In 1985, Steve Jobs was one of the most talked-about names in Silicon Valley — and not in a good way. After a boardroom battle with Apple CEO John Sculley — the very executive Jobs had personally recruited from PepsiCo — Jobs lost the fight and was forced out of the company he had co-founded in his parents' garage.
It was public, humiliating, and brutal. The press had a field day. The man who had convinced the world that Apple would change computing had just been voted out by his own board.
Far from being the end of the road, however, this was just the beginning.
Jobs didn't sulk. He made two bold moves that would quietly reshape the world.
Jobs took several Apple employees with him to found NeXT, a computer platform company specialising in higher-education and business markets. NeXT never became the commercial success Jobs had hoped for, and in some ways the company showcased the worst of his perfectionist tendencies. But the underlying technology was extraordinary.
In 1986, Jobs paid $5 million of his own money to George Lucas for technology rights and invested another $5 million as capital into a small struggling computer graphics division — newly spun off as Pixar. At the time, the team had already been declined by 35 venture capitalists and ten large corporations. Nobody wanted it. Jobs bought it anyway.
The decade that followed was not glamorous. Jobs had to personally cover Pixar's monthly cash shortfalls and questioned whether to sell the company multiple times. NeXT was burning money. The press wrote him off as a one-hit wonder who'd gotten lucky with the Macintosh.
Meanwhile, back at Apple, things were going from bad to worse without him.
In a single week in November 1995, Pixar released its first major film, Toy Story, and simultaneously launched an IPO. The film was a cultural phenomenon. Buoyed by Toy Story's success, Pixar's stock price closed at nearly double its initial offering, giving the company a market valuation of approximately $1.5 billion — marking the largest IPO of 1995.
The IPO made Jobs a billionaire — not from Apple, but from Pixar. The man who had been laughed out of Silicon Valley had just become one of its biggest winners, through a company nobody else had wanted to touch.
In the late 1990s, Apple was nearly bankrupt — but it had enough cash to buy NeXT and bring Jobs back on board, first as interim CEO, then as full-time CEO.
When Apple acquired NeXT for $429 million in 1997, they weren't just buying a company. They were buying the infrastructure they should have built in-house during those missing 12 years. The NeXT operating system became the foundation of what we now know as macOS.
When Jobs returned to Apple, he was a changed man. Under his renewed leadership, the company produced the iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad — one of the most dazzlingly potent periods of innovation in corporate history.
Pixar IPO'd in 1995 at a $161 million valuation. By 2006, when Disney bought Pixar for $7.4 billion, Jobs had become the largest individual Disney shareholder — not bad for someone who was fired.
"It turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me."
The failure wasn't a detour. It was the road.