11 ms·

Employee #1: Apple

379 points by craigcannon 10y ago

robotmlg 10y ago
Technically speaking, Woz was employee #1 and Jobs was employee #2, although Jobs assigned himself #0 and always had 0 printed on his badge.
- _RPM 10y ago
  Employee is a legal term, were they really employees?
  - Alupis 10y ago
    In a corporation, just about everyone is considered an employee of the company (in the legal sense), including major shareholders who do work at the company, as Jobs and Woz did. It's part of the protections provided by incorporation.
    - cmdrfred 10y ago
      Yup, thats why you can take with a grain of salt when someone says something like "We'd like to pay you more, but startup just isn't profitable enough", that doesn't mean the owner isn't taking a nice salary away from the place.
- ohitsdom 10y ago
  This is a series of interviews they are doing with early employees, meaning non-founders.
  - robotmlg 10y ago
    I know, and it's a great series. I just always liked this story about Jobs.
- dghughes 10y ago
  Was that to one-up Woz? I figured Woz as an electronics engineer would prefer 0 for technical reason (i.e. 0 to 9 or binary 0) and he's such a math freak too.
  - 27182818284 10y ago
    In the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, there is a scene where WoZ doesn't really care about the employee number but Steve does. That seems most likely to me having read iWoz too.
- sjm-lbm 10y ago
  Not really related to the OP (except that it's a story from early Apple lore), but your comment about Jobs' employee badge reminded me of this: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=You_Guys_Are_In_Big_Trouble.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story... As a side note, reading through all of Folklore.org is a great way to kill a few hours next time you have a free evening. I'm pretty sure I've read through all of it 2-3 times at this point, but there's part of me that wants to read through all of it again. It's basically just a collection of Apple anecdotes, mostly about the development of the first Macintosh. I'm sure it was hard at times, but it does sound like a fascinating project to have participated in.
  - robotmlg 10y ago
    I always liked this story, also from Andy Hertzfeld: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...
- bluedino 10y ago
  And wasn't Mark Markkula #3?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- danso 10y ago
  From Isaacson's biography of Jobs: > An early showdown came over employee badge numbers. Scott assigned #1 to Wozniak and #2 to Jobs. Not surprisingly, Jobs demanded to be #1. “I wouldn’t let him have it, because that would stoke his ego even more,” said Scott. Jobs threw a tantrum, even cried. Finally, he proposed a solution. He would have badge #0. Scott relented, at least for the purpose of the badge, but the Bank of America required a positive integer for its payroll system and Jobs’s remained #2. Isaacson, Walter (2011-10-24). Steve Jobs (p. 83). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
  - exolymph 10y ago
    It's kind of unbelievable what a jackass he was in addition to being a genius. People are weird multifaceted creatures.
    - danso 10y ago
      I actually never finished the book because Jobs, as a character, was just too inscrutable. And I don't mean in the interesting, complicated ways that humans generally are. The abrupt shift from brilliant leader and visionary to petulant asshole child is understandable, even at the start of Apple -- he was just 21, after all. But the emotional/personality swings pretty much continue through his entire life, and it was just too bewildering for me to fully empathize with Jobs. Maybe if other CEOs were as highly scrutinized as Jobs we'd see the same kind of inexplicable complexity? As it stands, I enjoyed iWoz (albeit it was written as an autobiography) much more than the Jobs' biography.
      - astrange 10y ago
        That's the fault of the biography, which refuses to ever analyze him and seems to not even notice when he's changed. Not the only thing it didn't notice - check out how often people are blatantly misquoted, like where Bill Gates supposedly claims a disk drive has "too low latency". Seems like the actual event right before coming back to Apple, where he mysteriously becomes an amazing CEO, is when he met his wife.
- bluedino 10y ago
  Bill himself says he was #4 Happily, I was given my old employee number (number 4), and my new title was “Member of Technical Staff”. http://www.storiesofapple.net/jack-of-all-apple-trades-interview-with-bill-fernandez.html http://www.storiesofapple.net/jack-of-all-apple-trades-inter...
  - jloughry 10y ago
    'Member of the Technical Staff' was traditionally the only job title at Bell Labs; it didn't matter if you were a technician or director, you had the same job title.
aresant 10y ago
