’s office in a hurry: the cars had to be moved immediately. The reason? Ross Perot, a famous businessman and a potential investor, was about to arrive at NeXT’s offices in Palo Alto, and Jobs didn’t want him, upon seeing those Porsches, to think the company had plenty of money.
They moved the cars to the back and, hours later, Perot invested 20 million dollars in NeXT and joined the company’s board of directors. What would have happened if there had been a Porsche parked in the wrong spot? It could have changed everything.
Steve Jobs and the atmosphere at NeXT
Adams also tells us how Jobs’s intensity and character shaped a lot of curious moments at the company. In 1986, for example, Bill Gates visited the offices, and Jobs left him waiting an hour in the lobby while he sat calmly in his office. For NeXT’s engineers, it was a unique opportunity: they were able to pepper Gates with questions, enjoying a sort of “impromptu talk” that would have been impossible in another context.
Jobs also had unexpected gestures. Being a vegan, he would sometimes walk past engineers enjoying their Subway sandwiches and say out loud: “Oh, the smell of burnt animal flesh. How delightful.” One Christmas, he dressed up as Santa Claus to hand out 100 USD bills to employees. Moreover, when someone messed up or kept a project from progressing as expected, he would snap a curt “fire yourself,” though without actually carrying out the dismissal – a peculiar way of maintaining pressure and humor at the same time.
These and other stories from former colleagues let us better understand Jobs’s personality and his peculiar working style. His strategic approach, his intensity, and his meticulous attention to detail, even in seemingly insignificant aspects, were key to taking Apple to the top of the tech world. Adams states that “His charisma, was like electricity – he was giving off this incredible force. It was inspirational. He lifted you. I used to believe when I was with Steve, you could do anything. You could change the world.”
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