Not necessarily - after all, there was a man who was struck by lightning 7 times[1] through no effort on his part. You will never hear about the almost-Jobs who fail to succeed on their subsequent come-back attempts.
(Look at the board/exec composition pre/post acquisition)
Total failure. If you squint hard enough with VC eyes, they can almost convince you that $70 million is a terrible amount of money.
And then ask Apple where OS X comes from. Ask any iOS developer about Objective-C (though not invented by NeXT, it certainly helped popularize it). Ask the wider world about object oriented programming.
If you can see past the bottom of the balance sheet and beyond the next quarter, NeXT lives on, despite not achieving commercial success.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT#1996.E2.80.9397:_Apple_me...
Apple paid $429 million in cash, which went to the initial investors and 1.5 million Apple shares, which went to Steve Jobs, who was deliberately not given cash for his part in the deal.
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Yes but the 2nd time he had the advantage of having the first success. That would mean he was taken more seriously and would be able to hire and influence better than if he was not famous. And of course in the current culture having even a large failure is enough to put you on the map to get more attention for the 2nd time around. This is not the way business used to be by the way. Used to be if you failed you failed and nobody would touch you with a ten foot pole.