#420 The Lost Years of Steve Jobs

David Senra· Host0:00

For a long time, people have been asking me, "Can you make a podcast on failure?" There is a brand-new book called Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of an American Visionary, and it was written by Jeffrey Kane, and that is what this episode is going to be about because the book is exclusively about, it chronicles that 12-year period of exile between when Steve Jobs gets kicked out of Apple and then he returns to Apple. It is probably the defining point of Steve Jobs' life because you will see one of the most brilliant entrepreneurs, maybe the greatest entrepreneur to ever live, just make mistake after mistake after mistake. And the longer he's in exile, the more the pressure builds because he's burning through his entire fortune. And yet, because we know what happens after he returns to Apple, this is somehow one of the most inspiring stories because of Steve's refusal to quit, and then his ability to transform, to build himself into the kind of leader and entrepreneur that deserves to run Apple. And before I jump into this book, I wanna read you a paragraph from another book because I want you to keep in mind these few sentences from this other book. This book is called The Return to the Little Kingdom. That book was primarily about the first few years of the history of Apple, but there's an updated version where the author, Michael Moritz, writes this: "Many are familiar with the reemergence of Apple. They may not be as familiar with the fact that it has few, if any, parallels. When did a founder ever return to the company from which he had been rudely rejected to engineer a turnaround as complete and spectacular as Apple's? While turnarounds are difficult in any