AFTER ONE OF NeXT’s early board meetings, Steve pulled aside Susan Barnes, his CFO. “When my life is over,” he told her, “people will give me credit for all the creative stuff. But no one will know I actually know how to run a business.”

As Steve started NeXT, it was true that he did know certain key things about running a computer business. He was a strong, if somewhat confounding motivator, and a restless innovator. He had shown himself to be a good negotiator with parts suppliers, often getting Apple better prices in its early days than its volume had really justified. He could synthesize big ideas, and he could see how different technologies could be combined into something that added up to a whole lot more. “He knew about inventory terms, he understood the mechanics of capital investment, he knew cash flow,” says Barnes. “He did understand this, and starting Apple had taught him things you can try to teach an MBA. But he actually knew them. [They were] survival skills.”

Steve craved recognition for this, and spoke often about how well he was going to manage NeXT, and how much he had learned from the mistakes Apple had made during its years of unfettered growth. “This is really the third time around for me and a number of other people at NeXT,” he told me. “When we were at Apple, we spent half the time fixing things that were breaking, whether it be an employee stock ownership plan, or a parts numbering system, or a way of manufacturing a product. At NeXT we have the benefit of having the experience of growing a company from zero to a couple of billion dollars before, and we could anticipate some of the more sophisticated problems that we didn’t anticipate the first or second time around. It gives us a certain level of confidence which enables us to take more risks. We’re working much smarter. We’re thinking things through more, which results in more getting done with less work.”

It sounded good. But much of it was chutzpah and self-delusion. When he started Apple, he had not presumed that he knew how to run a business—he was willing to rely, at least for a while, on his mentors and bosses. Now, however, he acted as if he knew everything, from payroll and engineering to marketing and manufacturing. He was out to do absolutely every little thing right this time. You could see it in his body language. Whenever someone nattered on about a subject Steve believed he knew well—knew better than anyone else, in his opinion—he would look away, tap his feet, shift restlessly in his seat, and behave like a teenager undergoing physical torment until he could finally break in and say his piece. And of course all this was done in a way that was obvious to everyone else in the meeting.

Steve’s overbearing need to weigh in on everything—to get those “twenty thousand decisions” exactly right—slowed everyone down. This micromanagement was the primary example of the fact that Steve did not know how to prioritize in any kind of holistic way at this stage of his career. Remember how he wanted the group at the first Pebble Beach offsite to decide on NeXT’s top priority: a great machine, on-time delivery, or a price tag under $3,000? It was the wrong question. NeXT absolutely needed to do all three things. But Steve couldn’t keep his company focused on what mattered when he couldn’t focus himself efficiently.

Steve was unable to effectively manage all the cash that he had been able to raise. NeXT was bankrolled by $12 million that Steve put in in two stages, as well as by investments of $660,000 each from Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, and $20 million from H. Ross Perot, the idiosyncratic businessman who offered to back NeXT after seeing the episode of The Entrepreneurs. (“I found myself finishing their sentences,” Perot raved to Newsweek.) The investments gave the young, productless company an exorbitant valuation of $126 million in 1987. (Two years later Canon, the Japanese camera and printer maker, would kick in $100 million more, raising the overall valuation of the company to $600 million.) Steve touted the investments as proof of concept. The Carnegie Mellon and Stanford money showed that the schools were anxiously awaiting his computer. Perot’s endorsement just underscored the size of the potential market, and was evidence that the most innovative businesspeople understood Steve’s greatness, potential, and maturity. Perot swore that he’d keep a close eye on his investment: “This is going to be hell on the oyster,” he said in the Newsweek article covering the deal, equating himself in his folksy way to the sand that irritates the oyster to create the pearl inside. But in truth Perot was hands-off with the man he viewed as a young genius. Years before, he had decided against investing early in Microsoft, missing out on billions of dollars as the company’s stock soared, and this time he was determined to roll the dice on one of those brilliant techies from the West Coast. Steve promised to be a careful steward of the cash. In the Entrepreneurs video, he repeatedly urged his staff to conserve resources, to the point of complaining about the hotel room rates they were getting. Despite having seen him throw money around at Apple, Barnes was initially hopeful that Steve might change his ways. “I thought he’d be better when it was his own money,” she remembers. “Boy, was I wrong.”

Most great Silicon Valley startups start out lean and simple. The advantage they have over established companies is the focus they can bring to a single product or idea. Unencumbered by bureaucracy or a heritage of products to protect, a small group of talented folks is free to attack a concept with speed and smarts. Eagerly working hundred-hour weeks, the employees want little more from the “company” than that it pay the bills and get out of their way. They know that if they execute their idea so successfully that their enterprise grows big, at some point they’ll have to deal with the rigors and strains of a corporation. But generally that’s a worry that’s tackled later. At the beginning, corporate trappings can just get in the way, and distract from the all-consuming job of creating an object of desire.

As he had explained to Nocera, Steve enjoyed the spirit of a startup. But his definition of lean and mean had been changed by his experience at Apple. “Living on the cheap was difficult for him after he’d lived the high life there,” says Barnes. Jobs had enjoyed the benefits of Apple’s resources and size, of its manufacturing prowess and rich marketing budget. Despite what he said about wanting to repeat the experience of the Apple II and the Mac, what Steve really wanted at NeXT was the garage spirit of a startup meshed with the safety, status, and perks of the Fortune 500. It wasn’t a combination he could pull off.

The first sign of his extravagance came early, when Steve paid Paul Rand $100,000 for his beautifully designed NeXT logo. Choosing Rand to design the logo was an indication of Steve’s ambition: Rand’s most famous logo is the one still used by IBM. His prestige was such that Steve agreed to Rand’s stringent terms that all he’d get for his hundred grand was a single draft—take it or leave it. Fortunately, Jobs loved everything about it. He loved the logo, and he loved the way it was presented in a classy booklet explaining in detail how Rand had arrived at his notable design, including the philosophical rationale for the lowercase e and the four vivid colors set on black. The day the members of Team NeXT were given copies of the manifesto, Lewin found himself reflecting on when he had first met Steve in 1977 as a Sony salesman based in an office near Apple’s headquarters on Stevens Creek Boulevard. He recalled the way Steve had lovingly fondled the Sony sales materials, making note of the fine paper stock and professional design: “Steve was a freak about Sony, right? Why did people spend fifteen percent more for a Sony product? Steve would walk into our office, and look at the paper and feel the paper that Sony printed their brochures on. It wasn’t the products, it was the tactile feel, the surface and the presentation that mattered to him.” But NeXT was a startup, not a mature, successful company like Sony with billions in revenues, for whom such a pamphlet would be pocket change.