Steve Jobs: pushed out of the company he founded

Steve Jobs founded Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak. Nine years later, he lost his place inside it.

The no

In 1985, after a dispute with the board and with the executive he himself had brought into the company, Jobs was stripped of his leadership duties and left Apple. He described the scene twenty years later, in the Stanford University commencement address, on June 12, 2005: he was 30, and what had been the focus of his entire adult life was gone. He said it was devastating and that he even thought about leaving Silicon Valley.

What they did

Jobs started again. He founded NeXT and invested in the company that would become Pixar, which in 1995 released Toy Story, the first feature film entirely animated by computer. In 1997, Apple bought NeXT, and Jobs came back. Then came the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone.

In the same Stanford speech, he summed it up: "I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me." The full text is on the university's website.

There's another Jobs story that matters here, and it's different from what usually circulates. In 1983, he asked engineer Larry Kenyon to shave ten seconds off the time the Macintosh took to boot. To explain why it mattered, he did a calculation: ten seconds, times millions of people, every day, added up to entire lifetimes. The account is by Andy Hertzfeld, who was on the team. No one told Jobs it couldn't be done. The story's power lies elsewhere: he put human life inside a number.

A correction: Jobs didn't ask for the Mac to "boot in ten seconds". He asked for the boot time to drop by ten seconds.

What this has to do with Bairo

Two things, both with humility.

The first is the pain of losing your place in what you created. Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez tells how, in one of the businesses he built, his partners pushed him out, and the idea stayed with them. He didn't make it an open wound. He made it a floor to stand on. It's in the chapter No is the foundation of yes.

The second is lifetime as a measure. The ten-seconds calculation reappears in Bairo's story, who designed the BICOIN (BTZ) yardstick as "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life". It's a yardstick of purpose, not a price, and nothing here is an offer or a promise of value. The idea is explained in the chapter A whole body, and the Jobs episode opens the story in Fifty-five years later.

Jobs died on October 5, 2011. The date has its own page: October 5.

Sources

• Stanford Report, speech of 06/12/2005 (full text): https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2005/06/steve-jobs-2005-graduates-stay-hungry-stay-foolish
• Andy Hertzfeld, "Saving Lives", August 1983: https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html
• Steve Jobs, departure from Apple in 1985 and return in 1997: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs
• Toy Story (1995): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story