Apple's forgotten founder still wandering in the desert
mercurynews.comThis might be unpopular, this might get me downvoted, but I have comment on this:
> But he cautioned Jobs never to forget that the money was just a vehicle for creating things. "But he forgot," Wayne says now. "He probably won't like me for saying this, but I think he got caught up in the business of business. He became so enamored with succeeding at this stuff that he began doing it for the sake of itself. He began making money for the sake of making money. What can somebody do with $200 million that they can't do with $100 million?"
That's loser talk. That's fully not getting it. Jobs isn't in it for the money at this point, he is doing things that matter to him, he's got a team of crazy-bright designers and engineers and he's pushing the world forwards. I'm actually much less of an Apple fan than most people, I think the Apple's got a lot more hype and sizzle than steak, but you do have to hand it to them for what they've done.
And Jobs himself? Forced out of Apple. Builds up Pixar. I mean, Pixar! There's a happiness-spreading company right there, maybe even more than Apple. Then Apple gets into trouble, and Jobs goes and digs through the ruins and builds this amazing company.
So typical loser thinking goes, "Oh yeah, well, maybe he's got hundreds of millions, but he lost focus! Yeah, that's it, he's not doing things that really matter!" Like playing penny slot machines?
Never fall into that trap. If you catch yourself making a loser statement about how much someone else has, stop yourself and be gracious. Not for the builder's sake, but for your own.
I totally agree with you. I'm the farthest thing from an Apple fan boy and have a lot of problems with their policies but it's obvious that Jobs has a vision. Instead of this guy admitting that he messed up, he's making it look like Jobs is the one that made the wrong choices in life.
Money is not the only measure of success but it is one of the measures. It allows you the freedom to see your visions through. If your vision is to have a nice house and family then you can be truly successful with little money, just enough to fulfill your needs. If you have a vision to change the world of computing then yes, there are things that you can do with 200 million that you can't do with 100 million.
> And Jobs himself? Forced out of Apple. Builds up Pixar. I mean, Pixar!
Also, before Pixar he founded NeXT, absolutely breakthrough stuff, though not a big commercial success:
I actually consider NeXT a commercial success since the company was bought by Apple, and NeXT OS was essentially the basis for OSX.
Yeah, NeXT got acquired for $427 million, and that was in 1997 dollars. Jobs personally pocketed $100 million in that transaction, plus 1.5 million Apple shares (and remember the stock has split several times since then).
He sold all that stock later in 1997 as a gambit, though.
Very doubtful that anyone ever made any money from NeXT, and that includes Steve Jobs.
I've never looked at a comment and then a username and thought to myself "wow, there is so much consistency in what you wrote and what your HN name is"... well said my friend.
Upvoted. That be wisdom, lionhearted.
Classic contrast bias. It's pretty interesting that he is considered super-unlucky when he is likely in the top 10% of humanity.
Number 9 in http://freebsd.zaks.com/news/msg-1151459306-41182-0/
This story is a classic case of survivor bias. Magazines only interview the people who bailed out of companies that went on to succeed. Between 1976 and now, how many people have bailed out of startups that went on to flame out? How many of them are perfectly happy and possibly wealthy?
This story is a classic case of survivor bias.
Not really. Merely telling the story of a survivor isn't survivorship bias; the bias would be extrapolating from this story to believe that his situation is common.
Or extrapolating from his story to infer that failing to take risks in an early-stage venture is a mistake.
The original Apple logo which he designed:
http://www.digibarn.com/history/06-11-4-VCF9-Apple30/images/...
The way this story portrayed Ron Wayne makes me think the quote on the etching, "A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought -- alone," might be quite revealing of Wayne's own psychology, which seemed to tend towards paranoia.
Counter point -
He was terrified of creditors, of debt, of risk - in other words of all the things that great entrepreneurs embrace and manage.
He was 42 and living with his mother at the time.
His role was to be the "problem solver" between Woz & Jobs.
He was to be the "respected adult" and provide guidance.
What if he'd blocked the development of the macintosh platform?
What if he'd blocked jobs from coming back?
Just useless after-lunch daydreaming, but my point is this guy looks more like a bullet Apple dodged, than a sure fire loser of billions . . .
John Draper (a.k.a. Cap'n Crunch) is another of Apple's early core contributors who managed to slip through the cracks. Not directly or officially part of Apple, but arguably way more involved in the genesis and early success of Apple than Ron Wayne. Now he lives out of a van and has been to jail several times.
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB116863379291775523-lMy...
Wow.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. should pool some money and fund some sort of Social Security for aging hackers.
