PHP Agency - Best Interview with Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak by Patrick Betdavid

but the next person we're going to bring up here um i've been looking forward to this for a while especially for this interview specifically because you want to talk to people who have already done what we are aiming to do in a different industry and when you look at different businesses whether it's sports whether it's business whether it's a church where there's a movement whatever it is technology there are certain things that do not change and those are principles and these guys built a business with principles of work ethic and different things that we'll talk about here today let me give you a story about him when he's when he got started back in the days with apple he was the brains of that company he was the guy that came who knew how to produce the products who knew how to put the things together he got started with the ideas created the computers from there until today he is a legend i mean he is like the michael jordan in the industry of technology all companies who go out and produce things they prefer to have a chance to ask for this man's advice this is who that guy is in that world did incredible things and the question i asked last night is what would the world be without apple think about it i have an iphone here i have an ipad here we have a bunch of mac computers in the back we got ipods all over the place what would the world be without apple think about that if 1976-77 wouldn't happen with the courage these people had so i can go on talking all about him and what he's done in the industry but please help me bring up the one and only steve wozniak so thank you for joining us wow it's incredible it's been fun did you have fun last night with us by the way had a lot of fun i didn't realize that the um alarm clock in my room had got set four hours advanced so i woke up real early this morning so i i heard you know a lot of times when when you know we bring somebody in but hey let me say though listening to you speak and the speaker we had and the whole event and the awards i have been to a lot of galas and award events for companies i have never been to one as good as that i was and watching you i mean i'm just totally sold because you know what you have to do you're talking about it's that that drive and wanting to do something to make a difference and you really bring that out and everyone yourself so absolutely so let's why don't we start off all the way to the back on how the whole thing got started i mean why don't you just tell us how the story on how it got started from the idea to it being where it's at sure yeah i grew up so advanced in electronics and computers that i couldn't afford anything had no money but i could design any computer there was in the world in just a couple of days and i just did it for fun it was a hobby and i wanted my own computer i told my dad at one point someday i'm going to have this particular computer of my own and he said how are you going to do that it costs as much as a house and i was sort of stunned because i was young and i said well i'll live in an apartment so i would rather have a computer of my own that i can just write programs on even if it's just to play a game just to solve a chess problem and eventually what happened was i had a lot of luck doing some extremely exotic design things i got into the early stages of arcade games designing games like breakout for atari and i just did that on the side and i was working for hewlett-packard designing the hottest gadget product in the world the hp scientific calculators changed the world within about five years there were no more slide rules sold every engineer every scientist had to have one of these hp calculators and i got to design them i had no college degree but they interviewed me and i knew so much about it all that they hired me anyway and while i was doing that i was designing all sorts of little projects the video games and terminals that i could talk to computers across the country and finally it i realized the formula the day had come when you could buy low enough cost memory chips low enough microprocessors that did enough i figured out in my head the formula to building an affordable computer and i said wow this is what i've wanted for you know 10 years i've got it i'm here and so how did that lead to uh unc i guess yeah questions he was he was a very good friend five years before apple even we met because i designed one computer and some executive gave me some chips to build it and i was building in a friend's house and the friend introduced me to steve he said both of you guys know digital electronics so steve came over and described projects he did at hewlett-packard building frequency counters it had displays of digits counting you know frequencies of things like guitar chords or whatever um and i told them what i had done how my my experience and i was sort of like the top young designer you could ever run into in the times and steve was the net he was a leader he was always trying to be one of those special few people in the world the few that take the steps forward and you know like you know a newton he'd spoke of newton and and um shakespeare and things like that and i know that he really wanted to be one of those people but he wanted to find formulas to have find the company and sell things so every time i designed something really cute steve would come by and say i know how we can sell it so we're always a partnership selling my little projects so so but the whole thing got started i i read this story about how you guys had this project underground telephone long distance minute what was that all about telephone long distance um when i yeah my third year college at berkeley i um i read an article that i thought was just the most amazing fiction story ever about these clever engineers that were smarter than the engineers in the phone company and they could turn the they could set up their own little networks and and find the bugs in the system and help mob bell correct them and and it was kind of honorable the way i read it and steve and i i i called steve up halfway through the article and started reading it to him and i said there's something wrong this article sounds too real like real people like real frequencies they're telling us about we went down to a scientific library that day i was going to start classes at college the next day we went down to stanford linear accelerator center and in those days it was the high-end physics research place of the world smart people always leave doors unlocked that's one thing i found so we would drive in and we'd always find a door unlocked to get into the main building they had a library they had computer books they had technical things and we verified that this article was true you could put tones into an american telephone and dial calls for free anywhere in the world you gotta be kidding me no the system had that big of a flaw so i was amazed this is like it's so amazing to know this nobody knows it and i can show it off now i can actually build a device and demonstrate it and show it off so to me it was more as a comedian and and you know and bringing people's attention to this weird phenomena so um so i designed this little box that would do it and steve said oh let's sell it okay and we sold it we both sold it in the dorms to people and for a year for a year for a year i thought i was kind of you know boy my own phone calls i would pay for them i wouldn't use it to save money but i liked exploring the network and being able to convince a tokyo operator that i was a new york operator and get her to put it over to london and around the world and i'd call one phone and speak in one phone and come out the other one a second later it was very weird back then this is what i heard now this is a story i heard i don't know i heard you were prankster a lot of times you hear stories and you think people are so serious to build something this big you got to be serious all the time and i heard with that machine you actually called the pope yeah i called i called italy inward asked for roman word i got to the vatican and they said it was 5 30 in the