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Why Founders Should Emulate Wozniak, Not Jobs
- gallerytungsten 15y agore: "if anything his most important contribution was just general hustling." If you don't have "general hustling" going on your company isn't going anywhere.
- wes-exp 15y agoEven if we assume that Wozniak was much more essential than Jobs, the fact is that Jobs persuaded Wozniak to do the startup in the first place. And if I recall correctly from the biography by Isaacson, it took quite a bit of convincing on Jobs' part to get Woz to leave his secure job at HP.
- trevor99 15y agoYou're right it did take a lot of convincing and hustling. It didn't take product vision from Jobs to make the Apple II a success however. Look at all the products Jobs tried to produce through his "vision," they all failed until the iPod.
- wes-exp 15y agoWhat about iMac?
- jritch 15y agoYeh without Jobs Excessive attention to details I doubt many of the products of recent would be as well recieved by the customers are they were.
- forensic 15y agoThe Apple II would not have had a keyboard or power supply without Jobs' vision though. You're probably right that it wasn't the design aesthetic that counted, but Jobs' customer focus was still very important.
- watmough 15y agoIt's highly likely that without Jobs, we wouldn't have had the awesome velcro that holds the top cover of an Apple II closed. For those that haven't had the privilege, first move the monitor and Disk II units off, then grasp the back of the top cover of the Apple II, and lift up. There will be a ripping of Velcro. It's surprising that no one else ever seemed to copy this, and not something that'd ever occurred to me until now.
- peteypao 15y agoI'm getting tired of these YOU SHOULD EMULATE X INSTEAD OF Y stories... You should emulate Bill Gates instead of Steve Jobs... You should emulate Wozniak instead of Jobs... Who cares?? I would be proud to emulate any of these great men.
- trevor99 15y agoSorry you don't like the title. Article is about the misconceptions surrounding Jobs.
- Samuel_Michon 15y ago"Wozniak had no desire to run any part of the company, he just wanted to be a mid-level engineer (he initially wanted to give plans for the Apple I away for free)." "[Jobs] who was mainly given no authority up until this point, was obsessed with (proving) himself and was able to get an opportunity to lead the Macintosh team. [...] He grabbed the best engineers from around the company and put them on the Macintosh team." So the only logical conclusion can be that founders should emulate Woz, not Jobs. Clearly...
- kstenerud 15y agoSo what I'm hearing is that tenacious Steve failed a bunch of times before he finally hit one out of the park. Sounds like an entrepreneur to me.
- trevor99 15y ago"Founders today will not have the opportunity to learn the lessons Jobs did because they don’t have the resources and klout that Jobs had." Jobs was a millionaire when he failed a bunch of times and lost all his money. Are you a millionaire?
- kstenerud 15y agoNope. But I've certainly failed a bunch of times. And now I'm going for the brass ring again. Work within your means, but reach for things that are out of your means.
- trevor99 15y agoI agree failure is important. It's easy to start with a large fortune and end with a smaller one though.
- kstenerud 15y agoBasically what I'm getting at is: He had greater means and so could take higher value risks, but the basic mechanism is the same; it's just at a different scale. In the end it comes down to having the vision and taking the risk. And one of his risks finally paid off. That is the essence of entrepreneurship, and something to emulate.
- trevor99 15y agoYour stretching pretty far here. "Vision" was what led Steve Jobs wrong for 20 years of his life. Markkula knew the industry and knew what would work, Wozniak had the best engineering ability of anyone. This was the magic combination and what founders should try to emulate. It's not just scale either. Jobs was also famous and perceived as successful. He could be a complete asshole to people and they would still work with him. You should try that in your next startup...
- dy 15y agoAccording to Steve, you shouldn't be emulating anyone - be yourself. You'll never be a better Steve Jobs than Steve was - or a better Woz than Woz was. The key thing I got out of the article is how important your co-founder is - one thing Steve seems to have is that he recognized talent very quickly (Woz, Ive at the age of 29) and developed them.
- trevor99 15y agoOr he just got lucky and was Wozniak's best friend from High School. Which is the true story.
- sliverstorm 15y agoCome again? Steve developed Woz?
- dy 15y agoCome to think of it, I think there was something in their relationship that we might now call "development." There is the anecdote about how Steve "tricked" Woz into cutting down the number of chips to win a prize at Atari. Woz did the work, but it was probably Steve pushing him that made him consider it possible in the first place. Although Steve had ulterior motives, this doesn't seem too different than what we would say now of managers who were good at developing their employees.
