To be fair though, Steve basically did it three times, once with Pixar, once with apple computers, and a third time with rejuvenating apple with mobile tech like the ipod and ipad. There has got to be something to it when someone can pull it off repeatedly. I remember Ellison once called it an experiment, you tried Apple without Steve and it failed, you brought Steve back and watched it succeed, that combined with the success of pixar suggests that Steve is either doing something right or he was chosen as tech emissary by God.
> There has got to be something to it when someone can pull it off repeatedly
Not necessarily - after all, there was a man who was struck by lightning 7 times[1] through no effort on his part. You will never hear about the almost-Jobs who fail to succeed on their subsequent come-back attempts.
But using the coin flip analogy, I would say that each successful company requires hundreds of "coin flips", with the outcome "heads" a majority of the time. A few bad flips could sink a company. I think it's much more than getting lucky 3 times -- more like mostly "lucky" hundreds of times.
There's the business end of things; Ross Perot himself "only" invested $20 million and got just shy of $70 million out of it when it was finally sold.
Total failure. If you squint hard enough with VC eyes, they can almost convince you that $70 million is a terrible amount of money.
And then ask Apple where OS X comes from. Ask any iOS developer about Objective-C (though not invented by NeXT, it certainly helped popularize it). Ask the wider world about object oriented programming.
If you can see past the bottom of the balance sheet and beyond the next quarter, NeXT lives on, despite not achieving commercial success.
Apple paid $429 million in cash, which went to the initial investors and 1.5 million Apple shares, which went to Steve Jobs, who was deliberately not given cash for his part in the deal.
Yes but the 2nd time he had the advantage of having the first success. That would mean he was taken more seriously and would be able to hire and influence better than if he was not famous. And of course in the current culture having even a large failure is enough to put you on the map to get more attention for the 2nd time around. This is not the way business used to be by the way. Used to be if you failed you failed and nobody would touch you with a ten foot pole.
