“Now, in hindsight, I obviously should have jumped at the chance,” says David Nagy of the “unbelievably cool” job offer he was sent by Steve Jobs himself in 1989.
Things were a little different for Jobs at the time. He had been fired from Apple, a company he co-foundedand bet everything on a quick move to recover: NeXT, another company dedicated to the manufacture of computers.
With $12 million of his own money, the genius in black turtlenecks planned to build a line of machines for use in universities and businesses with an innovative operating system.
In ’89, a year after NeXT released its first computer, Jobs extended what he considered an “incredibly cool” job offer to David Nagywho worked as a product manager at Apple at that moment.
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As reported CNBCIt wasn’t until this week that part of that period in the tech icon’s career came to light, and it was through auction.
Among the documents auctioned by the firm RR Auction was the contract letter addressed to Nagy, where he offered him a salary of US$ 80,000 per year and monthly payments in advance, in exchange for joining him in the NeXT team.
The $80,000 salary Jobs was offering would be worth nearly $180,000 today, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Technically, the position did not carry a royal title, though it did include a $5,000 signing bonus, options to purchase 5,000 shares of NeXT common stock, and health care coverage.
It was a “very unusual” proposal
Steve Jobs he was so confident that his offer was more than fair for Nagy to get into NeXT that he ended the letter with the phrase “I accept this amazing offer!!” above the space where Nagy’s signature was supposed to go.
But the optimism was in vain: Nagy ended up staying at Apple until 1993.
RR Auction’s website currently lists the lot of the letter as “closed,” but the auction house has yet to announce whether it ever sold. The estimated value of the letter exceeds $30,000.
Nagy says that today, on second thought, he regrets not taking the opportunity to work alongside one of the greatest minds of the century. But he explains that he wasn’t going to jump into the void without a “job title, department, or specific areas of responsibility.” “It was a very unusual letter,” she said.
Nagy was one of the privileged few who had access to Jobs’s plans for NeXT, which at the time was trying to get its feet on the ground: its original computer cost US$10,000 and could not be marketed among the academic public that had been established as initial goal.
Hence, Jobs wanted to hire him to “develop product strategies and plans, third-party partnerships, and marketing programs,” just as he was doing at Apple.
Nagy knew that NeXT was struggling to get off the ground and perhaps that was not to his liking. That takeoff lasted nearly a decade. Eight years later, in 1997, Apple ended up buying NeXT for $429 million and rehired Jobs.
Sales of NeXT computers were relatively low, with estimates of close to 50,000 units sold in total. However, its innovative operating system, NeXTSTEP, an object-oriented operating and development environment, was highly influential.
In addition to the lack of title and the fear of leaving a good position in which he was doing wonderfully, Nagy probably knew how difficult it was to work directly with Steve Jobs.
Guy Kawasaki, who worked for Apple during the 1980s and 1990s, told CNBC that working for Jobs was “sometimes unpleasant and always scary.”
“In the Macintosh Division, you had to prove yourself every day, or Jobs would get rid of you,” Kawasaki wrote. “He demanded excellence and kept you at the top of your game … but he led a lot of us to do the best work of our careers.”