The Second Coming of Steve Jobs - Alan Deutschman [44]
They talked with their old friend Jim Clark, who had founded a prominent computer manufacturer, Silicon Graphics Inc., and already become a multimillionaire.
“Why are you still working for The Man?” Jim asked. “Starting a company is real easy. Do it.”
Ed and Alvy went to a local bookstore and bought a guide about how to do it. They began writing up a business plan. They figured that they could find a market for the graphics computer they had created for ILM and Disney, a million-dollar machine that stored thousands of digital images. They could sell it to hospitals for archiving x-ray photographs, or to the government’s spy agencies, which loved buying new technology.
George put the operation up for sale. Ross Perot’s company, EDS (which was then part of General Motors), teamed with Philips, the Dutch electronics giant, and made an offer that was very close to George’s asking price of $30 million. To work out the final details and close the deal, each of the four parties—Lucasfilm, EDS, Philips, and Alvy and Ed—planned to send envoys and lawyers to a summit meeting in New York City.
Before they flew east, Alvy and Ed were apprehensive. They had heard strange things about Ross Perot from a credible source, Scott McNealy, the chief executive of Sun Microsystems, a rising young star in Silicon Valley. Scott talked about how he and Ross were supposed to meet at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to shake hands on a deal. The terms had already been negotiated by their people, but the two leaders had never met in person.
At O’Hare, Ross Perot sized up the younger man and asked: “Are you married?”
“No.”
“Where do you live?”
“California.”
That was all that Ross Perot wanted to know.
He stormed away. The deal was off.
• • •
THE BIG MEETING was held in the penthouse of the Philips offices on Forty-second Street, looking out on the Beaux Arts sculptures atop Grand Central Terminal. The stress and intensity was almost overwhelming to Alvy: a roomful of high-priced lawyers, arguing over his future. As the meeting ended, it looked as though all the parties were happy with the arrangement. But the EDS negotiators warned that there was one missing element. It wouldn’t be a done deal until Alvy and Ed shook hands with Ross Perot.
Ross Perot! If he had rejected Scott McNealy, who was clean-cut and preppy, how would be react to a long-haired bearded wild-assed hippie renegade like Alvy Ray Smith?
They would never know. The next day, the newspapers ran a headline saying that General Motors had forced the ornery Ross Perot to resign from its board of directors.
Perot was out. And the deal was off.
• • •
ALVY AND ED WERE DESPERATE. There were no other interested buyers, except . . . well, Steve Jobs had remained in touch with them. He seemed like their last chance.
The previous summer, after Steve was ousted from Apple, he thought of buying the Lucas computer group and running it himself. Alvy and Ed rejected the idea. They wanted to run their own show. And they didn’t like the notion of “being the first girlfriend after the divorce,” as Alvy put it. But now that Steve had gone ahead and started Next, which was consuming all of his attention, they felt more comfortable asking him to invest.
Alvy and Ed went to visit Steve at the Woodside mansion. They wondered why there was no furniture in the place, only a Bösendorfer piano and a BMW motorcycle, testaments to Steve’s fascination with German technology. Steve had his personal chefs make them a vegetarian meal featuring a salad of edible flowers. His chefs were a hip young married couple who had graduated from Berkeley and trained at Chez Panisse. Now they lived somewhere in the vast twenty-five thousand square feet of Steve’s nearly empty hacienda.
Alvy had some friends at Apple who warned him about Steve’s dark side of egotism and temperamental outbursts. But when Alvy would come to visit that December, Steve was unfailingly charming. They’d drive around in Steve’s Porsche, talk for a while, go out to dinner. Steve seemed