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Hide The Porsches

Software engineer Randy Adams initially turned down Steve Jobs' offer to work at NeXT, the computer company started by Jobs after his ouster from Apple. It was 1985. Adams wasn't ready to go back to work after selling his pioneering desktop software publishing company. Within a few days Jobs was on Adams' answering machine. "You're blowing it, Randy. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and you're blowing it." Adams reconsidered.

Adams, using some of the cash he'd earned from the sale of his company, bought a Porsche 911 at the same time Jobs did. To avoid car-door dings, they parked near each other--taking up three parking spaces between them. One day Jobs rushed over to Adams' cubicle and told him they had to move the cars.

"I said, 'Why?,' and he said, 'Randy, we have to hide the Porsches. Ross Perot is coming by and thinking of investing in the company, and we don't want him to think we have a lot of money.'" They moved the cars around to the back of NeXT's offices in Palo Alto, Calif. and Perot invested $20 million in the company in 1987 and took a seat on the board.

Adams also recalls the time Bill Gates showed up at NeXT for a meeting. It was the fall of 1986. The receptionist in the downstairs lobby called Jobs, whose cube was upstairs, to let him know that Gates was in the lobby. "I could see him sitting in his cube, not really busy. But he didn't get up or call Gates up. In fact, he left him waiting in the lobby for an hour. That speaks to their rivalry."

NeXT engineers, Adams said, took the opportunity to go downstairs and ply Gates with questions. "We enjoyed it and spent an hour talking to him until Steve finally called him in."

Adams said he left NeXT after disagreeing with Jobs about the use of the optical drive in the NeXT workstation, which he felt would be too slow. Some time later Jobs convinced Adams to start a software business around NeXT, which he did with a $2 million investment from Sequoia Capital. But as the business was under way, Jobs called Adams again to let him know that NeXT was going to give up its workstation business and focus instead on software.

"He told me that the cost of hardware is coming down and we think it's a commodity. I said, 'Then why don't you sell PCs?' Jobs told me, 'I'd rather sell dog s--- than PCs.'"

Adams says he has many memories of Jobs from those days at NeXT – how Jobs, a vegan, would pass by engineers enjoying their Subway sandwiches and comment, “Oh, the smell of burnt animal flesh. How delightful.” In 1986, Jobs dressed up as Santa Claus and handed out $100 bills to employees. Adams also said Jobs was constantly telling employees who had screwed up or done something he didn’t like to “fire yourself.” Was Jobs serious? “Well, if you didn’t get a termination notice then you knew he was only kidding.”

A year after Jobs’ death, Adams, who went on after NeXT to help lead development of Adobe Acrobat and PDF and is a co-founder of the FunnyorDie.com site, says the tech industry is still feeling his loss. “His charisma, was like electricity – he was giving off this incredible force. It was inspirational. He lifted you. I used to believe when I was with Steve, you could do anything. You could change the world. When he died, a little bit of that feeling left me. There’s no one like him.”