The Steve Jobs you never saw: Amazing photos of dot-com revolution Doug Menuez had unprecedented access to tech visionaries, entrepreneurs

Photos of Steve Jobs & the Silicon Valley: Steve Jobs Explaining 10-Year Technology Development Cycles. Sonoma, Calif., 1986.



Steve giving a history lesson about how technology evolves in ten year wave cycles to his new NeXT team at an off-site meeting. Every few months, Steve and the fledgling company’s employees would travel to a retreat in the country with their families to grapple with myriad technical issues. There he would regularly hold talks to explain his vision for the company and to encourage his brilliant cofounders and employees to participate fully in its realization. Steve planned to ride the next wave by putting the power of a refrigerator-size mainframe computer into a one-foot cube at a price affordable to universities, thus “transforming education.” When I asked him what he meant by this, he said he wanted “some kid at Stanford to be able to cure cancer in his dorm room.” Because he absolutely believed this was possible, his whole team did. less Photos of Steve Jobs & the Silicon Valley: Steve Jobs Explaining 10-Year Technology Development Cycles. Sonoma, Calif., 1986.



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Photographs and captions from Doug Menuez's new book "Fearless Genius: The Digital Revolution in Silicon Valley 1985-2000," Atria Books, an eyewitness record of the brilliant engineers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who built our world. Introduction by Kurt Andersen and Foreword by Elliott Erwitt. To buy the book or for more information visit: www.fearlessgenius.org.

In 1985, the year that Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple, photographer Doug Menuez asked for access to document his new startup, NeXT, for a Life magazine piece on innovation in Silicon Valley.

Jobs granted the request, and Menuez's photo shoot turned into a three-year project photographing the NeXT's team's mission to build a supercomputer to transform education.

But that was just the beginning. As Menuez writes:

"Because Steve trusted me, so did the other leading innovators of Silicon Valley. I gained insider access to their secret labs, boardrooms, offices and homes for 15 years as they built the technology that shapes our world today. It was a time of extreme sacrifice, struggle and sublime creativity, and many paid a high price. There were divorces, ruined careers, billions made and then lost in tragic failure."

The unprecedented access allowed Menuez to photograph the valley's tech visionaries on their own turf — at work and play, often in unguarded moments — as the dot-com boom unfolded. A sample is shown in the above slideshow.