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Geoffrey Cain - Five Way Interview

Geoffrey Cain is an award-winning author and correspondent who sits down with world leaders, tech founders, and dissidents. His book Samsung Rising was longlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year, and The Perfect Police State was named NPR's Book of the Day. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Time, The Economist, and Wired and has been featured on CNN and Bloomberg TV. He also advises executives and government officials on innovation. His latest book is Steve Jobs in Exile.

Why this book?

For years I covered Apple, Samsung, Sony, and the rest, and the people who knew Steve kept telling me the same story. They said his middle chapter at NeXT was missing -- few people were really looking into it. Everyone knows the young founder and everyone knows about his triumphant return, when he saved Apple from bankruptcy. But during the part in between, he wasn't wandering aimlessly - he was in his crucible, the period of transformation. He was humiliated and broke and running a company that kept failing. The gap became the book I wanted to write. I wanted to understand the human story in the years when nothing was working, because his lost years are where we became the business leader we all know.

I owned a NeXT Cube and saw the launch. Was the problem that making it super-cool sells at first, but it also had to be useful for everyday tasks?

You've put your finger on exactly the right thing. You also lived through it. The NeXT Cube, as the computer was called, was a beautiful machine and Steve made sure of that down to the last detail. He spent a hundred thousand dollars on the NeXT logo. But the machine had to earn its place in the markets, among real buyers like universities and intelligence agencies, and Steve was carried away with new add-ons that tripled the price of the Cube. It was too expensive and there was almost no software to run on it at first. The irony is that the one piece that did work was that software underneath, the part nobody could see. That operating system is what Apple bought in 1997, and it's what your iPhone and Mac runs on today. So NeXT was a rare moment where Steve had it backwards, and he had to learn hard lessons about what the world wanted from him -- software, not hardware. This was a lesson that really tamed him.

What transformed Jobs from a maverick into someone who could rescue Apple so dramatically?

Failure transformed Jobs. At Apple the first time in the 1980s, every success told him his instincts were infallible. He was on top of the world, a celebrity in tech. Then he was driven out of Apple for being too difficult to manage. At NeXT the Steve Jobs myth unraveled for the next twelve years. He shipped a perfect machine nobody bought, and burned through his investors' money, to the point where most pulled out. His cofounders left too. This was Steve at rock bottom --even Fortune magazine asked in the 1990s whether he was a 'snake-oil salesman.' Not the Steve we usually think of.

Steve learned the importance of discipline. Taste without discipline is too expensive - no one was going to beat a path down to his door to buy an exotic machine. His cofounders warned him this would happen, but he ignored them, convinced of his own brilliance, and eager to get revenge on Apple with a better computer. The surprise, to me, was that Steve was not ready to lead Apple in these early years - before the book I always assumed that he was the visionary all along, but that's not the case. He was seen as the brat who left Apple, losing a power struggle in 1985. The man who'd been beaten up for a decade had learned his lessons, and was ready to return to Apple and save it from bankruptcy. That's the whole argument of the book in one line. He didn't come back in spite of NeXT - he came back because of it.

What's next?

Writing this book changed how I think about building things. I've started applying what I learned about Steve Jobs to a venture of my own. I can't say more yet. But it's coming, and I think it will be groundbreaking.

What's exciting you at the moment?

Apple is in the middle of its own succession right now, with Tim Cook handing off the company to its next CEO John Ternus, who will start on September 1. My book tells the story about what it takes to lead Apple - it's so relevant for our moment. The company is undergoing a transformation and is going to have to learn to grapple with the AI frontier that we're now in. Apple, and Silicon Valley, are in the wilderness, and no one knows for sure where all this is headed, what Apple will look like when it comes out the other side of the uncertain path.

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