Dreamers: He Had a Hunch (page 2 of 2)

Staying the Same Person

Jobs went out looking for customers and located a computer store in the area that wanted 100 completely built computers. It offered to pay $500 each. "We had a $50,000 order," Wozniak marvels. "That was twice my annual salary."

With their bank account scraping bottom, Jobs and Wozniak negotiated 30 days' credit on the parts and went into warp speed. They subcontracted the basic manufacturing, but did all the quality testing themselves in Jobs's parents' garage, then boxed up the goods and delivered them to the store. The owner paid cash in ten days.

Meanwhile, Wozniak was working on a $1 part that would add color to the Apple I. "I decided instead to design a completely different computer (software, hardware, color, graphics, everything) from the ground up. That was the Apple II, the computer that really did start the personal computer revolution."

Knowing Apple II's winning potential, he and Jobs decided to look for an investor with business experience to guide their young company. When Mike Markkula came on board, he told Wozniak he could work at HP or Apple, but he had to choose. "I went deep inside myself and decided, No, I am not starting Apple," Wozniak recalls. "I had designed a bunch of great computers and written more software than anyone could believe in one year while moonlighting. But I wanted to work for HP for life. I loved how HP supported their engineers."

Luckily, a high school friend (and fellow computer aficionado) convinced him that he could start a company and still remain an engineer, but at Apple. The rest, of course, is history. The large computer companies that were manufacturing mainframes scoffed at the idea of personal computers for ordinary people. But Wozniak and Jobs made it happen. And by then a young fellow named Bill Gates was designing software for small computers.

Wozniak was just 26 years old when he cofounded Apple. The company went public in 1980, and he had the opportunity to attain wealth to a degree few 30-year-olds could even imagine. But money had never been a motivating force for Wozniak.

He began sharing his wealth from the start. When Apple was on the verge of going public, he found out key employees in engineering and marketing had not been given the chance to buy stock at the insider price. "I felt it was wrong, so I allowed them to buy my stock at a price that would make them very wealthy. It put the lawyers in a tizzy, but eventually they let me do it. I had far more than I needed."

Now 56, Wozniak looks back on his life and says, "The themes that drove me were the love of engineering, enabling me to design things that other people could not design. Also the social ramifications of doing good. We were talking about taking the little guy to a new place where the individual would be as important as the big company. I got to be a creator."

What's more, he says, "I would have done the things I did without Apple's success. I went back to college and got my degree. I always wanted to be a teacher, so I taught elementary school for eight years. I pretty much stayed the same person."

From Reader's Digest - March 2007

 

• • Inspiring Stories
• • Amazing People
• • Dreamers
• • Generation Y
• • Success Stories

• Inventor Resource Guide
• Learn about camps, contests or how to patent an idea below.
• 
• The Founder of Curves -- Fit to Lead
• He's learned from his mistakes. Good thing, 'cause he's made some doozies.
• 
• Founder of Subway: No Experience Needed
• How a 17-year-old built a multimillion-dollar business one sandwich at a time.
• 
• Chris Gardner: From Jail to Wall Street
• His life may not be a rags-to-riches fairy tale, but it's pretty darn close.
• 
• Start Your Own Business!
• Realize the dream of starting your own business
• 
• Kathy Ireland's $1.4 Billon Business
• Supermodel Kathy Ireland turned heads before turning her vision into a $1.4 billion business.
• 
• The Founder of Fed Ex Discusses Leadership
• He turned a mediocre term paper into a $32 billion business.
•