I've always considered Job's advertising campaign - "Here's to the Crazy Ones" - which announced his return and Apple's new direction to be such a masterpiece because it was so PERSONAL to Jobs. A recognition of what it had taken to START apple and the recognition that to survive, and thrive, they would need to get back to those roots, toss the beige boxes to the wind, devil may care here comes the blue bomdi iMacs dammit! Fernandez' quote puts a finger on it: "It wasn’t like this glamorous thing. It was this huge risk. Basically people would say, “Why would you quit Hewlett-Packard to go work for a couple of lame ass guys, you know, one of whom is like this hippy guy who wears Birkenstocks and torn jeans and dropped out of school and had to sell a beaten up VW van to just afford to get started on this. . . The short way of saying this, I guess, is there was no startup culture." And as much of an egoist as Jobs was he nevertheless realized that he had to squarely define & embed that culture of "be crazy / think different" into Apple, and make it bigger than just more to the Jobs' mythos: "According to Jobs’s biography, two versions were created before it first aired: one with Richard Dreyfuss voiceover, and one with Steve Jobs voiceover.[5] In the morning of the first air date, Jobs decided to go with the Dreyfuss version, stating that it was about Apple." (1) (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different
- 127001brewer 10y ago
  After Jobs' passing, didn't Apple air the version with his voiceover?
  - DarthMader 10y ago
    It was released on YouTube 2 years before his death. They haven't aired it as a commercial on tv at all
- vacri 10y ago
  That slogan always bothered me. It was only 'Here's to the Crazy Ones who had Mainstream Success', and relied on Survivor Bias. There is no place in that sentiment for a person like Stallman, or from another angle, a person like Trump.
GuiA 10y ago
One of the first projects they collaborated on was this huge sign of a hand with the middle finger raised. It was a huge cloth poster and they put it up on the roof of our school and weighted the ends with rocks, I think. This was the end of the building that all of the parents faced during graduation. And the idea was that during graduation they would cut some strings which would release this thing to roll down over the side of the building and it said, “Best Wishes, Class of ‘72!” and it was giving them the finger. [...] So that was like, their first prank together. Sometimes, like when a student was entering the telephone booth, Woz would call the telephone booth and it would ring and student would answer it. Then Woz would say, “This is Ramar the Mystic. I see wetness in your future,” and as the guy is saying, “What?” Woz would throw a water balloon at him from the second floor. The guy would be all angry and Woz would say, “Well, Ramar was only trying to help.” These kind of remind me of those YouTube pranks where guys randomly kiss girls on the street or pick fights with people for "social experiments". Not really "pranks", just idiotic fun at other people's expense. Jobs got a printed circuit board made and he figured out where to get all the parts. Jobs often gets put down as just "the marketer" from Apple's early days, with Woz doing all the execution, but when you get deeper it sounds like Jobs enabled a lot of the logistics, supply chain, etc. Without him, Woz's prototype would have remained just that - a one off. In this light, Woz almost appears as the "idea guy" (where idea includes initial concept + first execution), whereas Jobs is the one who made it a viable product and company.
- dpark 10y ago
  > Not really "pranks", just idiotic fun at other people's expense. The middle finger thing is really not at someone else's expense. It's a dumb prank. The water balloon thing is a bit more mean spirited, but it's still far more innocuous than assault or sexual assault "pranks".
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retra 10y ago
    A water balloon is mean spirited only because we've built roofs everywhere. Humans can get wet with very little to be afraid of.
MrBry 10y ago
So papa Woz worked at Lockheed Martin on super secret projects. I wonder how many people died as direct consequence of his ingenuity http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36978-there-s-no-business-like-the-arms-business http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36978-there-s-no-business...
bluedino 10y ago
Look at the diversity in the first three employees: Jobs, half Middle-Eastern, Woz, a every-day American descending from mix of a handful of European countries, and Bill Fernandez, a Hispanic/Latino.
- brandnewlow 10y ago
  Even more interesting is how they were brought together largely by parents making decisions to learn technical skills and then being adept enough to obtain employment at a top company, choosing to live in the neighborhood they lived in near other technical people with access to surplus parts, and then making enough money to provide their children with the space, time and security to tinker.
  - overcast 10y ago
    Yes, their story is not without its share of enablers. It was the perfect setup, with the right people meeting to create something huge. Most times, if you read into the background of the big players, you'll see a common right place, at the right time theme. Imagine where we'd be as a civilization if everyone had the those opportunities.