morning i said i was henry kissinger and and then so they said well it's 5 30 in the morning call back and you know later and i called back at 6 30 in the morning their time and i used a little bit of an accent to sound a little like henry kissinger at the summit with nixon in moscow and and the bishop that answered said i just spoke to henry kissinger busted well i i guess i guess one of the things you see with all the great ones they push the envelope and when you look at when you and steve work together almost seemed like a perfect partnership because of different strengths that you have steve was sort of like the leader he's always looking for ways to turn things into a product or a company make some money and if you have a good enough product to make enough money you can make a better product with that money and go up go up the ladder and that was his approach and i was a good leader has to spot the talented resources the best people to do the different jobs and the right products the right direction to go so he was the direction setter and he just knew that i was the best at what i did so i was that part of the formula and i designed all the early apple computers from scratch you know normally you go to college and you learn hardware or you learn software you're one or the other i did it all i did the whole hardware i wrote the computer programming languages i did every single bit of the whole computer that's unbelievable but i did it not for a company i did it because i wanted it myself if you can convince somebody to want something inside for their own personal reason they really see something that they want to do and they really feel it in their heart that's when um you get a lot more done than any you can't motivate people with a high enough salary to do what you'll do when it's for your own self there to show off even and that amazing i guess the question becomes this uh to to become successful in any field do you have to know everything and everything about it or is it is it kind of like you got to put a good team together wow you do need some backgrounds of let's call it education training you do need those elements but a person knows how to take the little elements and build on them and formulate write the book of how you actually put them into play a person who comes up with va the ability to write the book i think is better than someone who knows how to do it from past experience because everything i did at apple it was an a plus job and it took us places um i had two things in my favor a i had no money that meant i had to figure out ways to do things very inexpensively i had to get a lot lot out for the least in and b and i was very good at that and b i'd never done them before every single apple project computers hard disks everything i had never designed those things ever in my life i hadn't had no training in them but i was so good at taking the little parts like pieces of wood to build a building that i could architect something that was perfect and really better than people that we're used to doing that would do that's unbelievable yeah if i had had experience i would have designed things with 50 chips instead of eight chips traditionally yeah that's interesting you say that what did ronald reagan recognize you for i think it was in 1986 or eighty seven the first national medal of technology was created in 1986 i think and yeah the president ronald reagan gave the awards to me and steve jobs were in the first set of recipients um because apple was you know really doing a lot of good for the world then and the economy that always helps a president but yeah ronald reagan was one of the early presidents that they all speak out we got to have more um emphasis on technology on innovation and to me i thought wow they're going to have more math classes and science classes in schools it's never happened so it's there's a lot of talk everywhere but it's very hard it'll get translated into a couple little projects that are nowhere near what you ever hear of and research things yeah yeah i noticed yesterday when eric walt was talking about the education system you you were you were listening in and you mean specifically on that topic i was drawn to eric because it was very obvious that he thinks for himself and he comes up with his own ideas and he doesn't just read something other people have said and i almost topic after topic topic i come up with the same things myself without reading anyone i talk to education groups and i tell them you know when you start to school you go to kindergarten and you know the first day my kid went to kindergarten he wanted to kind of look and see what was in the drawers oh they said no you can't open the drawers you can't open any of these drawers you can only do what everyone else is doing at that time it's like they start stunting you you have an idea i can do something in the world you're taught no no no no no you can only follow this one little labyrinth maze you have to go on the same track as everyone else and i've also come up with this whole idea you know that matched what he said that intelligence in our schools is defined as always having the same answer as everyone else you go home you watch the same news show you come back and talk about current events you all say the same thing and not one person says no that doesn't make sense to me not one person is really taught to think for themselves or that's called not intelligence um we're taught how to how to calculate when two canoes will meet on a river the river's flowing five miles an hour you know and we never we should teach kids to raise their hand and say no that wouldn't work because you can't predict the water will be exactly five miles an hour they're gonna be wind and you know why don't we you know think think about these things be skeptical a bit we don't really teach that way we just teach come up with the same answer that everyone else would well then you're just one in a billion but it's not trying to follow you being a follower instead of a leader you don't is that kind of controversial though isn't that kind of controversial to do the opposite what everybody else has done well i think well some schools like montessori schools get around you know do some better job at that but um you know we just our whole system of schools is is unfortunately very bad because it's based on money and money and especially in a democracy you got a problem schools all are funded by the government they're all funded by the government and government has slices of pie that go into different sectors usually according to how much money there is there or how many votes well the funny thing is um for schools kids don't get a vote what that translates to is a family of five gets no more say than a family of two and the family of two doesn't want to spend money on schools and the family of five does so you've got this controversy where you're constantly outvoted by the the masses you didn't really the kids don't get counted as a as a vote in the you know determining how much money schools are worth and need so schools are always going to be short of money shorter money it means you have to have a large class and everybody's doing the same thing and there's no you can't have any randomness well you know and i think randomness and even a little misbehavior is really essential to creative people well steve i was a kid that had a 4.0 gpa i followed the system the rules to the t everything i did perfectly obviously i'm being sarcastic with you but i had a 1.8 gpa i filled most my classes except math i love math that was it i mean i could listen to that stuff all day long but let's change gears i got a question for you about this so steve jobs was steve jobs an expert i mean an expert in designing the apple one the apple ii the saw i mean the computers was he an expert in that area steve understood it and he knew how to listen to which people were telling the best stories he couldn't quite design things he wasn't quite an engineer level but he was close to it because of his understanding of electronics so he wasn't an engineer he couldn't he i don't think he ever wrote a program software so no he but he understood the value of them but at first it