Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Steve Jobs, John Sculley, Steve Wozniak at Apple

John Sculley, formerly CEO of Apple, recently visited our office to do a Q&A. 

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. We talk about what really happened at Apple with Steve Jobs in the 80s, what it's like to be fired, and why entrepreneurs should buy his new book. 

Business Insider: So let’s just start at the most famous moment. You’re known probably best for firing Steve Jobs, right? What was the thinking there? Is that something that’s been mis-remembered pretty horribly through history?

JS: Yeah, well, first of all there’s no accuracy to it at all. It’s one of those things that became a myth.

BI: Okay.

JS: The reality is that I was brought into Apple to bring consumer marketing to Apple, because Steve was getting ready to launch the Macintosh in a few years, and to turn around the Apple 2 because it was the only source of cash flow the company would have for three more years....

No survivorship bias here. A compilation of startup failure post-mortems by founders and investors.

On his many failed experiments, Thomas Edison once said,

"I have learned fifty thousand ways it cannot be done and therefore I am fifty thousand times nearer the final successful experiment."

And so while we have dug into the data behind startups that have died (as well as those acqui-hired) and found they usually die 20 months after raising financing and after having raised about $1.3 million, we thought it would be useful to see how startup founders and investors describe their failures.  

While not 50,000 ways it cannot be done, below is a compilation of startup post-mortems that describe the factors that drove a startup’s demise.  Most of the failures have been told by the company’s founders, but in a few cases, we did find a couple from investors including Roger Ehrenberg (now of IA Ventures) and Bruce Booth (Atlas Venture). They are in no particular order, and there is something to learn from each and every one of them....