Geoffrey Cain — Steve Jobs in Exile, Part 2: NeXT's Failures, Pixar's Lifeline and the Road Back to Apple
About this episode
Geoffrey Cain discusses the failures and lessons from Steve Jobs' time at NeXT in the second part of the series.
Steve Jobs sold barely 100 computers a month at NeXT — and told his team they'd sell 100,000. This is the decade everyone skips. Author Geoffrey Cain joins Aidan McCullen for part two on Steve Jobs in Exile, the story of the wilderness years between Jobs' 1985 ousting from Apple and his return. Cain reframes the NeXT era not as a triumphant hero's journey but as a cascade of failure, ego and self-sabotage that quietly forged the leader Jobs became. In this conversation, Geoffrey reveals: Why the "reality distortion field" stopped working the moment the $6,500 NeXTcube shipped How Jobs sabotaged an IBM deal that could have made NeXTSTEP, not Windows, the world's operating system The airport moment he abandoned his own salesman in front of 800 IBM engineers Why he killed Ross Perot's pipeline to the CIA, NSA and Pentagon with five words: "I don't like the feds" How a Daffy Duck demo blew up a Disney deal worth thousands of computers Why Tim Berners-Lee built the entire World Wide Web on a single NeXTcube in 1990 How the creators of Doom were turned away because Jobs "didn't like games" The advisor's warning Jobs ignored for a decade: "your assets have feet" Why putting on a grey…
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