5 ms·

The hardest thing to realize starting a company is realizing when you are no longer sufficient to run the company. It's a big difference from starting something

The hardest thing to realize starting a company is realizing when you are no longer sufficient to run the company. It's a big difference from starting something small to running something huge. It took Steve Jobs 10 years from being forced out from Apple to returning wiser. Some people can adapt and learn but from what I have seen, most people can only be good at small or large, but not both.

tough 3y ago
10 years building NeXT and Pixar and what not too
- hef19898 3y ago
  And at Pixar ot seems he learned a lot. As someone else pointed out, Jobs did more or less the same thing after his return he did before. The crucial difference being, he did it successful after, while before he almost killed Apple. That difference is hard to learn.
matwood 3y ago
It's a point that people often forget. Going from 0->1 is a very different skill than 1->100 or bigger. Anyone who has started a company or been part of a small company then acquired by a larger company has felt this. It's also one of the reasons why so many acquisitions fail.
valianteffort 3y ago
Didn't Jobs bring in Sculley himself before getting ousted? It's not as though he was removed for any particular disaster, it was a coup. He returned and continued doing exactly what he had done before. Investing tons of resources into new products that have cutting edge features bundled into an aesthetic package.
- rickdeckard 3y ago
  I'd assume also a godlike human being like Steve Jobs evolved within the 12 years he was gone from Apple, so I doubt the person who returned was the same as the one that left.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    > godlike human being like Steve Jobs There was absolutely nothing godlike about Steve Jobs and I really wonder where this sort of weird worship originates.
    - lioeters 3y ago
      Simply put, it's the worship of money and wealth. More money, closer to God.
    - askin4it 3y ago
      Results? Charisma? Partly. Instinctive hero worship tendencies in people? A little.
    - sashank_1509 3y ago
      While I would not compare any human to a god, Steve jobs is among entrepreneurs the most obvious and justifiable candidate to be worshipped. Under his leadership he converted a company that was relatively a small player in tech to the worlds most profitable company, flowing with more cash than the oil filled Saudi Aramco. Apple’s valuation has crossed the GDP of UK (lol), truly something phenomenal that this generation has got to witness.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        So it's all about the money then? I know plenty of stories about Jobs that put him in a very negative light no matter what the financial outcome.
- II2II 3y ago
  Apple was a disaster, riding on the coattails of the Apple II, prior to the ousting of Jobs. The Apple III was both an engineering and market failure. The Lisa was an engineering and market failure. The future of the Macintosh was by no means guaranteed. Whether he was the cause of the problems within Apple or a symptom of it is open for debate, but he certainly wasn't helping matters. Just consider how the Macintosh the world grew to love came to be. I don't know the story of Jobs well enough to pinpoint what had changed over the intervening years, but something clearly did change. He had and maintained the confidence of the company. He was able to restore confidence of the consumer. There was a clear succession plan when he passed away, avoiding the turmoil that Apple saw after his ousting in the 1980's. This was not the same man, even if he maintained his abrasive edge.
  - AdamN 3y ago
    The thing that saved Apple was the retirement of Classic Mac OS in favor of the NeXT OS (OS X and now MacOS). In the early 2000s, developers were building for the Internet and there were only two options for hosting: Windows NT and Solaris. The licensing for both was prohibitive (and just annoying) and so Linux/FreeBSD started getting traction on the server side. FreeBSD didn't have the hardware adoption so faded (but is still loved). Linux had enough hardware support to run serious servers but the desktop never was usable (the year of the Linux desktop!). Having OS X being a UNIX-variant was 'close enough' to develop on Mac (a very usable desktop) and deploy on Linux. Then, Windows released Vista which was so broken that developers simply had to move to Mac in order to be able to function. That progression is why Mac went from almost dying to being the most valuable company on Earth.
    - throwaway2990 3y ago
      > Then, Windows released Vista which was so broken Why do people still continue to spread this misconception?
      - AdamN 3y ago
        I lived it - that was the straw that broke my back. I can't speak for others but for me that's a first-person experience. Edit: Just to add, like many professional developers at the time, we were driven from Windows just as much as we were pulled in by OS X.
- s_dev 3y ago
  "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." - Steve Jobs on being fired from Apple.