A core Linux kernel hacker and an IBM employee was kicked out of his home, and made homeless while he worked on Linux. He was too sick to keep his job, so they let him go. He lived out of his car when I heard of him last, and last year someone heard me speak of him on IRC and messaged me in private to say he was on his death bed.
I wont discuss him further out of respect to him, but stuff happens, even to people with "jobs".
"to continue reading, subscribe now"
Uh... no.
I found this link that gives you the full article for some reason: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB116863379291775523-_E...
This actually came up in Woz's Founders at Work interview:
http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
Livingston: What about Ron Wayne? Wasn't he wasn't one of the founders?
Wozniak: Yes, but not when we incorporated as a real company. We had two phases. One was as a partnership with Steve Jobs for the Apple I and then for the Apple II, we became a corporation, Apple Computer Incorporated.
Steve knew Ron at Atari and liked him. Ron was a super conservative guy. I didn't know anything about politics of any sort; I avoided it. But he had read all these right-wing books like "None Dare Call it Treason" and he could rattle the stuff off. I didn't realize it until later.
He had instant answers to everything. He had experience with businesses and times he'd been gypped out of stock deals. He always had something very quick to say and, wow, it sounded like he was very knowledgeable about this stuff. He sat down at a typewriter and typed our partnership contract right out of his head using lawyer type words. I just thought, "How do you know what to say, all rights and privileges and all the different words that are in there"—I don't even know what they are. He did an etching of Newton under the apple tree for the cover of our Apple I manual. He wrote the manual. So he helped in a number of ways. Steve had 45% of this partnership, I had 45%, and Ron had 10% because both of us agreed that we could trust him to resolve any dispute, and we would trust his judgment.
Then what happened was that we were going to sell PC boards for $20 each and fund it out of our own pockets. I sold my HP calculator, Steve sold his van, so we had a few hundred bucks each. Then Steve got the $50,000 order. Over at the company that was making our PC board, as soon as the PC boards were made, they opened up a closet that had our parts and it started a 30-day clock ticking. We had 30 days to pay for the parts. The parts got stuffed into the computers, we made them work, we delivered them to the store and got paid in cash. The parts suppliers—the distributors in Mountain View—had checked with the store owner and knew that he was going to pay us. So basically, we didn't have the credit; he was good for it. But, here was the problem: What if he didn't accept them one time or didn't pay us? We would owe a ton of money on those chips.
I had no money and Steve had no money. We didn't own cars, we didn't have savings accounts, we didn't have houses. So Ron Wayne figured they'd come after him for his golden nuggets that he kept under his mattress. (He actually tells me it was in a safe—but he was afraid they'd come and get his gold.) So he sold out. It was too risky for him, so he sold out his 10% of Apple to us for a few hundred bucks. Maybe $600, maybe $800, maybe $300, but a few hundred bucks. And this was even when we had an Apple II designed and were heading toward future business. He was just scared that something was going to catch him.
> I thought if I stayed with Apple I was going to wind up the richest man in the cemetery.
Maybe he's right. If you're the type to worry - and everyone has that to some extent - it is very stressful.
I think you need to get to the point where it's in the lap of the gods; you just do your thing and the outcome does its thing. I am a leaf on the wind Doesn't Steve Jobs have some non-attachment/buddhist/meditation thing? Like he doesn't have any furniture (or didn't at one point).
Wayne insists he has no regrets about the choice he made
Fair enough, but I am going to regret it for him. 22 billion dollars. That's twice as much as eleventy billion!
I don't know what type of investment apple had but if he did stay wouldn't he's 10% have been diluted by future investment?
Given that Steve Jobs' net worth is $5.5 billion (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs), that number does seem deliberately misleading.
5 billion. 22 billion. Who cares what number comes in front of all those zeroes! It's the zeroes that matter. Once you start getting up in to the tens of millions I can't even imagine how to spend it all.
See, I understand if you meant "how to spend it all on my desires for luxuries."
But if you truly meant "how to spend it all," I disagree with you. Every day, I think of a new company that would make the world a slightly better place. Every day, I wish I had 50 billion dollars so I could call my manager up, tell him "you have 3 million, find someone who can solve this problem," and have it done.
Hey, just building a worldwide cellphone network with enough bandwidth to not suck and decent international rates could take up more money than I could ever possibly earn.
Dream big.
Well, doing good in the world with charities can get expensive. Or building space vehicles... I got plenty of ideas if I ever get that kind of money.
You start investing in things. You'd be amazed how fast the money can go.