was just mainly what could sell he could compare to other devices and he knew what would sell he had worked selling in surplus stores where all these little extra electronic parts came and he would know how to buy some switches for six cents that he could sell to somebody for six bucks so was it more back in those days he was a good mix you know what when you have a guy at the top he's got to be good at sales sales is where your income comes from but he should also be able to if you've got a guy at the top of a company that understands the technology and can talk to the engineers and not be totally lost and just say you do what you're doing i trust you yeah that's good and he was he was sort of he had a good understanding of it which helped i mean although although really the story of apple is a little misunderstood because um it's like steve and i did it ourselves and we really with the apple ii computer we got funding a guy funded us an angel and he joined us and he had made his money working in marketing at intel and as an engineer before and he was a mentor he was kind of young but he was wealthy and he owned as much of apple as steve and i did same amount of stock mike markle is his name and he ran our marketing but he was our mentor he told us how we would organize the company what steve's roles would be what my role would be um so he was really more responsible for apple's success than anyone but he kind of lays out of the picture because steve and i came from nothing we had no savings accounts we had no relatives or friends that could loan us money we had um we just had this drive we wanted to build this computer we wanted to find a way to sell it and you know and and for a while we were getting the parts on 30 days credit with no money and we'd build the computers in 10 days and sell them for cash at the store so that was that was how we ran for you know a good year with the apple one computer the interest because we had nothing ourselves the interesting that i read in accidental millionaire about you is you had a full-time job when you started apple so you were part-time with apple and you had a full-time job while building an apple company that's right i worked for hewlett-packard i loved hewlett-packard i had determined in my life i didn't want to be a high up run other people's lives person i didn't want to get in to be political i didn't want to be a manager i was going to be an engineer for life and the greatest engineering company in the in the country was hewlett-packard everyone was building products that other engineers used i mean that was my life forever i would never leave hewlett-packard so i made sure when we came up with the apple computers and steve suggested starting a company oh i tried to talk hewlett-packard into doing it five times they turned me down five times a time five times the first time i spoke of the idea of a little machine for 800 you could type your programs in and see them on your home tv and they turned it down for some good reasons hewlett packard couldn't have built the product the right way when your your company culture establishes your product has to be very boring and engineer strictness about it you know you can't use normal things that normal people have like a normal cassette tape recorder to store programs so they really would have done the project all wrong and eventually they did then when we got the order for completely insane we were going to sell little pc boards for 40 bucks each at first then when we got the order to sell them with all the parts in whoa we're selling everyone for 500 i got scared so i went to hewlett-packard's legal department and i had them research what we were going to do set or send it around to every hewlett-packard division and they all turned it down and all turned them down they all turned it down and then when we started a project in our lab at hewlett packard right on my floor of the building i went over and i said i i really calculators aren't my life computers are i want to be on this computer project you're doing they started a computer project little microprocessor just like i had used a bunch of dynamic memory like i had come to use they had five guys writing a basic language and i had just written one myself so i'd done it all and i said i'll do any menial job i'll do a printer interface a little dinky job but i want to be on this project and they turn me down i read a story that atari almost bought you or commodore four hundred thousand dollars and offered a twenty thousand dollar salary for you and steve is that accurate that's totally inaccurate okay the real truth is steve and i went into commodore first we walked in we had the apple ii design but we had no money now you've got a computer that you know is hot and you can sell a thousand of and we didn't give it away i gave away the apple one public domain no copyright no nothing the apple ii was too valuable for that and we took it into commodore and we're sitting there and they said well what do you want and steve says well we'd like you know a few hundred thousand dollars and i shut up my salary was 25 000 at the time and he says and we'd like to you know have stock and we'd like to have a position running the whole thing and and um i was just how could you ask for so much that's just like you're asking for the world and commodore turned us down they had a guy that joined them that had come to our garage i demonstrated the apple ii and he went to commodore and said people don't want color they don't need graphics they don't need all these fancy things they just want cheapness isn't that amazing and the funny thing is their machine was actually more expensive than ours because it didn't use your home tv your home tv is free for output so commodore went their own way and lucky for us atari loved us and they left the product but they were about to come out with the first home pawn game ever they were going to make millions of dollars off this and they have their hands full you don't you don't want to divert from the one big project to try to do something new but eventually of course atari also got into these home computers so you know so that's how steve and i we went on a long course to try to get the money we went to venture cap listen they said you guys are two you know we're in our young 20s we didn't speak business talk we'd never had business experience never taken a business course and then we wound up with the angel mike markle and that was a big thing once that took place he saw he saw he saw and believed that this product was going to be one of those categories that was going to be successful and pop up in so many homes and be one of those huge startups that grows to a billion dollars in five years back in those days money how many doubters did you guys have people that doubted that this will never happen how many what doubters many doubters at first before steve joined he was up in oregon i was going to a club a computer club and people were starting to talk about the revolution that was going to come they hadn't found the formula to build the right computer yet that could sell to the non-techies but boy we were just so gung-ho about how we were going to revolutionize education and communication and and calculating the finances for companies and everything and and i forgot what the question was i think i asked them what are they asking you guys doubters okay so the big computer companies the big computer companies like digital equipment the mini computer companies all kept saying oh it's going to go away it's going to be a little hobbyist thing it's not going to be important money-wise it's not so we had there were a lot of official high-level doubters but eventually and the analysts were not not really predicting it was going to be a big market until just about when we started with the apple ii the analysts were about to finally conceive this home computer market was going to be big so the first day apple gets started first apple gets started how was that all about how did that whole dream get started the first day well the first day i mean i was i had this computer that i was giving away all the designs for freely stephen yeah steve jobs just said came back from oregon