Why Founders Should Emulate Wozniak, Not Jobs | Hacker News Reader

Why Founders Should Emulate Wozniak, Not Jobs

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137 pointstrevor9991 comments

Sadly, this is not one of the honeypots Wesley Tansey recently suggested I set up (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.

Thanks pg.

My intent was not to bash Jobs, quite the opposite as I called him "one of the best CEOs ever to live" in the conclusion.

My goal is to reflect on what skills are really important in an early startup. The Apple II wasn't a success because of Jobs's leadership or because of his design focus like with the iPhone. Founders don't think about Markkula's role in getting the Apple II mainstream. Furthermore, Jobs had to fail over and over, wasting millions of dollars, before he tamed his bad habits and realized what would work. Then again, I only know what I'm talking about from reading Isaacson's biography and doing my own research. Thought this would make an interesting discussion.

"Jobs’s most important contribution was just general hustling."

This is where I think you went wrong. You can have the greatest product in the World, and if you can't sell it, you're toast.

So the question is, who sold it, Jobs or Markkula?

Jobs sold Woz and Markkula on the idea of starting a company to build and sell computers, which was probably the most important sales job of all.

The most valuable skill in a startup is Jobs-style hustling. The whole article and your attempts to defend it are misguided.

Are you sure about that? I do not almost nothing about those early years, but I get the impression that what made the Apple ][ a success is that it got accepted as a office machine. It got that status because it had a case and a keyboard.

VisiCalc played a role here, too, but I think it came to the Apple ][ because it was (relatively) popular in business, and then helped increase sales, rather then that it made the Apple ][ popular completely on its own.

Now, why did the Apple ][ get a case to start with? I think that was more Jobs' than Woz's work (<http://allaboutstevejobs.com/blog/tag/woz/>)

"I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

-Michael Jordan

Was he the one who actually came up with that? It sounds suspiciously like Nike ad copy. In fact, it would make a very good Nike ad.

Yep.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45mMioJ5szc

"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly." ― Robert F. Kennedy

"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."

Most people tend to crave easy explanations as to why someone did X. They need to see their ascent so that they feel that they could have done the same if some variable Y had been there. I think that's a very human and understandable thing to do, but in this case it has gone into over drive because something has changed.

Steve Jobs was a titan in an age where recording information is quite cheap indeed and everyone chronicles the minutest details of their life in some way or another. (be it through email or facebook, we're all creating heft tomes about our lives) Thanks to the age he helped along, he has the unenviable distinction of being a human being whose complexities have been recorded and will be poured over again and again until the human beings shall forget his name someday.

I think I'm going to start flagging every Jobs story from now on. This has gone on long enough.

Don't bother you just lose your ability to flag.

Really? Interesting. Can you point me at the source?

Perhaps I'm being downvoted because people think I'm going to stop exercising judgement. I meant merely that I was going to be less lazy.

I haven't seen it documented anywhere, just experienced it for myself.

No, you don't.

Yes, you do, and I'm proof.

Ironically, the new algorithm does not allow people learn on their mistakes. Their upvoted score is silently incremented and that's all.

BTW it is actually quite valuable for new people to look through that article and read later comments about why it is bad. To learn how to read critically articles posted on HN and elsewhere.

Not to mention that Woz had an equal amount of failures..

What we have is really several different Founder styles:

1. Young Woz 2. Old Woz 3. Young Jobs 4 Old Jobs

Could you be more specific about Wozniak's equal amount of failures? Not quite sure I agree.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheels_of_Zeus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Festival

this failure happened after his initial success, not before

  Steve 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.

I 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.

You can't create the Apple potion without Jobs or Wozniak. By all accounts in the book, Woz would have just given his designs away. It was Jobs who realized the market potential of Wozniak's designs.

But founders shouldn't be emulating anyone. They should be doing what they're best at doing. And Apple's founders did this. Woz was best at engineering and Jobs was best at building a company. Woz was very skeptical of Apple being able to become a company. Without Jobs' early vision, the company never would have taken off. Remember from the book that Woz was doing Apple as a moonlighting gig and did not leave his job at HP for quite some time into Apple's development.

