Show Notes
The popular story of Steve Jobs is that he co-founded Apple, was pushed out, wandered through a failed venture called NeXT, then returned to save the company and usher in the iPod and iPhone. That version is memorable, widely repeated, and, in an important sense, wrong. His years at NeXT are usually treated as a footnote, when they were among the most consequential of his life and career.
Geoffrey Cain is the author of Steve Jobs in Exile, which draws on previously unpublished material and new interviews to illuminate the NeXT years. The book argues that NeXT was not a failure but the hidden turning point. Its operating system, NeXTSTEP, became the foundation of Mac OS X and, later, the iPhone, and its fingerprints are still visible in Apple’s code today.
Dan’l Lewin was an early Apple employee who led the initial launch of the Macintosh into higher education. In 1985, he left the company alongside Steve Jobs to co-found NeXT, where he served as VP of Marketing and Sales. Over more than 30 years in Silicon Valley, he went on to hold senior roles at Sony and Microsoft, and later served as President and CEO of the Computer History Museum.
In this episode, Geoffrey and Dan’l join Matt Merrill to discuss the story behind NeXT, the 1980s computing landscape that shaped it, the technical bets like Objective-C and dynamic binding that gave Apple a long head start, why the university market mattered so much, and how the company ended up shaping the devices in our pockets.
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