Geoffrey Cain

He knew how to build an adult company.

He wasn't building a startup anymore, but Steve wanted to keep that startup ethos.

And the board had to decide, is it going to be John Sculley, who's a mature adult, or is it going to be Steve Jobs, the agent of chaos, who's just going to destroy this company?

You know, I've wondered that.

It is counterfactual and it's hard to speculate, but I've wondered about that.

And I don't think that it would have played out that way because Steve had this thing called the reality distortion field.

This is what he was famous for.

He could convince anybody of anything, but the downside of this is that he could convince himself of anything.

So he was living in his own world.

His colleagues called it the world according to Steve.

And that's one of the reasons he thought he could run around Apple and boss people around and bully them and fulfill his vision.

So this is Steve the tyrant, the tyrannical side of him.

He would not have been able to run Apple, to make Apple a success, unless he had gone off in this wilderness.

It was absolutely necessary for him

because he needed taming.

He needed to learn what the world needed from him as opposed to what he had to show the world.

And he had a series of lessons during this time in his life when he really actually was, to my surprise, he was humbled.

We don't think of Steve Jobs as a guy who's humbled, but the rock bottom got bad enough.

I mean, it was really bad in these years that he had no choice but to firm up and get his act together or he was going to be written out of history.

And for Steve Jobs, that is a nightmare.