and saw it and he said wow let's um you know we should um sell these pc boards build them for twenty dollars sell it for forty dollars and didn't know if we'd we'd have to come up with a few hundred bucks each and that was tough i had to sell the most valuable thing i owned my hewlett packard 65 calculator sold it for 500 bucks and i only got 250 the guy never showed up again but uh um so so we put a few hundred bucks in to make this pc board and then we got a little bit bigger interest there's the owner of the local store i've been looking over my shoulder at the computer club i would just type on a keyboard little board with a bunch of little you know accountable number of one dollar chips and this thing is actually running software and programs and and so he decided he wanted to buy the complete things all built and we didn't quite supply the apple one completely built we didn't have time to get cases and power supplies done that was the apple ii that was later um and when when the apple ii came along yes steve and i both looked each other it was the day that i had come up with this little idea in my head when i was in a dreamy state you know when you lose sleep how you get a little creative thinking i was down at atari and we had a job steve came to me said you have to design this project in four days and back then a game an arcade game was not a program it was not software and it would take six months so i had to do it in four days and wow i was great and i i said i don't know if i can do this we've stayed up without sleep for four days and nights we both got mononucleosis the sleeping sickness and delivered it but while my head was sort of half awake and half asleep i saw this thing on the factory floor of atari all the games were black and white tvs this one game it was going back and forth changing color and my eyes couldn't quite focus i was so tired it's weird it was like hypnotic it was like you're at a light show at a concert and they had little mylar coverings on the tv red green blue yellow and made it look color so i went back to a lab bed steve was was wiring up my design on one side of the lab and i'm on the other side thinking color television i remember how the frequencies go from high school electronics what if i and then i came up with this little method of taking a little one chip digital putting ones and zeros in it cycling around one zero one zero one zero up down up down up down i could make it look like color tv would it work it doesn't it's not the formulas they have all this complicated calculus and hundreds of parts and thousand dollars to generate color you know on you know in tv stations would this little idea with a one dollar chip work and the day that i actually built it the app the first apple 2 prototype and i could type something to memory and a blue dot pops up on the screen of the tv i type something else into memory a yellow dot pops up i called steve jobs over and you know that was a eureka moment we were shaking this is so big this is you know all the colored games are now going to be on computers everything so today it started with you the couple yeah yeah oh yeah yeah that was a really incredible uh that's probably my best pattern bring bringing color to the world you're not in kansas anymore that's why we chose a six color logo for our first logo from apple we were the ones that brought color because nobody would have ever expected color on an affordable computer much less the graphics that we had and we even had pixels so you could almost have photographs on a screen no it was so far ahead of its time that everybody else was going to have to sit back and figure out ways to do it ibm did on the pcs did a horrible horrible attempted color they just said your letters can be a certain color and their background can be a color but we really didn't they didn't really do graphics pure like we did how close were you guys both of you of quitting at one point where it got tough when he said this may just not work out we should just give it up and quit and sell off we never went through that phase at apple no we were just we were in a new revolutionary product area all the press of the world was yes home computers are going to come because they kind of didn't leave it and didn't know what it was but there was nobody really saying in the press oh this is a horrible idea because largely it didn't look like it was going to be big money so there was no reason for the big companies to poo-poo it in the press so really it was getting just gung-ho i mean it was thing we thought we were on top of a revolution and we knew that at apple we were the leaders so everybody we hired in those early years young people old people we we hired competent people in every department if we hadn't done that we wouldn't be here but um we just everybody felt that we were just leading the whole new world and things were going to go up and up and up forever and uh nobody left the company for years a few years until we went public so it was um it was really we didn't have oh my gosh let's pack it up and quit there were times there was a time when um it came time to actually take the money and i don't want to be part of the i don't want to be big money i really don't and i didn't want to run companies and tell other people what to do and i was so kind of a nice too much of a nice guy that i would probably get kicked out real quickly so i you know i wanted to design computers so there was a condition i had to leave hewlett-packard and i loved that company and i'm so loyal and i didn't want to i said why do i flee fuel at packard in one year i've designed two computers i've written a basic i've done all these these cassette tape interfaces and other interfaces for printers and things i've done all that on the side why don't i just keep working on the slide and the investor said i had to leave hewlett-packard and i went on the ultimatum day i went to his cabana and i said no not going to start apple i want to design computers but i'll do that on my own time and steve jobs went into a frenzy and he got all my friends and relatives to start calling me and finally one very very trusted friend convinced me that i could start apple and i could stay an engineer and just do it to make money and i said that's fine not amazing so nothing wrong with making money off what you do no was the motive initially of money or was it to revolutionize an industry for you guys it was more to revolutionize an industry but money is partly the way to do it you have to have successful success in the products to be able to build another higher level product to take you further and further out and i know steve was very steve jobs was very scared right away big company names like you were talking last night ibm oh my god they're gonna they're gonna kill us and our marketing guy mike markley said he said no no no even at a big company it boils down to a small group and we're a small group and we've got to lead and if we think as well as they if we have a smarter people as they have we'll do the job and we'll that will keep your market share so it sounds like he played a big role in the company oh absolutely a huge role and he basically from day one said apple should be a marketing driven company you should understand your customers needs and the pricing the products and competitive products and that's how you decide what you're going to do and then engineering more follows directions where i was coming from hewlett-packard where it was an engineering driven company engineers at every phase of the management from the founders on down and we're building products for engineers so we were the market we could understand what made sense in our products and ideas for the next product that would you know turn the company hewlett packard around for 10 years might come from a low-level engineer wow so how how much how much does courage play a role in starting the company and getting part of something going against the bigger guys how big of a role does courage play wow i think it's like going on dancing with the stars you you don't know if you can do it and you're afraid to fail but i'll tell you that drives you to work harder and try harder than you've ever done