- dporan 15y agoSteve Jobs played a minor role in Apple’s early success with the Apple II I disagree. Here's what Isaacson writes (p. 73): If it had not been for Jobs, [Wozniak] might still be handing out schematics of his boards for free at the back of Homebrew meetings. It was Jobs who had turned his ingenious designs into a budding business, just as he had with the Blue Box . . . . To make the Apple II successful required more than just Wozniak's awesome circuit design. It would need to be packaged into a fully integrated consumer product, and that was Jobs's role. For all of his foibles, Jobs was the quintessential founder, relentlessly pushing the business forward -- recruiting great team members, signing up investors, and polishing the product for a mass audience.
- trevor99 15y agoI noted that Jobs's hustling was important. His product vision, design aesthetic, and RDF were not, which is where most founders go wrong. Not sure you read the book carefully--many investors laughed in Jobs's face not because it was a bad idea, but because he had BO and they couldn't stand him. Also--Steve was lucky to be Wozniak's best friend, whom most talented engineers came to Apple because of. Mike Scott (the CEO of Apple since it launched the Apple II) is the person who built the team, not Jobs.
- ez77 15y agoWhat's BO?
- lindvall 15y agoHe smelled.
- personlurking 15y agobody odor
- jwn 15y agoIn the first half of the biography, it's mentioned numerous times that due to his fruitarian diet, Jobs believed that he rarely needed to bathe.
- microtherion 15y agoHaving read the same biography, I came to rather different conclusions: True, without Wozniak, there wouldn't have been an Apple I and II. However, without Jobs, the Apple I and II would never have SOLD. A company needs good engineering AND hustle.
- trevor99 15y agoAll Jobs did was get Wozniak to quit his job. Markkula was the one who got the Apple II beyond the hobbyist market which Jobs could never have done.
- jaequery 15y agoSteve Jobs was one of the hardest working man in the industry. Enough said.
- bradleyland 15y agoI cannot understand how you could read this biography and arrive at the conclusion that any one person should be "emulated". What I took away was that all components of Apple's success were mutually inclusive. It's unlikely that it could have happened any other way. You can pick a thousand points along the line wherein the events might have not come together as they did, and you do not end up with the Apple that exists today. I don't seek to "emulate" Jobs. I look at his life, and I hope to learn from his mistakes, as well as his successes. You should do the same from Wozniak's life. Likewise with your family and other mentors. Reading "Steve Jobs" reminded me of reading Watchmen because he is often cast as the "American Entrepreneurial Hero". But underneath, Steve Jobs was as deeply flawed as any of us, and that is the truth of our humanity. None of us are perfect, yet we are all capable of greatness.
- trevor99 15y agoArticle is just trying to expel the misconceptions around Jobs and say that brilliant engineering is more important than design & reality distortion field in a startup.
- comedian 15y agoWoz was the engineering genius. Jobs was the visionary entrepreneur. They both needed each other.
- trevor99 15y agoHe was not a visionary entrepreneur, that's the whole point. His vision led him to create product flops for 20 years. Markkula on the other hand got it correct with the Apple II from having the right industry knowledge.
- comedian 15y agoLet's see. Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Barack Obama, Bob Iger, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Dell, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Steve Spielberg, Michael Bloomberg, Stephen Wolfram, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Dick Costolo, Steve Case, Marc Andressen, etc. They all think he's a visionary. Should I believe them or you?
- dickersonjames 15y agoThere wouldn't have been a Markkula there without Jobs' ability to bring him on to the team. Ability to bring together great engineering with great industry expertise is more valuable than solely Woz's engineering talent on it's own.
- slimshady 15y agoa better piece for an argument on jobs ethos http://goo.gl/yHRct http://goo.gl/yHRct
- far33d 15y agoJobs without Woz would have found another company to run and another great idea to build. Woz without Jobs would just be some really good engineer inside some gigantic company no one has ever heard of. He even is quoted in the book as having aspired to that.
- trevor99 15y agoFirst statement is completely up for debate. Jobs did continue without Wozniak and he failed every product in the next 18 years and spent millions of dollars. Not something founders here can emulate.
- mh_ 15y agoIt's worth checking out how many of Jobs' "failures" eventually came to pass. Crazy ideas like the stability of Unix with an Apple GUI..
- jonhendry 15y ago"he failed every product in the next 18 years and spent millions of dollars." The Mac failed? NeXTSTEP failed, when it's running the millions of Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple TVs today? Pixar failed? Jobs' record has more successes than Wozniak's.
- rmason 15y agoTake Jobs, Wozniak or Markula out of the picture and Apple fails. You needed a hustler/product guy, a brilliant engineer and a great business mind for success. Jobs legend was created because he built upon his skills. He enhanced his ability to spot and aquire great talent and learned (the hard way) how to become a great businessman.
- trevor99 15y agoTrue, but the least important in the mix was Jobs.
