#rick lucas

During the go-go days of the mid to late 1980s, the primary criteria for landing a job in the nascent high technology industry was the ability to hang on to the tiger’s tail. In my case, I was only six years removed from a rural Iowa high school when I had the experience of working with Steve and his inner circle on development of a third-party software product for NeXT.

For nearly anyone working on the frontlines of high-tech at the time (especially the self-taught, as so many of us were), Steve Jobs was the zeitgeist personified.

With several friends at Apple, I was well acquainted with the Apple milieu. Upon visiting the NeXT offices for the first time, it was clear that Steve was attempting to build something very different in both physical and cultural space. While modest in size, the NeXT offices were extraordinarily well appointed (including a remarkable free-standing spiral stairway, bespoke by Steve and which I recall as being one of the few of its kind in the world).

In vivid contrast to the physical space was a classic Silicon Valley bootstrap culture that screamed ‘laid back’ (with seemingly displaced hippies at every turn), while possessing the energy of a coiled spring just beneath the surface.

I met with the NeXT inner circle numerous times over a period of several months, with Steve in attendance at each meeting. Reputation aside, in my entire experience with Steve I found him to be soft-spoken and gracious to the point of being deferential. What others have characterized as bluntness struck me as simply an efficiency of words. Each word spoken by Steve furthered an objective.