in your life you do have to you do have to be competent you have to seem competent that's important you have to appear confident um as far as we didn't take really great risks i mean i sold my calculator it was my most valuable thing but i sold it for 500 in theory and i knew that the next month we were coming out with the hp 67 a better one and my employee price would be 370. so it didn't take a financial risk um yeah finally leaving hewlett-packard going out on my own it was a big risk but it was a risk with a real strong belief that the product was good so when we see the company from outside and we see apple and we're using our iphone our ipad you know all this stuff that we use when you first got started with the apple what was the work ethic like i mean how did you guys work with the hours and the sacrifices how did that take part in this taking place at first we had really no such thing as hours i mean pretty much everybody was in full day times of course when you're a programmer or an engineer sometimes you don't have something fixed at 5 pm 6 pm 8 pm midnight 2 a.m you go home very tired maybe you get it fixed maybe you don't that's just the life of an engineer my whole life ever even when i was just a young student loved it loved electronics and nothing else i'd stay up as late as i could when something was close to being done that's what drives you especially software so we just had kind of one room much smaller than this and about five desks at first and then seven everybody could see everybody and we got another little tiny office because we hired a guy that um the other people didn't like too much so to get him out of their way i loved him he was he was the guy that um known as captain crunch with the blue boxes that called all over the world had them develop a great phone board they could make a phone call in the early days of modems could make a phone call on your phone like it was before modems really or before modems that we know today that can dial it would dial a call and listen is it busy is it answering it could listen to the tones and tell like a human could and that wasn't going to happen in modems for another 12 years this thing was way ahead of its time it could so it could dial it could send out tones and it could listen to tones and he set it up he wrote programs where we dial 5000 calls a day trying to crack some codes successfully so so work i think there's no hours when you start a gig there's no such thing as you're working nine to five this and this and you're working your tail off to start the company off no any yeah any any you know entrepreneurship because i've been around so many i love young people that are like we were like steve and i starting their own little business and they've got their ideas and hang around them and to go i mean you always see it though they're usually young people look at the people who started apple look at the people who started google and facebook very young people just out of college you know and this infinite time in the world if you're really motivated to do something you don't have all the obligations of family and expenses and things that take a lot of your you know make it harder to come up with that time here's the difference that does make a huge difference you could never add up the amount of hours we would put into these projects here's a question about entrepreneurship you see one thing i see is you know there there are very common uh commonality similarities between people who win in different fields what basic principles would you say that is common in order to want to become successful as an entrepreneur what could you say to the guys here that are here for the first time maybe saying if you want to make it as an entrepreneur this is what you need to do these days entrepreneurship is taught as courses in all the colleges and usually it's a business level course so you've got all these business guys that oh my gosh if i write some ideas down on paper that's how you go about it starting a company and i my principle is no i i so many people in silicon valley got used to write ideas down on paper and then try to get some money try to get some money try to get some money like we can just buy the engineering for it no i like the type of entrepreneurship that has actually created working models here is an example of something that works the way we want it and we've built it and we've got the the talented the talented technical people that know how to do it and i think it should get to that phase and so the entrepreneurship it's a combination of the business and the technical um doers the technology people so competence work ethic business combined together yep and you but you've got to have somebody at least in the company that has incredible drive that just you know absolutely determined that you know you're onto something big and we've got to keep moving to get there and just about everybody in apple was that way just about everybody in appalachia yeah we believe we were really really getting make going a long ways making a lot of money in a very short time is a big big attraction wow what what what what what did you see yesterday when you saw you know you're seeing the whole thing taking place people coming up on stage going crazy guys wearing hispanics football jerseys all this other stuff you know what did you think yesterday similarities to how apple was with the fire with us in this industry you're ahead php's ahead i have to say but when we when we started apple we were a lot more subtle with um we didn't have award ceremonies for quite a while and you know recognizing the people's accomplishments um there weren't very many of us you know there weren't very many engineers for a while i was the one engineer so there wasn't a place to recognize accomplishments um i guess your name could pop up on a patent was the best the most it would be no i like that i was i was smiling heavily all through that thing last night because they had i was in the backs of people who take pictures and i wouldn't be blocking the way so but no but i it was really uh yeah it's really good to see i really hope that everybody out there is a real come-through star and you know i think you got to believe in yourself you got to believe that you've got the talent inside and then you've got to actually present that you've got to believe it not just pretend it so you mentioned one thing you said we recruited people to come on board that all were good at what they did so recruiting was very critical for the success of apple we did some recruiting we lucked out by having a few good people around us to begin with our funder was incredible at marketing whereas all these other little hobbyish companies didn't have anybody you know his caliber at all and you know my excellence in engineering was was well known and but then when we hired people we looked around we needed a guy that runs the operations he's the guy that when things aren't getting done and need a little attention he gets on their backs and makes the phone calls make sure they get busy so that parts of the company don't hold up mike scott was our president from the day we started till the day we went public you never hear his name but he was it was an incredible experience we hired very good um sales people and accountants right from the start we had quality people in the company not just a whole bunch of kids that's good that's exciting when you hear that because you know at the end of the day you're putting a team together and when i read the story about apple it seems like people played their roles everybody took responsibility in playing their roles yeah all the various disciplines were well had good people behind them and then i looked back after just a couple of years why is apple going so well and all these other companies every single other one that started in our little homebrew computer club faded away why what was the difference and really we had the good people in all the different categories you need that was probably the main thing for a startup absolutely that's great to know i watched one of your interviews in 1984 um and you were at your home you had your three dogs with you and in this interview you said