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Replit CEO Amjad Masad on the “most gangster story in Silicon Valley”

March 26, 2025

In September 2021, Replit founder Amjad Masad tweeted:

“The most gangster story in Silicon Valley is Steve Jobs buying Pixar for $5m, investing $50m, operating at a loss for a decade — so much so he had to cut personal checks every month to make payroll and somehow turning it around to exit for $7B to Disney.”

He expands on this in his interview on the My First Million podcast:

“The thing I like about the Steve Jobs story is when he was lost in the desert for 10 years. He was fired from Apple, and then he created two companies that were failing the whole time. NeXT Computer and Pixar were literally failing, and he was investing more and more of his own money. At that pace he was going to go broke, but he kept going for 10 years. How do you do that?”

Eventually the success of Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film, helped make Pixar’s 1995 IPO one of the the most successful of the decade. And Apple used the NeXt operating system as the foundation for macOS. But both ventures took the better part of 10 years.

Interestingly, the 12 “wilderness years” between getting fired at Apple and coming back was the most pivotal period of Steve Jobs’s life. His work with Pixar and NeXT helped him grow into the leader capable of taking Apple to unimaginable heights when he returned.