>>I think the separation was driven by Steve being in a real funk because the Macintosh, which he developed, was failing in early 1985. His vision was ahead of its time, the power of the microprocessor wasn't enough to do what he wanted to do and Mac sales were falling off.
We were still very dependent on the profits of Apple II. I felt we had to push profits of Apple II and Steve wanted to lower the price of the Mac to get sales up. We went to the board to decide.
The board made a decision and they asked Steve to step down as head of the Macintosh division. He still remained as chairman of the board.
But that was an incredible blow to the man who created the product, he was extremely hurt and pained by it.
To me, coming from corporate America, I was used to people being moved from job to job, because that's how it worked. Professional executives were reassigned, terminated, promoted all the time.
That's not what you do with founders of companies.
<<
Emphasis on the "That's not what you do with founders of companies. "
I think that's exactly what they used to do with many founders of companies. Over time though, the conventional wisdom on founders has started to change:
<< The conventional wisdom says a startup CEO should make way for a professional CEO once the company has achieved product-market fit. In this post, I describe why we prefer to fund companies whose founder will run the company as its CEO. >>
We were still very dependent on the profits of Apple II. I felt we had to push profits of Apple II and Steve wanted to lower the price of the Mac to get sales up. We went to the board to decide.
The board made a decision and they asked Steve to step down as head of the Macintosh division. He still remained as chairman of the board.
But that was an incredible blow to the man who created the product, he was extremely hurt and pained by it.
To me, coming from corporate America, I was used to people being moved from job to job, because that's how it worked. Professional executives were reassigned, terminated, promoted all the time.
That's not what you do with founders of companies. <<
Emphasis on the "That's not what you do with founders of companies. "