NeXT was a terrible business, it never turned a profit, and bled money endlessly. The products were often good, but they were extremely expensive and were never

NeXT was a terrible business, it never turned a profit, and bled money endlessly. The products were often good, but they were extremely expensive and were never quite matched properly to a market. NeXT was such a terrible business, Jobs was nearly at a point of having to shut it down when Apple purchased it because it couldn't stand on its own as a hardware company any longer. The reason VC never touched NeXT was the hyper valuation Jobs placed on it from day one. Before it had any products or any sales, he slapped a $100+ million valuation on it, which was a lot of money back in 1986, and a huge valuation for any VC to touch without any sales or product. It would have been trivially easy for Jobs to get VC money at a sane valuation. And yes, I realize there were five years between the iPod and Jobs arrival. So what? The point was the iPod is what revived Apple and set it on a huge upswing (which is also why the stock didn't move until 2003 as the iPod sales rolled in). The work that was done on the iMac got Apple back to stable ground as a business, the iPod sent it on a skyrocketing trajectory. The valley absolutely believed in Jobs. He was a big reason the NeXT products were often good, and the valley saw that. The fact that the valley believed in him is why he was able to sell NeXT to Apple for so much money in the first place, and why he was able to take the helm at Apple again in the second place.