With an upcoming Hollywood biopic and the record-breaking recent sale of an Apple-1 computer, Steve Wozniak's indispensable contribution to the success of Apple and to Steve Jobs himself, is often overlooked in stories of the latter. But what can we learn from the Jobs-Wozniak relationship and are there lessons for start-ups as well as some insight for success in life?
Steve Jobs stares wistfully into the camera and strikes a pose, whereas Steve Wozniak is lost in thought and concentrating on solving the technical problem at hand. To my mind, this picture seems to neatly encapsulate the complex and symbiotic relationship between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the two co-founders of Apple. There is no question that they needed each other: Jobs, the showman, marketer, and public face of Apple; Wozniak, the technical genius and problem-solver. There is also little doubt that we probably wouldn't have heard about Jobs without ‘Woz’, as he is affectionately known, and vice-versa.
A Tale of Two Steves
The relationship between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak is often characterized in the media as almost the perfect metaphor for two extremes of personality: exuberant extrovertism, personified by Jobs on the one hand, and introverted diligence and application on the other, summed up in Wozniak. There is no doubt that Wozniak had a great deal of admiration and affection for Jobs, but he wasn't blind to his faults and the friction that Jobs's style of management brought, particularly in the early days. His confrontational style alienated as many people as it succeeded in winning over and Wozniak said of the younger Jobs in a recent interview:
"Steve Jobs had a lot of these questionable things, like some of my very best friends in Apple... almost all of them said they would never, ever work for Steve Jobs again. It was that bad."
From Homebrew to Garage Startup
The two Steves met in high school, where they were both members of the Homebrew Computer Club. Despite a difference of five years in age between the older Wozniak and the younger jobs, they collaborated on building a device that could be used to enable free phone calls worldwide. It was Wozniak’s early homemade computer, however, that switched Jobs onto the potential for computing for the masses.
Apple Computer Inc. was founded in the garage of Steve Jobs’ parents’ house in 1976, with the name inspired by a visit to an apple orchard, according to Jobs. Recently one of the first Apple-1 computers made by Wozniak and Jobs fetched an incredible$905,000 at Bonhams auction house in New York, with the winning bid coming from the Henry Ford organization. The original machine had a price tag of $666.66, apparently because of Wozniak’s penchant for repeating number sequences, but it was basically a printed circuit board and very little else.Woz and Apple-1
In creating that first Apple-1, Wozniak’s expertise and technical input was significant and the foundation of Apple’s subsequent success was in no small part due to the innovation of that earlier machine and the ones that followed. The Henry Ford organization is proposing to display the computer in its museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Commenting upon the significance of the Apple-1, the president of the museum, Patricia Mooradien, described it as ‘a key artefact of the digital revolution,’ and she also added:
“Similar to what Henry Ford did with the Model T, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs put technology directly in the hands of the people with the creation of the Apple-1, completely altering the way we work and live.”
Both men left Apple in 1985. In the latter years Wozniak and Jobs were not as close as they had been in the early days, with a suggestion that Jobs allegedly refused to write a forward for his autobiography, iWoz. Wozniak, however, remained loyal to Jobs and determined to defend his legacy, particularly in interviews following his friend’s untimely death from pancreatic cancer in 2011. In one interview, Wozniak said that Jobs had revealed to him when they were very much younger, a belief that he would not live past 40 and this was something that Wozniak felt gave such an urgency to Jobs and his mission. Nevertheless, Wozniak believed that he developed as a person and the earlier confrontational Jobs gave way to a more thoughtful person in latter years:
"Steve Jobs was a very different personality over the time frame I knew him. I met him when he was in high school. And, back then, we played jokes and pranks on each other. […] Once we started Apple, he sort of had something he wanted in life: to find the formula to be an important person."
There have been a number of big and small screen portrayals of Wozniak. In a forthcoming movie about Jobs, the role of Wozniak is set to be played by Hollywood funny man, Seth Rogen, in what will be a high profile biopic of Jobs and directed by Danny Boyle. But however Woz is depicted in that film, there is no doubt that Wozniak played a pivotal role in the early success of Apple and that Jobs might not be the household name that he is without that symbiotic early partnership. Maybe the real lesson of the ‘tale of two Steves’, is that the secret of a successful high tech start up is that you need the diligent and technically-minded engineer, in the shape of Wozniak, who is prepared to occupy the back-room away from the distractions of the limelight, so that the front man can get on with promoting the business.
Perhaps the secret to success for us all is that we all need to be a little bit Woz and a little bit Jobs to get on in life: the technical skills of the engineer, combined with the showmanship of the front man able to promote our ideas to the wider audience.
Will Trevor is the Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training. Please click 'Follow' if you would like to hear more from Will in the future. Feel free to also connect via his Linkedin page, or via Twitter and Facebook or email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net
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Picture Credits: Headline Photo: flikr.com; Apple-1: By Bobo11 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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