Today, Apple is worth trillions of dollars. Its products define industries. Its launches stop the internet. It is easy to believe success was inevitable.

It wasn’t.

In 1997, Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. The company had burned through cash, its product lineup had become bloated and confusing, and its market share had collapsed. Steve Jobs, who had been forced out of the company he co-founded 12 years earlier, returned not to a thriving technology giant but to one fighting for survival.

Jobs later admitted Apple was about 90 days away from running out of money. One of his first decisions shocked Silicon Valley: asking Microsoft’s Bill Gates for help. Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple and agreed to continue developing Microsoft Office for the Mac.

But money alone did not save Apple.

Jobs eliminated roughly 70 percent of Apple’s product lineup, canceled projects, simplified the company’s strategy and demanded that every remaining product justify its existence. Thousands of jobs disappeared. Apple stopped trying to be everything to everyone.

None of those decisions were easy.

Neither was working for Steve Jobs.

His brilliance has long been accompanied by stories of volatility. That duality remains part of Apple’s history.

Jobs inspired people. Jobs intimidated people.

He demanded excellence while creating an environment that many former employees described as extraordinarily intense.

Yet Apple was never Steve Jobs alone.

The company survived because thousands of engineers, designers, software developers, operations specialists and marketers matched his relentless pursuit of excellence. Jony Ive transformed industrial design into art. Software engineers rebuilt Apple’s operating system from NeXT technology. Manufacturing teams reinvented global supply chains. Retail employees changed how technology products were sold.

Apple’s greatest products were collective achievements. The iMac restored profitability. The iPod reinvented portable music. The iPhone transformed personal computing.

None emerged from one person’s imagination alone.

Even Jobs understood the importance of assembling exceptional people. His greatest strength was often recognizing talent, setting impossibly high standards and persuading others to chase a vision they sometimes could not yet see.

The years following his return became one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in history. Apple introduced the iMac in 1998, followed by Mac OS X, the iPod, the iTunes Store, the iPhone, the App Store and the iPad, products that redefined entire industries and transformed Apple from a struggling computer manufacturer into one of the world’s most valuable companies.

Looking back, Apple’s story is not really about avoiding failure. It failed repeatedly.

Products like the Newton and Pippin struggled commercially. Leadership battles nearly tore the company apart. Steve Jobs himself spent more than a decade in exile after being ousted from Apple in 1985 before returning through Apple’s acquisition of NeXT in 1997.

The company’s defining characteristic was something else.

It kept rebuilding.