Founders at Work.pdf

56 Founders at Work
can’t figure out a way to test something and get it working, I don’t think you’re
the right type of person to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs have to keep
adjusting to . . . everything’s changing, everything’s dynamic, and you get this
idea and you get another idea and this doesn’t work out and you have to replace
it with something else. Time is always critical because somebody might beat
you to the punch.
It’s better to be young because you can spend a lot more nights, very, very
late. Because you have to get things done, and there’s almost no other way to
get around that. When the times come, they are critical.
Livingston: You got mono once because of this?
Wozniak: That was the Atari Breakout, because I didn’t sleep for 4 days and
nights. How could you design a game—this would be months of design—build
it, breadboard it, get it working, debug it in 4 days? Steve needed the money
quick. He didn’t tell me. He also didn’t tell me the full amount of the money.
He got paid a lot more than he told me, and he only gave me half of a smaller
amount. Which he didn’t have to; I would have done it for 25 cents. So that
wasn’t the point. I was glad to just be in there doing it. To get to design a game
for Atari, who was bringing arcade games to the world—what a thing to remember
for the rest of my life. So I would have done it for 25 cents.
But we both got mononucleosis. There was one Coke can I think we’d
shared.
Livingston: So he took more money than you did, but you both worked on the
project?
Wozniak: Yeah, I found out 12 years later.
Livingston: That’s awful.
Wozniak: I know, but he didn’t have to. He probably needed the money. And I
didn’t; I had an engineering job at Hewlett-Packard. It was very little to me. It
would have been better if he’d been open about it and honest. And what if I
remembered something wrong, too? It’s so long ago.
Livingston: Did you ever get any investment from Mike Markkula?
Wozniak: $250,000. What he did was $80,000 of it was investment for an equal
share to Steve and I, and the rest was a loan, paid back to him.
Livingston: And that’s all Apple ever took?
Wozniak: Yeah. But we did right away meet with some people he’d met
through Intel that were investment people. Hank Smith of . . . I can’t remember
the name of the company out of the East, but a venture group. They came
in and met us all early on, and they did put in . . . Mike figured out that we were
going to need some cash, we were going to be so fast growing. And when you
are fast growing, you need more cash right away. So we did have a venture deal
in place from well before we shipped an Apple II. And sometime after we were
shipping the Apple IIs, we got, I think, $800,000 or $300,000—some large
amount—from one venture capital place.