Steve Jobs: Apple founder's moving speech on why being fired from tech giant was the best thing to happen

Jobs, who died from cancer, would have been 61 today

Steve Jobs’s story of co-founding Apple in a garage, being unceremoniously sacked from the company he brought to life and then returning to transform it into a tech giant continues to inspire many almost five years after his untimely death.

The entrepreneur, who died from cancer aged 56, was adopted as a baby and grew up in a working-class family. In 2005, Jobs, himself a college drop-out, shared the three most important stories from his life as he gave the commencement address during a graduation ceremony the prestigious Stanford University in 2005.

Jobs divided his speech into stories about dropping out of college, love and loss, and death. He heralded the moment he was dumped from Apple as the best thing to happen to him.

“I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life,” he said. “Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

“I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

“During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.”

Jobs gave this frank and sincere address a year after he was diagnosed with cancer. You can read the full text of his speech here.