    - flukus 10y ago
      > Imagine where we'd be as a civilization if everyone had the those opportunities. Exactly. You have to wonder how many Einsteins we've had over the centuries/millennia that never even learned to read.
- somid3 10y ago
  Even more interesting is their spiritual background as well -- I didn't know Bill is a Baha'i -- that is phenomenal!
- macintux 10y ago
  When I accidentally dove into the ragey part of Twitter where Trump supporters are shouting about White Genocide, I saw a graph illustrating the percentage of white Americans dropping since the 60s and how awful that supposedly is. I've thought about trying to identify how many of the tech companies we rely on were started by first or second-generation immigrants. Apple and Google, obviously, but I'm sure there are many more.
mahyarm 10y ago
So what is his new company that he is starting?
- jdhawk 10y ago
  Google Omnibotics? Robot assisted surgery
bluedino 10y ago
Bill's story is worth the read: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/apples-first-employee-the-remarkable-odyssey-of-bill-fernandez/ http://www.techrepublic.com/article/apples-first-employee-th...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
HillaryBriss 10y ago
> The infrastructure was there so you could say, “I want sheet metal done. I want a printed circuit board made.” You could just go out and someone would do it for you. “I want to buy parts,” someone could do it for you. The ability to reach out locally and have hardware components custom made seems kind of important for the small innovator in today's fast economy. The speed of revisions and product evolution and all that.
- dbcurtis 10y ago
  Today that is Shenzhen.
smegel 10y ago
> We became fast friends. I got him interested in electronics and so… > Craig : Wait, really? I don't know what is so surprising about think. Jobs was not an engineer or even really a geek. He was a visionary and a businessman. If he had gotten Woz into electronics, that would have been a big deal.
- frandroid 10y ago
  The surprise is that Woz isn't the one that got Jobs interested in electronics.
ktRolster 10y ago
Cool guy. His analysis of his economic situation is much different than we'd do today: I figured that this could be pretty interesting and I was living with my parents and my car was paid off and I was very employable. So I figured that if this fell through that it would be easy for me to get another job and there’s no big loss, right?
- ericd 10y ago
  Is it? I had the same thought process not too long ago.
  - mroll 10y ago
    Indeed I am thinking similar things right now
  - ktRolster 10y ago
    Your thought process was, "I'm in good shape, my car is paid off and I'm living with my parents?"
    - ericd 10y ago
      Pretty much, except for me it was "It would suck, but I could always go move back in with my parents". The gist of it was that I wasn't risking much except for my time and a bit of pride, so why not.
m1c0l 10y ago
FYI, "the Hamurabi game" links incorrectly to http://themacro.com/articles/2016/07/employee-1-apple/[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamurabi http://themacro.com/articles/2016/07/employee-1-apple/[https... which causes an error 404.
- craigcannon 10y ago
  Fixed. Thanks :)
ojosilva 10y ago
> many people, many engineers are really great at designing a product but absolutely terrified to actually tell anyone about it or to promote themselves or to say it’s good. So marketing and sales are complete anathema to them. But you’re going to have to step up to the plate and do some of it. I agree. There's always a lot of talk about how engineers neglect sales and its utmost importance to a startup's success. But I haven't seen lots of literature on encouraging engineers to come out of the shell to (rationally) "brag" about your product. Not all engineers have the confidence to do it or are just plain humble - Woz comes to mind. A search for "marketing for engineers" only turns up content that explains marketing concepts and strategies to the uninitiated (inbound, organic, SEO...), but I'd like to see more on how to effectively step outside of your code editor, take pride and broadcast your technical creation to the world - for either economic or nonprofit motivations.
Schwolop 10y ago
Bill : Also, be prepared as either a founder or an employee to spend your life on it. Be prepared to give your life to the enterprise. Forget about family, forget about children, forget about your pets or your garden. It is going to be all-consuming and that’s one reason why I’m starting my startup so late. I waited until I could neglect my children without harm to them. Craig : [Laughter] How so? Bill : They’re out of the house now so I figured, “Okay, now I can do what I want.” I really like this attitude, and it's something that's on my mind too as I'm abandoning my kids by working 6 evenings a week to deliver my startup's first product. I hope there are a whole bunch of older entrepreneurs hiding in the wings, just waiting until their kids are young adults before jumping out into startup land with amazing ideas and a career's worth of experience to actually build them sensibly.