this you said perhaps once a decade a very large market new market comes from zero up to billions of dollars within a few years a new group of people come out right you said this in an interview so when these groups come out what are some of the commonalities these groups have in common that go from zero to a billion dollars i'm not talking about the groups of people as much as i am about the industry a new industry gets formed and it might be you know color television and something comes along you know personal computers came along really with apple and when that that whole market the whole market expands so great that's when companies can become join the big leagues in a very short number of years did you guys initially think you were going to become the big leagues and become this 200 30 billion dollar company i mean powerhouse worldwide was that something that you you knew this was going to happen or was it vision you casted saying let's see if it's going to take place well if you asked us a question back then are you going to be 30 billion dollars in 2010 what you know i think i would just invoke um exponential laws or you know and say of course we will because money will deflate or you know there's there's a lot of different ways to come up with that but we we truly believed within five years we would be huge that there would be computers in every house that we were going to be one of those companies that doesn't go away doesn't get consumed by others we were very individualistic and proud of what we'd done and boy now now i realize how how lucky how rare that is yeah a lot of an awful lot of good companies start out and they seem to have all the right pieces and formulas and still drop off and it's it's hard to say why you know it's even hard to say why why myspace and facebook it sure is you know you you look at the stories of computer in the book accidental millionaire talks about how computers back in early 1900's the one that was designed the number they said is 40 tons roughly and when they turned it on in philadelphia the lights in the entire city went down when it would turn on this computer to go from a computer that's 40 tons to come and make a pc that's doing the impact you got to be a little bit crazy to think you're going to do something like that um a little bit that's true but the world was going down to where the computers were getting smaller and smaller using less and less power um doing much more work due to advances in technology the vacuum tubes of the old days took a lot of power i've got a watch with vacuum tubes in it and they run out of the cameras on this by the way can we have that you guys got to see this phone let's have the camera zoom in on this watch yeah when i turn my wrist explaining it displays hours and minutes the little three volt battery is boosted up to 140 volts to run those vacuum tubes called nixie tubes which are the display and um so in the old days things were high-powered the televisions got hot you know you took the tubes down to the grocery store to when they burned out i mean that was part of our life then transistors came along silicon valley was one of the big hearts of transistors and we had little transistor radios that ran on a small battery and they could run for a week on it and then we had chips and now with chips you could build larger and larger projects at first the military could you know make spaceships way less but eventually you could build computers out of chips and then the chips got better and better and eventually an entire computer was on one chip and all you had to do was design io stuff around it and so everything got shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and today we have the iphone and it's obviously a million times the computer and a millionth of power it's unbelievable yeah it is unbelievable but some of the steps along that way could have delayed things if they hadn't happened so starting apple i think was one of the good steps that really took the world quicker by spotting spotting little formulas of how to make things at a certain cost i think that's always the heart of it it's you know if you have the better price you win what would seem that what i got from what you just said right now is the fact that you know doing the impossible yes somebody's going to do it because somebody's going to come out and make something bigger and better anyway that's what it's meant to be you know what is the future hold in technology what do you think about the future i mean we have ipods iphones ipads what is the future hole with technology the way we communicate with computers is called input and output okay and it used to be just a big old typewriter and it would type back to you a teletype machine and then it went to the apples the apple style with just a keyboard and a video screen that could display things and then we got graphics a better output style a picture can sometimes tell the mind something much more quickly you know pictures worth a thousand words and um and and it allowed us to then drag things we got the mouse but the mouse is remote control when i want to move something on a table i use my hand the mouse was a remote control still it was a little more human but a little not perfectly there we tried to make the computer world seem more and more like human paradigms i have a screen on a computer we started calling it a desktop because everyone has a desktop it's familiar we were trying to make these computers friendly to the person that's afraid of computers afraid of the word and these days now we've got the touch screens i just love it i love even my ipod nanowatch just swiping along instead of pressing buttons it's just much more comfortable the way the way you use these things and i don't know why the body actually when it feels good about something i prefer it and sure somebody can type things on their blackberry whatever and do it just as fast but i don't know there's a thing in that you like you enjoy the way it works now what i enjoy the most these days though is on all my smartphones both iphones and androids i enjoy where i can speak commands into them because i don't have to think i don't have to think how do i do this where is this little program what do i click to put into a certain mode and then what do i click to put in some data i don't have to do that i just speak to it i'll speak to you know call janet mobile or i'll speak you know um navigate to ruth chris steakhouse in las vegas or make a reservation for rude's chris steak on the apple i love using the siri assistant make a reservation for six people at ruth's chris steakhouse in las vegas at 8 p.m tuesday night and it does it all and i just have to press one little confirm button it's all done on the web um and so this world's getting more and more to the speech recognition being better and better um you know what's the largest lake in california and i get the answer i didn't have to go into google and type things with my finger or my my keyboard i really love doing that what's your name so i i think eventually we're going to be speaking almost everything to a phone and you know maybe every single program that you applied app that you'd like to use on your phone will include its own little speech dictionaries so you'll just have to say the name of an app and then tell it what to do in its own dictionary so that the same phrase doesn't have to be me you don't have to memorize a billion phrases you've got infinite things that it can do i don't want to get into that we had a language at apple that worked that way called applescript what's your thoughts on social media twitter facebook what do you think about when you see you know facebook's twitters youtube i'm a poor person to ask about about those sort of things i mean i think they're very they're obviously so important and you get a lot of value out of them i get a lot of value out of facebook and twitter i just have time to use them because i'm so hung up in so much email and then i've got i now have probably 2 000 facebook friends that i don't even know but they asked me politely they said something nice about me and i said okay they're an apple apple fan okay and i've got 2 000 fans that i don't really