In reality, he would have been in the position to know. When you leave, you tend to get chatted up by two kinds of people - really good people, who want to do

In reality, he would have been in the position to know. When you leave, you tend to get chatted up by two kinds of people - really good people, who want to do something interesting, and an army of really bad people, who think they can social engineer their way into coasting somewhere new that will succeed. I am certain Jobs had this experience with NeXT.