Founders at Work.pdf

Steve Wozniak 45
would drive the boxes down to the Byte Shop in Mountain View or wherever
and get paid, in cash. We had the parts on credit and we got paid in cash. That
was the only way we could do the Apple Is.
Livingston: So you’d keep self-funding?
Wozniak: Yes, we kept self-funding and we probably built up a bank account of
about $10,000. Not a huge amount, but it was enough to move into an office.
Steve really wanted to make a company.
Livingston: Where was the first office?
Wozniak: The first office was even before we worked a deal with Mike
Markkula. We arranged to get a place at an office complex I could drive to in
Cupertino. It’s not too far from where Apple’s places are now. Not too far from
where our first building on Brandley was. We had one office and Steve had
arranged that we only pay for half of it until a certain date when we’d use the
rest. It was kind of cold and empty when we finally did move in.
So Mike was going to finance us, and then one day he said to me, “You have
to leave Hewlett-Packard.” And I said, “Why? I designed two computers and
cassette tape interfaces and printer interfaces and serial ports and I wrote a
Basic and all this application software, I wrote demos, and I did all this moonlighting,
all in a year.”
He said, “Well, you have to leave Hewlett-Packard.” It just wasn’t open. I
went inside of myself and thought about it. “Who are you? What do you want
out of life?” And I really wanted a job as an engineer forever at a great company
(which was Hewlett-Packard). I wanted to design computers and show them off
and make software. And I can do that on my own time. I don’t need a company
to do it. So there was an ultimatum day—I had to decide by a certain day if I
was willing to do this. I met Mike and Steve at Mike’s cabaña at his house in
Cupertino. Eventually we got around to it, and I said, “I’ve decided not to do it,
here are my reasons.” Mike just said, “OK.” Steve was a little more upset.
About the next day after I said no to starting Apple, my parents called me
and said, “You really ought to do this.” (Because $250,000 was a big deal in anyone’s
life.) And then friends would start calling me. That day my friend Allen
Baum called me in the afternoon, and he said, “Look, you can start Apple and
go into management and get rich, or you can start Apple and stay an engineer
and get rich.” As soon as he said it was OK to do engineering, that really freed
me up. My psychological block was really that I didn’t want to start a company.
Because I was just afraid. In business and politics, I wasn’t going to be a real
strong participant. I wasn’t going to tell other people how to do things. I wasn’t
going to run things ever in my life. I was a non-political person and I was a very
non-forceful person. It dated back to a lot of things that happened during the
Vietnam War. But I just couldn’t run a company.
But then one person said I could be an engineer. That was all I needed to
know, that “OK, I’ll start this company and I’ll just be an engineer.” To this day,
I’m still on the org chart, on the bottom of the org chart—never once been anything
but an engineer who works.