- jritch 15y agoIn YOUR opinion. I doubt those involved would agree.....if Woz was left to what he wanted to do he would have been giving away products...... All were equally important in starting the company.....
- lindvall 15y agoBased on what? Building really cool technology that you decide to give a way sounds a lot like how many startups have failed. You've attributed arbitrary value to peoples worth when you have absolutely no way to know if you are correct.
- lparry 15y agoTake a step back from being the author of this article, take a deep breath, and read through the whole of this comments page and try to get a feeling for the big picture. From an non-vested point of view, I see an article presenting a point of view, 95% of comments disagreeing with the article, and the remaining 5% are you telling them they're wrong. It feels like you've got a bit of an axe to grind. You've said your piece, now it's time to just accept that not everyone (or in fact most hacker news readers this morning) agrees with you
- Tycho 15y agoWhat is a product/hustler guy? Thats not clear to me at all
- jritch 15y agoIt really all depends on what your trying to do yourself. Im not naive enough to think Apple would have worked without BOTH Woz and Jobs. Every company needs an innovator/inventor, but then what good are they if they have no clout with regards to how to get the product to market, or what exact product the consumers would want? Thus the title is completely incorrect. The company would not be what it is today if either of them had went solo, FACT. These constant articles/opinions etc regarding Jobs are now getting pretty tiresome. Love him or hate him, he was amazing at what HE done. Whatever happened to letting someone Rest In Peace
- ryandvm 15y agoThis shit is beyond absurd. How can anybody write an article with a straight face suggesting that you should emulate any of these people who were notable chiefly because they emulated no one? Can we get special flagging functionality to deal with this personality cult bullshit?
- pg 15y agoSadly, this is not one of the honeypots Wesley Tansey recently suggested I set up (http://www.nashcoding.com/2011/10/28/hackernews-needs-honeypots/ http://www.nashcoding.com/2011/10/28/hackernews-needs-honeyp...). As someone who has seen dozens of Woz-founder-only startups march into the meatgrinder of obscurity, I can tell you that if you have to be one or the other, you're better off being Jobs. Not that you have much choice about it though. If you're a natural Jobs you're not going to have much luck trying to turn yourself into a Woz. And vice versa. More generally, I'm tired of these articles where people make up a straw man version of Steve Jobs and then attack him. I feel like I know more about Jobs than nearly everyone who writes this stuff, and I don't feel confident making generalizations about his character.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- raganwald 15y agoI’ll say it again: Don’t follow in the footsteps of Woz, Jobs, or Gates: Seek what they sought.
- AdamFernandez 15y agoIs it possible that great founders can be different types of people (engineers, professionals, visionaries or some combination of the three)? Weird.
- ofca 15y agoI think , if startup founders were to emulate anything from Apple's early days, it would be to emulate THE TEAM. Founder-teams should consist of one brilliant engineer (Woz), one business guy (Markkula) and one design guy (Jobs). Everyone should be themselves, but for a company to truly succed, a perfect combination of people is needed. And a perfect timing. Apple had both.
- aneth 15y agoApple would not exist had Jobs not had the insight to turn Wozniak's hobby into a marketable product. Indeed he had much help to grow the company, but that help is a commodity far easier to find than a man like Jobs who could spy potential and lead those resources toward his vision. In his early days, Jobs was a terrible manager, a tedious perfectionist, a narcissistic autocrat, and an emotional child - yet he had the passion, charisma, and vision to see potential and make it happen. Because of that, all his negative qualities become charming quirks instead of causing him to be kicked to the curb for good at 20. He was probably rightfully booted from Apple for those characteristics, and it was far easier for him to tame those demons than it would have been for Wozniak to take on Jobs' charm. There's a reason there is only one Jobs and one Apple, yet thousands of Wozniaks and still one Apple - Jobs is a rarer and more essential talent. Wozniak was quickly replaced when he became disengaged - Jobs still can't be.
- pbreit 15y agoThis article and the author's subsequent attempts to defend it demonstrate a colossal misunderstanding of valuable founder attributes. The role of the hustler is being horrendously under-appreciated. It would be easier to make the case that Jobs was the quintessential founder. Jobs basically willed the company into existence dragging Woz along and installing Markkulla for credibility. From the get go, Jobs had an impeccable talent for finding the very best employees, convincing them to join the crusade and then getting the best out of them. The downvoting is warranted because the author doesn't seem to think there's a chance he's wrong.
- vorg 15y agoA lot behind success has to do with luck (quote from pg's "How to make wealth"). Perhaps Jobs was unique in that he was lucky in business twice, not just the once like most who succeed in business (e.g Microsoft Windows & Office), then can't do it again no matter how hard they try, even with a fortune to help.