Exitless
Levin Works is fictional. This is a story about building a company that can continue without its founder. Its setbacks are part of the story too.
2029. There is work to do.
Levin Works makes replacement parts for old municipal water pumps. Nineteen people work there. Mara Levin has personally guaranteed the building loan. A water plant in Leeds has a pump apart on the floor. It needs a shaft nobody else will make.
An offer arrives for €18.4 million. Mara’s share would clear the loan and leave her with €9.7 million. She is 55. The most she has ever had in the bank is €90,000.
She asks whether the buyer will keep making the old parts. They will review the range after closing. It takes fourteen days to close the email. The workshop makes the shaft. Leeds gets it on Thursday.
2030. Make the decision last.
Mara does not want the next refusal to depend on her willpower. In this story, she places the controlling shares in a purpose trust with restrictions on selling the company. Workers and investors can still receive profit. The board can still replace management. She gives up control she will later wish she had kept.
2038. Someone learns.
Amira, who once could not loosen the bearing housing, runs production. The workshop has developed a valve assembly for dialysis machines. It took four years and nearly stopped twice.
A buyer offers €640 million, with promises about jobs and a new plant. It is a good offer. Under the arrangement in this story, the controlling shares are not available for sale.
Dov retires after thirty-one years on Machine 3. He tells the others to ask Amira about the bearing.
2043. The founder can be wrong.
Mara decides to build complete pumps and compete with the workshop’s customers. Two years and €31 million later, the customers are leaving.
The board removes her and appoints Amira. Mara votes against it. The pump line closes. Forty-one people lose their jobs. Customers return slowly. At Christmas two years later, Mara comes to lunch.
2049. Monday.
Mara dies on a Friday. Former employees come to the workshop on Sunday. On Monday, Amira arrives first. Nobody talks much. The compressor starts. The first truck reverses into the dock Mara fought to build.
2057. It can still fail.
The water plants have changed their pumps. There are fewer shafts to make. A production line closes and twenty-six people lose their jobs. The company’s ownership does not solve its problems.
The people running it keep the valves and repair work, then find new work in desalination pumps. Machine 3 is replaced in 2061. Somebody keeps its handwheel.
2084. Someone opens up.
Monday, 07:54. Someone unlocks the workshop. There are sixty-one orders waiting. Nobody working there remembers the founder.
An email asks them to name their price.
They have a bearing to finish.
About this interpretation
The starting question was how Steve Jobs might approach Exitless as a personal project. This is an independent interpretation, not a design by him or an endorsement. The handwheel comes from the existing fictional story.
A useful reference is Jobs’s 2003 interview with Leslie Berlin, in which he admired Robert Noyce for actually handing over the CEO role and making room for succession. His 2005 Stanford address returns to love of the work after losing a position. Those ideas informed the interaction. They do not establish that he would have supported this fictional ownership arrangement.
Steve Jobs Archive, Make Something Wonderful
Stanford, commencement address, 2005
The trust in this story is a simplified fictional arrangement, not legal instructions or a guarantee that a company can never be sold or fail.