379 points by craigcannon 10y ago

Technically speaking, Woz was employee #1 and Jobs was employee #2, although Jobs assigned himself #0 and always had 0 printed on his badge.

_RPM 10y ago
Employee is a legal term, were they really employees?
- Alupis 10y ago
  In a corporation, just about everyone is considered an employee of the company (in the legal sense), including major shareholders who do work at the company, as Jobs and Woz did. It's part of the protections provided by incorporation.
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    Yup, thats why you can take with a grain of salt when someone says something like "We'd like to pay you more, but startup just isn't profitable enough", that doesn't mean the owner isn't taking a nice salary away from the place.
ohitsdom 10y ago
This is a series of interviews they are doing with early employees, meaning non-founders.
- robotmlg 10y ago
  I know, and it's a great series. I just always liked this story about Jobs.
dghughes 10y ago
Was that to one-up Woz? I figured Woz as an electronics engineer would prefer 0 for technical reason (i.e. 0 to 9 or binary 0) and he's such a math freak too.
- 27182818284 10y ago
  In the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, there is a scene where WoZ doesn't really care about the employee number but Steve does. That seems most likely to me having read iWoz too.
sjm-lbm 10y ago
Not really related to the OP (except that it's a story from early Apple lore), but your comment about Jobs' employee badge reminded me of this: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=You_Guys_Are_In_Big_Trouble.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story... As a side note, reading through all of Folklore.org is a great way to kill a few hours next time you have a free evening. I'm pretty sure I've read through all of it 2-3 times at this point, but there's part of me that wants to read through all of it again. It's basically just a collection of Apple anecdotes, mostly about the development of the first Macintosh. I'm sure it was hard at times, but it does sound like a fascinating project to have participated in.
- robotmlg 10y ago
  I always liked this story, also from Andy Hertzfeld: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lin...
bluedino 10y ago
And wasn't Mark Markkula #3?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
danso 10y ago
From Isaacson's biography of Jobs: > An early showdown came over employee badge numbers. Scott assigned #1 to Wozniak and #2 to Jobs. Not surprisingly, Jobs demanded to be #1. “I wouldn’t let him have it, because that would stoke his ego even more,” said Scott. Jobs threw a tantrum, even cried. Finally, he proposed a solution. He would have badge #0. Scott relented, at least for the purpose of the badge, but the Bank of America required a positive integer for its payroll system and Jobs’s remained #2. Isaacson, Walter (2011-10-24). Steve Jobs (p. 83). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
- exolymph 10y ago
  It's kind of unbelievable what a jackass he was in addition to being a genius. People are weird multifaceted creatures.
  - danso 10y ago
    I actually never finished the book because Jobs, as a character, was just too inscrutable. And I don't mean in the interesting, complicated ways that humans generally are. The abrupt shift from brilliant leader and visionary to petulant asshole child is understandable, even at the start of Apple -- he was just 21, after all. But the emotional/personality swings pretty much continue through his entire life, and it was just too bewildering for me to fully empathize with Jobs. Maybe if other CEOs were as highly scrutinized as Jobs we'd see the same kind of inexplicable complexity? As it stands, I enjoyed iWoz (albeit it was written as an autobiography) much more than the Jobs' biography.
    - astrange 10y ago
      That's the fault of the biography, which refuses to ever analyze him and seems to not even notice when he's changed. Not the only thing it didn't notice - check out how often people are blatantly misquoted, like where Bill Gates supposedly claims a disk drive has "too low latency". Seems like the actual event right before coming back to Apple, where he mysteriously becomes an amazing CEO, is when he met his wife.
bluedino 10y ago
Bill himself says he was #4 Happily, I was given my old employee number (number 4), and my new title was “Member of Technical Staff”. http://www.storiesofapple.net/jack-of-all-apple-trades-interview-with-bill-fernandez.html http://www.storiesofapple.net/jack-of-all-apple-trades-inter...
- jloughry 10y ago
  'Member of the Technical Staff' was traditionally the only job title at Bell Labs; it didn't matter if you were a technician or director, you had the same job title.

