Benjamin franklin and albert einstein, this is the exclusive biography of steve jobs

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
NeXT
Prometheus Unbound
The Pirates Abandon Ship
Upon his return from Europe in August 1985, while he was casting about for what to do next, Jobs 
called the Stanford biochemist Paul Berg to discuss the advances that were being made in gene 
splicing and recombinant DNA. Berg described how difficult it was to do experiments in a biology 
lab, where it could take weeks to nurture an experiment and get a result. “Why don’t you simulate 
them on a computer?” Jobs asked. Berg replied that computers with such capacities were too 
expensive for university labs. “Suddenly, he was excited about the possibilities,” Berg recalled. 
“He had it in his mind to start a new company. He was young and rich, and had to find something 
to do with the rest of his life.”
Jobs had already been canvassing academics to ask what their workstation needs were. It was 
something he had been interested in since 1983, when he had visited the computer science 
department at Brown to show off the Macintosh, only to be told that it would take a far more 
powerful machine to do anything useful in a university lab. The dream of academic researchers 
was to have a workstation that was both powerful and personal. As head of the Macintosh 
division, Jobs had launched a project to build such a machine, which was dubbed the Big Mac. It 
would have a UNIX operating system but with the friendly Macintosh interface. But after Jobs 
was ousted from the Macintosh division, his replacement, Jean-Louis Gassée, canceled the Big 
Mac.
When that happened, Jobs got a distressed call from Rich Page, who had been engineering the 
Big Mac’s chip set. It was the latest in a series of conversations that Jobs was having with 
disgruntled Apple employees urging him to start a new company and rescue them. Plans to do so 
began to jell over Labor Day weekend, when Jobs spoke to Bud Tribble, the original Macintosh 
software chief, and floated the idea of starting a company to build a powerful but personal 
workstation. He also enlisted two other Macintosh division employees who had been talking about 
leaving, the engineer George Crow and the controller Susan Barnes.
That left one key vacancy on the team: a person who could market the new product to 
universities. The obvious candidate was Dan’l Lewin, who at Apple had organized a consortium 
of universities to buy Macintosh computers in bulk. Besides missing two letters in his first name, 
Lewin had the chiseled good looks of Clark Kent and a Princetonian’s polish. He and Jobs shared 
a bond: Lewin had written a Princeton thesis on Bob Dylan and charismatic leadership, and Jobs 
knew something about both of those topics.
Lewin’s university consortium had been a godsend to the Macintosh group, but he had become 
frustrated after Jobs left and Bill Campbell had reorganized marketing in a way that reduced the 
role of direct sales to universities. He had been meaning to call Jobs when, that 
Labor Day weekend, Jobs called first. He drove to Jobs’s unfurnished mansion, and they 
walked the grounds while discussing the possibility of creating a new company. Lewin was 
excited, but not ready to commit. He was going to Austin with Campbell the following week, and 
he wanted to wait until then to decide. Upon his return, he gave his answer: He was in. The news 
came just in time for the September 13 Apple board meeting.
Although Jobs was still nominally the board’s chairman, he had not been to any meetings since 
he lost power. He called Sculley, said he was going to attend, and asked that an item be added to 
the end of the agenda for a “chairman’s report.” He didn’t say what it was about, and Sculley 
assumed it would be a criticism of the latest reorganization. Instead, when his turn came to speak, 
Jobs described to the board his plans to start a new company. “I’ve been thinking a lot, and it’s 