tough 3y ago

10 years building NeXT and Pixar and what not too

hef19898 3y ago
And at Pixar ot seems he learned a lot. As someone else pointed out, Jobs did more or less the same thing after his return he did before. The crucial difference being, he did it successful after, while before he almost killed Apple. That difference is hard to learn.

matwood 3y ago

It's a point that people often forget. Going from 0->1 is a very different skill than 1->100 or bigger. Anyone who has started a company or been part of a small company then acquired by a larger company has felt this. It's also one of the reasons why so many acquisitions fail.

valianteffort 3y ago

Didn't Jobs bring in Sculley himself before getting ousted? It's not as though he was removed for any particular disaster, it was a coup. He returned and continued doing exactly what he had done before. Investing tons of resources into new products that have cutting edge features bundled into an aesthetic package.

rickdeckard 3y ago
I'd assume also a godlike human being like Steve Jobs evolved within the 12 years he was gone from Apple, so I doubt the person who returned was the same as the one that left.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  > godlike human being like Steve Jobs There was absolutely nothing godlike about Steve Jobs and I really wonder where this sort of weird worship originates.
  - lioeters 3y ago
    Simply put, it's the worship of money and wealth. More money, closer to God.
  - askin4it 3y ago
    Results? Charisma? Partly. Instinctive hero worship tendencies in people? A little.
  - sashank_1509 3y ago
    While I would not compare any human to a god, Steve jobs is among entrepreneurs the most obvious and justifiable candidate to be worshipped. Under his leadership he converted a company that was relatively a small player in tech to the worlds most profitable company, flowing with more cash than the oil filled Saudi Aramco. Apple’s valuation has crossed the GDP of UK (lol), truly something phenomenal that this generation has got to witness.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      So it's all about the money then? I know plenty of stories about Jobs that put him in a very negative light no matter what the financial outcome.
II2II 3y ago
Apple was a disaster, riding on the coattails of the Apple II, prior to the ousting of Jobs. The Apple III was both an engineering and market failure. The Lisa was an engineering and market failure. The future of the Macintosh was by no means guaranteed. Whether he was the cause of the problems within Apple or a symptom of it is open for debate, but he certainly wasn't helping matters. Just consider how the Macintosh the world grew to love came to be. I don't know the story of Jobs well enough to pinpoint what had changed over the intervening years, but something clearly did change. He had and maintained the confidence of the company. He was able to restore confidence of the consumer. There was a clear succession plan when he passed away, avoiding the turmoil that Apple saw after his ousting in the 1980's. This was not the same man, even if he maintained his abrasive edge.
- AdamN 3y ago
  The thing that saved Apple was the retirement of Classic Mac OS in favor of the NeXT OS (OS X and now MacOS). In the early 2000s, developers were building for the Internet and there were only two options for hosting: Windows NT and Solaris. The licensing for both was prohibitive (and just annoying) and so Linux/FreeBSD started getting traction on the server side. FreeBSD didn't have the hardware adoption so faded (but is still loved). Linux had enough hardware support to run serious servers but the desktop never was usable (the year of the Linux desktop!). Having OS X being a UNIX-variant was 'close enough' to develop on Mac (a very usable desktop) and deploy on Linux. Then, Windows released Vista which was so broken that developers simply had to move to Mac in order to be able to function. That progression is why Mac went from almost dying to being the most valuable company on Earth.
  - throwaway2990 3y ago
    > Then, Windows released Vista which was so broken Why do people still continue to spread this misconception?
    - AdamN 3y ago
      I lived it - that was the straw that broke my back. I can't speak for others but for me that's a first-person experience. Edit: Just to add, like many professional developers at the time, we were driven from Windows just as much as we were pulled in by OS X.
s_dev 3y ago
"The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." - Steve Jobs on being fired from Apple.