aresant 10y ago

I've always considered Job's advertising campaign - "Here's to the Crazy Ones" - which announced his return and Apple's new direction to be such a masterpiece because it was so PERSONAL to Jobs. A recognition of what it had taken to START apple and the recognition that to survive, and thrive, they would need to get back to those roots, toss the beige boxes to the wind, devil may care here comes the blue bomdi iMacs dammit! Fernandez' quote puts a finger on it: "It wasn’t like this glamorous thing. It was this huge risk. Basically people would say, “Why would you quit Hewlett-Packard to go work for a couple of lame ass guys, you know, one of whom is like this hippy guy who wears Birkenstocks and torn jeans and dropped out of school and had to sell a beaten up VW van to just afford to get started on this. . . The short way of saying this, I guess, is there was no startup culture." And as much of an egoist as Jobs was he nevertheless realized that he had to squarely define & embed that culture of "be crazy / think different" into Apple, and make it bigger than just more to the Jobs' mythos: "According to Jobs’s biography, two versions were created before it first aired: one with Richard Dreyfuss voiceover, and one with Steve Jobs voiceover.[5] In the morning of the first air date, Jobs decided to go with the Dreyfuss version, stating that it was about Apple." (1) (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different

127001brewer 10y ago
After Jobs' passing, didn't Apple air the version with his voiceover?
- DarthMader 10y ago
  It was released on YouTube 2 years before his death. They haven't aired it as a commercial on tv at all
vacri 10y ago
That slogan always bothered me. It was only 'Here's to the Crazy Ones who had Mainstream Success', and relied on Survivor Bias. There is no place in that sentiment for a person like Stallman, or from another angle, a person like Trump.

GuiA 10y ago

One of the first projects they collaborated on was this huge sign of a hand with the middle finger raised. It was a huge cloth poster and they put it up on the roof of our school and weighted the ends with rocks, I think. This was the end of the building that all of the parents faced during graduation. And the idea was that during graduation they would cut some strings which would release this thing to roll down over the side of the building and it said, “Best Wishes, Class of ‘72!” and it was giving them the finger. [...] So that was like, their first prank together. Sometimes, like when a student was entering the telephone booth, Woz would call the telephone booth and it would ring and student would answer it. Then Woz would say, “This is Ramar the Mystic. I see wetness in your future,” and as the guy is saying, “What?” Woz would throw a water balloon at him from the second floor. The guy would be all angry and Woz would say, “Well, Ramar was only trying to help.” These kind of remind me of those YouTube pranks where guys randomly kiss girls on the street or pick fights with people for "social experiments". Not really "pranks", just idiotic fun at other people's expense. Jobs got a printed circuit board made and he figured out where to get all the parts. Jobs often gets put down as just "the marketer" from Apple's early days, with Woz doing all the execution, but when you get deeper it sounds like Jobs enabled a lot of the logistics, supply chain, etc. Without him, Woz's prototype would have remained just that - a one off. In this light, Woz almost appears as the "idea guy" (where idea includes initial concept + first execution), whereas Jobs is the one who made it a viable product and company.

dpark 10y ago
> Not really "pranks", just idiotic fun at other people's expense. The middle finger thing is really not at someone else's expense. It's a dumb prank. The water balloon thing is a bit more mean spirited, but it's still far more innocuous than assault or sexual assault "pranks".
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Retra 10y ago
  A water balloon is mean spirited only because we've built roofs everywhere. Humans can get wet with very little to be afraid of.

MrBry 10y ago

So papa Woz worked at Lockheed Martin on super secret projects. I wonder how many people died as direct consequence of his ingenuity http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36978-there-s-no-business-like-the-arms-business http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/36978-there-s-no-business...

bluedino 10y ago

Look at the diversity in the first three employees: Jobs, half Middle-Eastern, Woz, a every-day American descending from mix of a handful of European countries, and Bill Fernandez, a Hispanic/Latino.

