In 1985, at just thirty years old, Steve Jobs was pushed out of Apple, the company he had co-founded in a garage less than a decade earlier. A boardroom power struggle he'd lost left him publicly, humiliatingly, without a role in the very company that carried his fingerprints on every product it had shipped.
He later described the years right after as genuinely painful — he had built his entire adult identity around Apple, and losing it forced a kind of reckoning he hadn't planned for. Rather than disappear, he started over: founding NeXT, a computer company that struggled commercially but developed technology that would matter enormously later, and buying a small computer graphics division from Lucasfilm that he renamed Pixar.
Pixar, under his ownership, went on to produce Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film, becoming a genuine creative and commercial triumph built almost entirely during the years he was locked out of Apple.
In 1997, a struggling Apple bought NeXT and brought Jobs back as an advisor, and within months he was running the company again. He went on to lead the development of the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad — arguably his most transformative work, all of it happening only because he had first been forced to rebuild from outside the company that once discarded him.