Steve Jobs, the creator of Manzanaand his ostentatious life today allows us to recover an episode that we could classify as genius when it comes to obtaining extra financing for his new company, NeXT.
And it is that, if we talk about this great character, we all know that Steve Jobs (died 2011) was relegated as the leader of the company he founded, Apple, and eventually decided to leave the firm and pursue other brands, before returning to his roots with iPhone a few years later.
one of them was NeXT, a much smaller company founded in the late 1980s. To do this, he invested $12 million of his own money. However, Jobs’s outlay was not enough and the company needed more financing.
A little more investment was needed and Ross Perot was the one to make his rookie bloom even more company.
“Randy, we have to hide the Porsches”
This whole story stems from Randy Adams who sat down one day and told Forbes. This is a software engineer who had just sold his company for a good deal of money, and Steve Jobs convinced him to join NeXT.
Jobs proposed a job offer to Randy Adams, which he initially turned down because he was not yet ready to return to work after selling his software development company.
A few days passed after Steve Jobs’s offer, when the Apple co-founder insisted by leaving a message on his phone’s answering machine: “You’re ruining it Randy. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and you’re wasting it”. Randy Adams reconsidered the offer and eventually became part of NeXT’s roster.
Well, after this episode, one day at the NeXT offices in Palo Alto, California, Jobs ran up to Adams and told him that they had to move their cars. Because? Well basically both, with their millions, they had bought a Porsche 911. Between the two they occupied three parking spaces, to avoid friction, at the doors of the company.
“Randy, we have to hide the Porsches”Jobs allegedly told Adams. “Ross Perot is coming in and he’s thinking about investing in the company, and we don’t want him to think we have a lot of money.”
They went out and moved their Porsches to the back of the NeXT offices and it turns out that thanks to this curious movement Ross Perot made an investment of 20 million dollars in the company. Of course, it is undeniable that Steve Jobs business vision was a success no matter how you look at it.