And much of that sum is from the sale of Pixar to Disney.
Jobs has 138 million shares of DIS; currently valued at ~$4b.
He is famous for one of the worst trades in history with his Apple stock. In 2003 he accepted a safe but low returning investment in exchange for his 55 million Apple stock options. This stock would now be valued at ~$13 billion.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/36615-how-steve-jobs-lost-ov...
Serious question:
What's their rationale for forming a partnership and not incorporating right away as a means of protecting personal assets? Was the official / lawyering process radically different (i.e. terribly expensive) back then?
I'm sure that the startup legal process was a lot less popularly understood than it is now. And even today people ask a lot of questions about legal foundations for startups.
But I think you can't abstract away the particulars. I'm sure it didn't occur to the Steves to spend money to protect their assets, because they didn't have any. Assets or money, that is. And this fellow Ron could have done so, but perhaps it didn't occur to him because he was too busy burying gold nuggets in his backyard and cleaning his weapons collection.
The early history of Apple is such a fun story. I now have this awesome vision of the Apple cofounders as the bowling team from The Big Lebowski.
My guess is that incorporation would have included a fee of several hundred to a thousand dollars - money they totally didn't have. Note they incorporated with the Apple II, after they'd had some revenue come in.
Could've been there was no LLC option back in the 1970s, so they'd have to go for full-blown (expensive) corporation.
I think his attitude is wonderful and refreshing. It makes me happy to take him at his word.
I saw a story recently of a guy released from jail after some 20 years of wrongful incarceration, and his attitude was so amazing. Wayne reminds me of that. We can learn a lot from both - they both make me feel so petty.
I honestly don't know if I could live with myself. I just turned down a really great position in favor of a start-up I'm working on, specifically because I don't want to be in this guy's position.
First, how many times are you willing to spin the wheel? It was pretty clear that he tried to start a business at least once before, and it blew up in his face. That probably changed his outlook on risk-reward tradeoffs.
Second, it confuses me that this guy is living off Social Security.
"After Apple, he spent two years creating the model shop at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, then was chief engineer at Thor Electronics in Salinas for 16 years. He holds a dozen patents, but he has never had the money to develop them into products."
Being a chief anything for 16 years in the Valley, I would think should let you sock enough away for a comfortable retirement, even investing conservatively. I suspect this guy is just bad at managing money all around, which he pretty much admits.
"I don't know why, it just never happened. It's probably because I'm not the businessman I should be."
Salinas isn't in Silicon Valley, it's in the Salinas Valley. It's mostly an agricultural area, and incomes are much lower.
You don't know though - by the guys own admission he isn't a great business man. He might have driven the fledgling Apple into the ground by making some poor choices.
As for your own choice - go for it - you can't win if you ain't in the game.
My comment was not a judgement statement about him (sorry if it sounded that way). It was really a statement about myself: I would really have a hard time not "what if'ing" myself to death if I were in that situation.
I actually have a lot of respect for anybody who could find peace after that.
It's an interesting yet sad story, showing how a single decision, which probably seemed completely rational at the time, can make or break your future prospects.
Ron Wayne's conservative disposition probably helped him a great deal up to the point of selling out of Apple, but counted against him subsequently. None of us can know the future, and we can only rely upon previous experience to estimate the possible outcomes which a decision might have.
Like what Mike Shuster said on Jason Calacanis' interview (or rephrased), "You have to give up your current job, be passionate on what you're doing with this startup, and then believe that it's going to work no matter what." Ok, I didn't say it right, but you get the point.
One of the most interesting aspects of this story for me is that the guy was single and living with his mother. His risk profile should have been ideal for keeping his stake in the company.
Bad luck couldn't get any worse than this, I suppose.
I wonder why Jobs or Woz never gifted a tiny fraction of their shares in Apple at a later point to Wayne, as a token of appreciation (if tiny). It would have been a nice gesture.
Woz gave away a lot of his shares to early employees pre-IPO because he felt it was unfair that they didn't get any from the company. I suspect that by 1980, most of those employees did a lot more than Ron Wayne to make Apple what it was.
> I wonder why Jobs or Woz never gifted a tiny fraction of their shares in Apple at a later point to Wayne. It would have certainly been a nice gesture.
everyone wants to be charitable with someone else's money...
Why on earth would they give him one red cent more? He sold his shares. He wanted out. Not only that, but if the Founders of Work story quoted earlier is correct, Jobs and Woz spent money to buy him out at a time when they couldn't afford it. They took all the risk, and he consciously avoided it. You make a conservative move to avoid risk, then you lose out on possible paydays.