John Sculley: Seeing Steve Jobs Everywhere

John Sculley thinks he’s found the next Steve Jobs. Several of them, in fact. The former Apple chief executive officer is taking on the thorny problem of reforming health care by mentoring tech entrepreneurs. Working from his Palm Beach (Fla.) home, he’s invested nearly $10 million in five startups, often using his name to raise the companies’ profiles. “The real heavy lifting is not done by me,” he says. “I get a front row seat at what I think will be a revolution.”

Sculley knew little about the health-care industry until just a few years ago. He was also new to computers in 1983 when Jobs recruited the onetime PepsiCo president to run Apple. Sculley’s decade-long tenure included company growth and successful products but was marred by the flop of the Newton portable digital assistant and his role in forcing out the man who became a business legend. In the years after his own ouster from Apple in 1993, Sculley kept a low profile while backing technology and telecommunications companies, as well as oddball products like the Wine Clip, a device that clamps to a bottle and supposedly improves the drink’s taste.