Interviewed by Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, leading tech investor Steve Jurvetson said that Steve Jobs was obsessed with returning to Apple during his NeXT days.
He was just obsessed with Apple […] He didn’t own a share of Apple [at the time but] felt this visceral pain when Apple was being beaten around in the public eye or in the press. He would always come to the same inevitable conclusion that Apple should bring him and the NeXT technology, the operating system, back into Apple.
Jurvetson admitted that he thought Jobs was nuts every time he raised the idea, but “of course, that’s exactly what happened.”
Jurvetson made the first ever venture capital investment in Hotmail, and currently sits on the board of Tesla and SpaceX among others companies. Asked how he got to know Jobs in those days, he said he “just asked” if he could learn from him.
Later on Jurvetson admits he’s not a fan of the Apple Watch because it doesn’t meet his charging requirements use case.
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That’s an absolute B.S. representation of the situation. Apple wasn’t beaten around in the public eye until 10+ years after Jobs had left the company and 10+ years after he had formed NeXT. Jobs gambled his entire fortune on NeXT, starting in 1985… and needed still $100M more money from Ross Perot to keep it afloat in the ’90s. Jobs was not obsessing over returning to Apple this whole time – it was only when Apple began floundering badly and was looking to buy either BeOS or NeXT. Until then, Jobs was focused on revolutionizing computing with NeXTStep (Object Oriented Programming), 32-bit hardware and advancements in manufacturing.
Correct, and that is what I said. He was obsessed when Apple was getting flogged in the press. This was 1994. My comments were not meant to imply anything more than that.
Thank you for clarifying. Then the reporting misleads? No time limits are provided on his “obsession” with Apple, which one might otherwise surmise began when he incorporated Apple and continued through his NeXT days. All of them. Have you seen Sorkin’s ghastly biopic? He writes that Jobs created NeXT knowing it would fail and with the intention of it being acquired by Apple. Utterly ridiculous.
BeOS was an amazing operating system!