His reaction helped Ross Perot make a big investment in NeXT.
Sometimes great businessmen have to forget the most common marketing strategies and opt for less orthodox tactics using logic to achieve their goals. That’s what happened to Steve Jobs in 1985, when he was still working on NeXT. The co-founder of Apple used a very clever tactic that not all entrepreneurs of the time would have thought of using.
After the death of Steve Jobs in 2011, interesting stories and anecdotes about the life of the visionary continue to be revealed, especially in relation to his origins at Apple. Like when I was doing the beer test to hire the best employees. We know a lot about Steve Jobs thanks to his biographies and the testimonies of many people who worked with him. But there are still many Steve Jobs stories to uncover, like the time he decided to hide his Porsche 911 to get a financial investment in NeXT.
“Randy, we have to hide the Porsches”
As we mentioned earlier, the year was 1985 when Steve Jobs was working on NeXT. The visionary offered a job offer to Randy Adams, a software engineer who declined the proposal because he was not yet ready to return to work after selling his desktop software development company.
A few days passed after Steve Jobs’ offer, when Apple’s co-founder he insisted on leaving a message on the answering machine from his phone: “You’re wasting this Randy. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and you’re wasting it.” Randy Adams reconsidered the offer and eventually made the NeXT roster.
Using some of the money he raised selling his business, Randy bought a Porsche 911 along with Steve Jobs. Both used to park their luxury vehicles using three parking spaces to avoid scratching the car doors. Curiously, according to Randy, one day Steve Jobs rushed to his cubicle and told him that the cars needed to be moved immediately..
“Randy, we need to hide the Porsches. Randy asked, “Why?” Steve Jobs replied, “Ross Perot is coming and he’s considering 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 in Palo Alto, California, and eventually Ross Perot made a $20 million investment in the company. Who knows, perhaps without this reaction from Steve Jobs, the right conditions would not have been created for the creation of Apple as a company. Something similar to what happened with the creation of this illegal company by Steve Jobs. The butterfly effect, right?
