Before the iPhone: How Steve Jobs Hit Rock Bottom, with Geoffrey Cain

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]if you could start off by telling us, especially for the uninitiated and to the world of tech nerd-dom, what you mean by Steve Jobs being in exile during this quote untold story of NeXT?

[00:00:15]Well, Steve Jobs is the guy who we think of as that he's that guy in the turtleneck. He's the guy who stands up on stage and gives the big famous keynote. We all have an image in our head of Steve Jobs as this leading entrepreneur of our area of our era.

[00:00:29]But, this is the story about what happened before that. How did he become the Steve Jobs we know? So, I was doing research on this this topic, writing this book, and I found that there was an entire period, so a third of his adult life, he died quite young, 12 years he spent just off in the wilderness. And by wilderness, I mean he was failing constantly. He started a company called NeXT Computer. He was pushed out of Apple originally, the company that he co-founded. And this was the crucible period. So, this is when he went out, he was trying to do something new, trying to invent something really brilliant and smart and technologically into the future, and he just kept failing over and over for 12 years. So, the question my book is asking is what did those failures teach him? What did the crucible teach him? And how did he come out of it? And how did he become the great success, the great Steve Jobs who we all know now?

[00:01:18]Were you surprised by any of the information that you learned over the reporting process for this book, Jeff?

[00:01:23]Did anything stand out to you as something Maybe it wasn't surprising to you in terms of like radically rethinking the way or maybe it was, you saw Steve Jobs, but did anything jump out as as surprising new information during the course of your reporting?

[00:01:37]Well, I didn't realize how far he had gone to rock bottom. I mean, he really just hit the bottom, and he was about two to three years from personal bankruptcy. That's something that I learned in the reporting. Got access to a lot of internal documents, you know, private emails, stuff that was being released to me. And he was really like, you know, by the 1990s, he was almost written out of history. So, you know, we look at guys like Steve Jobs, we look at these these tech visionaries today, and you know, we we talk about their success a lot, but when you actually go back and look at their life and look at how they became that success, it's always a lot harder. It's a tortuous, winding road, and how they got there, it's just it just blows my mind. I mean, Steve Jobs was really suffering during this time.