brandnewlow 10y ago
Even more interesting is how they were brought together largely by parents making decisions to learn technical skills and then being adept enough to obtain employment at a top company, choosing to live in the neighborhood they lived in near other technical people with access to surplus parts, and then making enough money to provide their children with the space, time and security to tinker.
- overcast 10y ago
  Yes, their story is not without its share of enablers. It was the perfect setup, with the right people meeting to create something huge. Most times, if you read into the background of the big players, you'll see a common right place, at the right time theme. Imagine where we'd be as a civilization if everyone had the those opportunities.
  - flukus 10y ago
    > Imagine where we'd be as a civilization if everyone had the those opportunities. Exactly. You have to wonder how many Einsteins we've had over the centuries/millennia that never even learned to read.
somid3 10y ago
Even more interesting is their spiritual background as well -- I didn't know Bill is a Baha'i -- that is phenomenal!
macintux 10y ago
When I accidentally dove into the ragey part of Twitter where Trump supporters are shouting about White Genocide, I saw a graph illustrating the percentage of white Americans dropping since the 60s and how awful that supposedly is. I've thought about trying to identify how many of the tech companies we rely on were started by first or second-generation immigrants. Apple and Google, obviously, but I'm sure there are many more.

mahyarm 10y ago

So what is his new company that he is starting?

jdhawk 10y ago
Google Omnibotics? Robot assisted surgery

bluedino 10y ago

Bill's story is worth the read: http://www.techrepublic.com/article/apples-first-employee-the-remarkable-odyssey-of-bill-fernandez/ http://www.techrepublic.com/article/apples-first-employee-th...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

HillaryBriss 10y ago

> The infrastructure was there so you could say, “I want sheet metal done. I want a printed circuit board made.” You could just go out and someone would do it for you. “I want to buy parts,” someone could do it for you. The ability to reach out locally and have hardware components custom made seems kind of important for the small innovator in today's fast economy. The speed of revisions and product evolution and all that.

dbcurtis 10y ago
Today that is Shenzhen.

smegel 10y ago

> We became fast friends. I got him interested in electronics and so… > Craig : Wait, really? I don't know what is so surprising about think. Jobs was not an engineer or even really a geek. He was a visionary and a businessman. If he had gotten Woz into electronics, that would have been a big deal.

frandroid 10y ago
The surprise is that Woz isn't the one that got Jobs interested in electronics.

ktRolster 10y ago

Cool guy. His analysis of his economic situation is much different than we'd do today: I figured that this could be pretty interesting and I was living with my parents and my car was paid off and I was very employable. So I figured that if this fell through that it would be easy for me to get another job and there’s no big loss, right?

ericd 10y ago
Is it? I had the same thought process not too long ago.
- mroll 10y ago
  Indeed I am thinking similar things right now
- ktRolster 10y ago
  Your thought process was, "I'm in good shape, my car is paid off and I'm living with my parents?"
  - ericd 10y ago
    Pretty much, except for me it was "It would suck, but I could always go move back in with my parents". The gist of it was that I wasn't risking much except for my time and a bit of pride, so why not.

m1c0l 10y ago

FYI, "the Hamurabi game" links incorrectly to http://themacro.com/articles/2016/07/employee-1-apple/[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamurabi http://themacro.com/articles/2016/07/employee-1-apple/[https... which causes an error 404.

craigcannon 10y ago
Fixed. Thanks :)

ojosilva 10y ago

> many people, many engineers are really great at designing a product but absolutely terrified to actually tell anyone about it or to promote themselves or to say it’s good. So marketing and sales are complete anathema to them. But you’re going to have to step up to the plate and do some of it. I agree. There's always a lot of talk about how engineers neglect sales and its utmost importance to a startup's success. But I haven't seen lots of literature on encouraging engineers to come out of the shell to (rationally) "brag" about your product. Not all engineers have the confidence to do it or are just plain humble - Woz comes to mind. A search for "marketing for engineers" only turns up content that explains marketing concepts and strategies to the uninitiated (inbound, organic, SEO...), but I'd like to see more on how to effectively step outside of your code editor, take pride and broadcast your technical creation to the world - for either economic or nonprofit motivations.

Schwolop 10y ago

Bill : Also, be prepared as either a founder or an employee to spend your life on it. Be prepared to give your life to the enterprise. Forget about family, forget about children, forget about your pets or your garden. It is going to be all-consuming and that’s one reason why I’m starting my startup so late. I waited until I could neglect my children without harm to them. Craig : [Laughter] How so? Bill : They’re out of the house now so I figured, “Okay, now I can do what I want.” I really like this attitude, and it's something that's on my mind too as I'm abandoning my kids by working 6 evenings a week to deliver my startup's first product. I hope there are a whole bunch of older entrepreneurs hiding in the wings, just waiting until their kids are young adults before jumping out into startup land with amazing ideas and a career's worth of experience to actually build them sensibly.