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was the most prestigious house on Wall Street, and Stanford was arguably the top business school. She was exceptionally bright and showed the kind of sharp focus and ambition that Tina lacked. She had aspirations of starting and running her own company. Like Steve, she melded influences from the California counterculture and the elitist realm of corporate power. At Stanford she rode on the back of the motorcycle of a fellow student who wrote a column on Zen Buddhism for the campus newspaper. At the same time, she dated an aristocratic country-club type. One of her classmates, Tony Swei, recalls: “Laurene was a free spirit who didn’t fit into any particular clique.” That’s exactly how Steve had seen himself during his own student years.

In the days following their impromptu first date, Steve strutted around the office and talked exuberantly about the incredible woman he had discovered. “We all heard about Laurene when Steve met her,” recalls Allison Thomas, Next’s public relations consultant.

Gossip about the relationship spread quickly through the campus and the company. Within a few weeks, Steve and Laurene were seen lunching together at Tressidor, the grand outdoor cafe at the center of the Stanford grounds in a heavily trafficked area near the bookstore. In their business-school courses, one classmate noticed that Laurene began to take a stronger interest in the subject of manufacturing, which was one of Steve’s passions.

The rumors took on a nasty edge. The story spread about Laurene plotting to meet and marry a Silicon Valley millionaire like Steve. It made the rounds at Stanford, and then at Next as well. Some of her friends also believed that Laurene had picked out that front center seat before Steve’s speech and preemptively forbid the others from sitting there.

The Stanford kids looked on with ironic humor as a world-famous figure tried to fit in with their student scene. Steve was only thirty-four, not much older than many of them, but he was still what Ross Perot had called a “white monkey,” not really a regular guy. It was especially awkward for Steve that winter, when Laurene joined in with twenty other classmates to rent a ski house in the Sierras. They found a cheap crash pad on Donner Lake, near the Lake Tahoe slopes, for the bargain price of $250 a person for the entire season. They called it The Shelter, and it became a fun social scene for the bunch of twentysomethings.

Any one of the twenty house-sharers might answer the phone. It would be a male voice asking for Laurene. They all knew who it was, but they taunted him for their amusement.

“Who’s calling?”

“Steve.”

“Steve who?”

• • •

HIS ROMANTIC LIFE REBOUNDED, but the beautiful computer he created was a horrendous flop. And even what his colleagues referred to as his “hobby” was becoming a miserable mess.

Pixar’s situation was remarkably similar to Next’s. It produced a very expensive computer which it couldn’t sell. But it also, like Next, had a brain trust that wrote great software, which offered some hope for salvation: the software tools that John Lasseter had used to model and color and shade the 3-D images in Tin Toy, the software that helped them win an Academy Award. That was the really valuable “intellectual property,” the legacy of two decades of brilliant and costly research.

At Next, Steve couldn’t bring himself to kill the computer and sell software instead. The Cube was his own beloved creation. But at Pixar he acted decisively and without any sentimentality. In 1989 he cut the hardware business, he closed the half-dozen sales offices around the country, and he laid off almost all of the dozens of salespeople he had hired only two years earlier, the salespeople who could hardly sell any of those damn machines. He slashed more than half of Pixar’s employees, over time cutting from 125 people to around 60. He had the binge-and-purge approach to entrepreneurship: when he was building a company, he would spend lavishly, and when he was cutting back, he could be brutally austere. What he spared was the brain trust, the nomadic band