know so now i get a new social media and it says you want to link it to your facebook friends oh my god so all of a sudden i'm gonna have two thousand people i don't know on this new one too no so i have to i have to leave those links out and those links are very important for normal people to be able to link all of your social worlds to each other and include them like i might go into just something that sends birthday cards do you want to get you want to link it to your facebook no i don't i don't you know it's it's too huge so i have to i have to avoid those things a bit and at first it caused me to think well they weren't really doing anything new that we didn't have before we had web pages we had email we had interactions online we had a lot of chat methods so you know what is it it's just sort of a nice holding place if you think back 15 20 years aol aol when it started it was macintosh only but aol was the first one that brought graphics to this kind of a world but you were in your own little private world with your friends your people your buddies and your little chat rooms and it was very similar environment back then which is probably why it was so successful in its day let's switch gears and let's talk about ron wayne um yeah i i read an article in l.a times when you guys got started and initially because you know you were younger in your 20s the industry may not take you seriously so you about somebody who was runway experienced i think he was on the target and you made him a 10 owner initially and you were 45. steve was 45 and 12 days later ron comes back and he sells off his 10 saying i want to sell it back to you for 800 that 10 today would be worth 22 billion dollars if he was still there what happened with ron wayne what was that story about i don't remember if 12 days is right but um steve came to me at one point and he said okay we're i finally hewlett packard had turned me down and we're going to start this company to make these little 20 pc boards for and sell them for 40. and he came to me and he said look there's this guy he kind of respected ron's thinking ron wasn't one of these arch conservatives reading all the conservative books of the time you know today it'd be considered a wacko but um but it makes him sound very authoritative and he had so much experience in companies and having stock in some companies and getting screwed by the executives and knowing how these things work and he attracted steve jobs so steve said well let's hire we can hire him and he will he'll do a manual for us he's good at doing manuals he sat down to typewriter and typed out a um our partnership agreement all the legal phrases and words and and uh i mean i don't know how a person knows how to do that he was incredibly talented he drew the sketch an etching by hand of newton under the apple tree for our first the cover of our first apple one manual and um and he was great i know he was with us more than 12 days though and so so steve's proposed that ron would have 10 so if steve and i disagreed about something ron could could resolve it and i met ron and was wow so impressed he knew all these different things and he referred me to a bunch of books and when i got home they were kind of trashed to me none dare call it trees and then that kind of stuff but um but um i really respected his ability to think and and to resolve things the right way so that was his purpose and then what happened was we got this order out of thin air to build computer boards with with parts on them and sell them for 500 each a 50 000 order and like i said my salary 25 000. this was scary stuff because now we're in big business and i don't want to make hewlett packard think i'm you know doing something behind their backs well what happened was we'd get the parts on 30 days credit build them in 10 days as i said deliver them to the store and ron wayne figured out that what if something goes bad and we don't get paid then who owes the money on the parts well it turns out that steve jobs had zero bank account you know zero i had zero bank account no savings account no nothing none of us had any wealthy friends so ron wayne all his money would be at stake so he was taking 100 of the financial risk for 10 of the company and um it was too flaky and he sold out he you know he didn't have a vision there was a big picture but it was so early with just the apple one it was hard to see where apple would go the apple ii really um changed the story and that came about three months later so so it takes a little bit but i think ron was with us for for a few months he was with you for a few months yeah so what was his reason for quitting outside of that did he have outside influence that said these guys may get sued these guys may be out of business these guys may have this i never heard a reason for ron quitting steve just told me he wanted to sell sell out and he walked away from it i'm so i'm guessing his reason his reasoning would have been good and he walked away from it yeah and very happily and um so is he an apple fan i guess that'd be a question every time he looks at apple that's 22 billion dollars right there i actually i actually talked to him now and then and he's um a little bit on the poor side so he's can't always afford apple stuff yeah that's what that's that's actually what it said in the article yeah uh it said in the article he now collects stamps and sells coins to supplement a social security income and you know you hear a story like that you feel bad because you know the opportunity was so but that's so common in other industries as well people hear a story they they come and they want to be part of the last minute they get afraid and they want to walk away from it well let's talk about this last thing because i know we only got a few minutes here let's wrap it up when did you know steve that you were there with with the big boys you were there where your competitors started saying okay you got to be careful with apple when did that happen where you guys kind of said okay i think we're getting there well what happened was the first killer app a spreadsheet came out and then a spreadsheet made this computer so valuable to any small businessman calculate all your income and expenses month by month by month make a change and see the bottom line months later that all of a sudden the shale sales shot up 10 times we went into you know heavy overdrive to ramp up and within about a year of that we had the floppy disk come in we now we've been in business two years and we were just selling so much that if you we didn't our stock wasn't on the market or anything but its value was pretty huge steve came to me one day and he said you realize that our stock is worth more than our parents have made in their lifetime and that was that was still a very early day you know a year later we went public and that was a huge a huge thing so you know pretty much you know it by the money you know how big you are but of course we were just but nobody ever said there was a for many many many years you know there was a better computer in that class than we actually have an apple computer if we can have it come up here guys if we can bring that appleton computer up here apple ii computer which was designed by you oh yes yeah very familiar uh and our first apple ii computer let me tell you an important part about steve jobs when we designed it i did all the computer stuff all the hardware all the software and steve's steve knew a guy that made motorcycle seats out of a phone process in palo alto and this guy could make some cases for us so steve actually worked on with an artist to draw some case designs up and came up with the general design of the case kind of like a typewriter very nice case very um very efficient and thought out well thought out the way it works so um we our first cases didn't have these little grooves here so they were that's how you can tell the very earliest ones but that guy could only make us like 12 a day you know we're begging him we're sending an engineer over every day to his house to try to get 20 of them and we finally we had to send off to make real plastics overseas we finally got that it saved the company so please put this in perspective