Amjad Masad discusses Steve Jobs' "most gangster" Silicon Valley story: pouring his own money into Pixar and NeXT for a decade while both lost money, then watching Pixar become hugely valuable and NeXT's OS rescue Apple as macOS.
Questions this video answers
$5 million (per the referenced tweet in the interview).
$50 million (per the referenced tweet in the interview).
Approximately $7 billion (as referenced by the speaker).
You tweeted out the story that I loved about you, said the most gangster story in Silicon Valley is Steve Jobs buying Pixar for 5 million, investing 50 million and operating at a loss for a decade. So much so that he had to cut personal checks to make payroll and somehow turning it around to a $7 billion exit. Why did you like that story?
You know, there are people who are overrated in Silicon Valley and I think there are people who are underrated. Like, I think people think about Steve Jobs in terms of like, yeah, the flashy things, the iPhone, the ipod, you know, coming on stage and doing that. The thing I like about the Steve Jobs story is when he was lost in the desert for 10 years. So he left, he was fired from Apple and then he created two companies that were failing the whole time, like Next Computing, Next Computers and Pixar were literally failing. Like they didn't do anything, they weren't selling. He was just like investing more and more of his money. Like, I think he was going to go broke, but he kept going for 10 years. Like, how do you do that? And you know, I'm a person who, like we talked about in my story, where I want to be able to go the distance. I think going the distance is an advantage for entrepreneurs. And Pixar became this hugely valuable company and it goes from making no revenue to making billions of dollars and going public over a couple of years. And Next Computers saved Apple. Apple was having a problem with os, like Intel. They had a chip before, I don't know, they made it internally or something like that. And then everyone was moving to intel and intel was the best computing chip and they wanted their computers to be fast and so they needed a new operating system. And they tried to buy, they went to the market, they tried to acquire companies. They couldn't find a great operating system and Next Computing had a great operating system and that became macOS. So they bought.
I didn't know that. I thought Next was just a failure. I didn't even realize it, actually. I thought they just bought Steve back. Aqua Hire. But it wasn't an Aqua, it wasn't just an Acquihire.
No, I mean Objective C, for example. Next Computing was really obsessed with this idea of object oriented programming and they innovated a lot on what that means. And it is based on Unix, but it has a lot of interesting features on top of that. So it saved Apple because Apple was otherwise not going to be competitive without these new chips.