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time for me to get on with my life,” he began. “It’s obvious that I’ve got to do something. I’m 
thirty years old.” Then he referred to some prepared notes to describe his plan to create a computer 
for the higher education market. The new company would not be competitive with Apple, he 
promised, and he would take with him only a handful of non-key personnel. He offered to resign 
as chairman of Apple, but he expressed hope that they could work together. Perhaps Apple would 
want to buy the distribution rights to his product, he suggested, or license Macintosh software to 
it.
Mike Markkula rankled at the possibility that Jobs would hire anyone from Apple. “Why would 
you take anyone at all?” he asked.
“Don’t get upset,” Jobs assured him and the rest of the board. “These are very low-level people 
that you won’t miss, and they will be leaving anyway.”
The board initially seemed disposed to wish Jobs well in his venture. After a private discussion, 
the directors even proposed that Apple take a 10% stake in the new company and that Jobs remain 
on the board.
That night Jobs and his five renegades met again at his house for dinner. He was in favor of 
taking the Apple investment, but the others convinced him it was unwise. They also agreed that it 
would be best 
if they resigned all at once, right away. Then they could make a clean break.
So Jobs wrote a formal letter telling Sculley the names of the five who would be leaving, signed 
it in his spidery lowercase signature, and drove to Apple the next morning to hand it to him before 
his 7:30 staff meeting.
“Steve, these are not low-level people,” Sculley said.
“Well, these people were going to resign anyway,” Jobs replied. “They are going to be handing 
in their resignations by nine this morning.”
From Jobs’s perspective, he had been honest. The five were not division managers or members 
of Sculley’s top team. They had all felt diminished, in fact, by the company’s new organization. 
But from Sculley’s perspective, these were important players; Page was an Apple Fellow, and 
Lewin was a key to the higher education market. In addition, they knew about the plans for Big 
Mac; even though it had been shelved, this was still proprietary information. Nevertheless Sculley 
was sanguine. Instead of pushing the point, he asked Jobs to remain on the board. Jobs replied that 
he would think about it.
But when Sculley walked into his 7:30 staff meeting and told his top lieutenants who was 
leaving, there was an uproar. Most of them felt that Jobs had breached his duties as chairman and 
displayed stunning disloyalty to the company. “We should expose him for the fraud that he is so 
that people here stop regarding him as a messiah,” Campbell shouted, according to Sculley.
Campbell admitted that, although he later became a great Jobs defender and supportive board 
member, he was ballistic that morning. “I was fucking furious, especially about him taking Dan’l 
Lewin,” he recalled. “Dan’l had built the relationships with the universities. He was always 
muttering about how hard it was to work with Steve, and then he left.” Campbell was so angry that 
he walked out of the meeting to call Lewin at home. When his wife said he was in the shower, 
Campbell said, “I’ll wait.” A few minutes later, when she said he was still in the shower, 
Campbell again said, “I’ll wait.” When Lewin finally came on the phone, Campbell asked him if it 
was true. Lewin acknowledged it was. Campbell hung up without saying another word.
After hearing the fury of his senior staff, Sculley surveyed the members of the board. They 
likewise felt that Jobs had misled them with his pledge that he would not raid important 
employees. Arthur Rock was especially angry. Even though he had sided with Sculley during the 
Memorial Day showdown, he had been able to repair his paternal relationship with Jobs. Just the 
week before, he had invited Jobs to bring his girlfriend up to San Francisco so that he and his wife 
could meet her, and the four had a nice dinner in Rock’s Pacific Heights home. Jobs had not 
mentioned the new company he was forming, so Rock felt betrayed when he heard about it from 
Sculley. “He came to the board and lied to us,” Rock growled later. “He told us he was thinking of 
forming a company when in fact he had already formed it. He said he was going to take a few 
middle-level people. It turned out to be five senior people.” Markkula, in his subdued way, was 
also offended. “He took some top executives he had secretly lined up before he left. That’s not the 
way you do things. It was ungentlemanly.”

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Over the weekend both the board and the executive staff convinced Sculley that Apple would 
have to declare war on its cofounder. Markkula issued a formal statement accusing Jobs of acting 
“in direct contradiction to his statements that he wouldn’t recruit any key Apple personnel for his 
company.” He added ominously, “We are evaluating what possible actions should be taken.” 
Campbell was quoted in the