this computer's power compare compared to today's computer uh probably one millionth one million yeah this one this one has for example it originally came with 4k bytes of memory now four gigabytes is considered small a million times more the speed of this one was one million and the speed of today's is of several billion so that's thousands of times more and speed call it maybe 10 000 times more yeah so but it did the job and it did it well and fun and did just what it was supposed to and and everyone who had one loved it when did his first come out 1977 we put this out i decided yeah in that 77 and it was um so far ahead of its time and it but the best of all is i built in a lot of game stuff and tell people computers should be fun you should have a fun element in your work i watched that video last night i mean that's really you got to have the people you know laughing and smiling as they do their job and talking to each other absolutely so so we can put this up here so question about competitors when you first got started how did the competition look at apple the day that they take you seriously your first year did they did they i mean did they laugh at you did they spread rumors did they was there a lot of propagandas i mean what happened when you first got started how do they look at you the the apple one was you know i developed that and gave it away at the computer club and it was selling pretty pretty well and we was it was really the best little complete computer for the price you could buy but one company in our club looking over my shoulder they had the formula so they built their next computer with a keyboard and a little video display it was called the processor technology saw it became the hot seller using the intel chips which i didn't use and they were too expensive for me so it became the hot seller selling up to a thousand a month for a brief period and then we had the apple ii which we knew was 10 times the computer that was color that was graphics it was games it was it was really everything and and we knew we had the hot ones so we knew we'd sell a thousand a month of it and we really have no competition for quite a while you know it was probably it was probably one to two years yeah we had we had a couple of early competition products but like i said they were just cheap by comparison they didn't have color they didn't have graphics they they were limited their memory you couldn't expand it i built this thing the way computer people build computers you could increase the memory if you don't have enough you can add more if you if you need think of a device like a floppy disk you can add a card connect it to a floppy disk so they weren't expandable and what happened was when that program the spreadsheet came out visible this is the only one of those computers the three of them that existed that had enough memory to run it so they had to write it for this computer only so basically everybody else had to go back to the drawing board and make computers that could add floppy disks and things and could add more memory so that was um that was a big lead for us just was an accident too we hadn't really thought this is how this is we're gonna we're gonna make sure that we don't you have to you know that we're well ahead of the competition because of this we just lucked out that's so interesting yeah but then later on later on competition once apples were really selling ibm was the first major competition and when they got into it they had this huge marketing arm that went into every big organization in the world and selling big mainframe computers but it was easy for anybody to buy an ibm you never get fired for buying ibm so they had when they came out with their pc it was very easy to get huge huge sales and eventually it took it took a few years but eventually um they surpassed the the apple ii in sales that's exciting so you know to wrap it up here we only have two minutes and something seconds here the people that got started initially with apple that did their parts that played their roles all of that stuff you know with the success of apple how many people i mean how many people ended up becoming financially independent simply because of apple when they got started first couple years hard to say i think a lot more become financially independent now because if you get a high up executive job in a big company your salaries now are going high but when we were a startup well there were five of us that really ran the company for the first three years and we pretty much had you know almost all the stock so when we went public that was what i didn't feel right about i felt that everybody had been around us was a part of helping i came from hewlett-packard and they had profit sharing every quarter a certain amount of the profit was given to the employees as stock because you as an employee should feel like an owner of your company and i felt that so strongly so i gave away a lot of my own stock to almost everybody in the company in marketing engineering jobs a certain level of job and then i gave huge amounts to a few key people young people that were in high school that helped enthuse me and you know helped write code with me in the early days wouldn't have gotten to where i got to without them and i felt they deserved a part of it too they shouldn't be treated like they aren't worth anything awesome i hope i hope php is that way everybody should benefit no doubt about it that's why we say php people helping people um 30 seconds commercial 1984 super bowl you know which one i'm talking about yes what was this i mean i look at that commercial i get fired up when i watch the commercial yeah tell us a little about that commercial i'd had a plane crash i'd gone back to college to get my degree and steve jobs i was over one day and steve jobs called me over to the macintosh building said you got to see this it puts a big pneumatic tape in the player and keys it up and it goes through that 1984 commercial and i've got to assume that almost everybody's seen it where the the young track lady with a red outfit throws an anvil and there's a big screen on the television saying everybody has to think the same you know kind of like the ibm world everybody has to have the identical thought contrary thoughts will not be tolerated and she throws it and it explodes and everybody's just gasping they say a new world is coming oh my god that was the most incredible thing i've ever seen the most incredible piece of science fiction and to describe a company ridley scott had done it and i said oh we're going to show this at the super bowl and steve said no the board voted against it i said why and he said well they had some some problems with the meaning and you know i didn't get that he said and it would cost eight hundred thousand dollars i said well by then steve and i were worth a bit you know maybe a couple million each and i said i'll pay half of it if you'll pay half you know and we can still show it and we should because this is us and i was so naive i thought that's how things got done but eventually eventually it did get shown that the agency that developed that commercial um they deliberately didn't sell off their super bowl time they kept saying we can't get rid of it we haven't been able to unload it but they were really making sure it didn't go and so we showed the commercial and that was very lucky it was a you know still rated the best commercial ever hands down for you're taking over a traditional industry which is exactly what we want to do with php steve thank you for joining us here coming on and spend some time with us honor to be part of you absolutely someday i need a php jacket

Channel: PHP Agency, Inc.

Views: 397,869

Rating: 4.887681 out of 5

Keywords: Steve Wozniak, Woz, Apple Computer, Macintosh, Hewlett Packard, Patrick Bet-David, People Helping People, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, Steve Jobs, rebel with a cause, tedx, tedtalks, the story of apple, patrick bet-david interviewing steve wozniak, patrick bet-david net worth

Id: nPlDoW0d4a4

Length: 61min 42sec (3702 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 13 2011

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