As for Steve being "lucky" to be Wozniak's friend, Wozniak was just as "lucky" to be Steve's friend. Without Steve, Woz would have probably been an engineer his whole life, working for companies like HP. Instead, he got to become a multi-millionaire and retire at a very young age, become a legend in computing history, and pursue his passions without the constraints of a job.

You're right that they both needed each other. You're wrong that Jobs was best at building a company. Markkula and Scott built the company. But I agree Apple would have failed without Jobs.

What's BO?

In 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.

body odor

He smelled.

I 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.

Article 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.

You can't separate Jobs' and Wozniak's contributions like that. Jobs deserves great credit for helping to motivate Wozniak's great feats in the early days (look how much effort it took to convince Woz to leave HP, even after Apple's initial successes), handling practical considerations and component issues, and forming the early Apple leadership team which eventually lead to Markulla's involvement. PG has spoken many times about how "scrapiness" is perhaps the most crucial sign of a successful startup; almost all of Apple's came from Jobs.

This is an incredibly divisive mentality. The word "balance" gets thrown around a lot, but it's commonplace for a reason. Both engineering and "design & reality distortion" are valuable for a start up. You have to balance the two.

You're always going to have power struggles in startups. That's the nature of the beast when you put highly motivated, competitive individuals in a room, but the smartest of the players know that with the help of everyone around them, their chances of success increase many times over.

This theory is not supported by reality. Companies succeed just as often with lousy engineering.

Woz was the engineering genius. Jobs was the visionary entrepreneur. They both needed each other.

He 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.

Can you elaborate on what his flops were?

LISA? kicked off the team

Macintosh? I'm typing from one right now

NEXTStep? considering the technology forms the foundation for OSX and iOS doesn't look like it flopped.

AppleTV? it's doing better than it's competition, maybe.

Apple Hifi? definitely.

Pixar? I think other animation studios wish they could as good as their worst films.

Over the course of his career most of his "flops" have turned out successful. He pumped millions of dollars over a decade to keep Pixar afloat. And it was him and his technical team at NEXT that turned the Mac into what it is today.

Let'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?

You should believe neither them nor trevor99. Look at the facts and draw your own conclusions.

Thanks for answering my rhetorical question.

This 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?

second that

Wake up and look around at how many founders are trying to emulate Jobs. This article is about looking at the facts--mainly that Steve was not a great founder.

According 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.

Or he just got lucky and was Wozniak's best friend from High School. Which is the true story.

Ive is much more responsible for Apple's current renaissance than Wozniak.

They were both lucky to have each other.

Come again? Steve developed Woz?

Come 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.

"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...

I'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.

Sorry you don't like the title. Article is about the misconceptions surrounding Jobs.

Having 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.

All 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.

Take 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.

What is a product/hustler guy? Thats not clear to me at all

True, but the least important in the mix was Jobs.

Take 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

In 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.....

Based 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.

So 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.

"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?

Nope. 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.

I agree failure is important. It's easy to start with a large fortune and end with a smaller one though.

Basically 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.

Your 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...

Steve's "vision" failed him time and time again. He risked his own money and lost it. He risked other peoples' money and lost it. And then eventually he made it work. It doesn't matter that he leveraged other peoples' genius and vision. It doesn't matter that he stole everything. It doesn't matter that he was a little self-delusional or that he was an asshole. Under his direction, his "vision" finally materialized, and was wildly successful.

Now I wouldn't say that being a narcissistic asshole is a good strategy or something to emulate (after all, nobody's perfect), but pursuing a vision through all manner of trial and tribulation is a worthy goal, and something to emulate.

The people who make the biggest impact tend to be those who spend years, even decades in the harsh wildnerness, taking hits and taking falls, but never giving up because they refuse to believe that it can't be done. And then one day they do it, or die trying.

These people look at a territory and say "I'm going to conquer that." Most people will tell them they're crazy to even try, and that it would already be conquered if it were worthwhile or even possible to do so. "Just till the land like everyone else does" they'll say. And then these would-be conquerors get some other key people to see the vision and the possibility. They all work hard, doing what nobody else is doing, or would even try doing. They fail campaign after campaign, but keep going, eventually seeing some success. And then one day the visionary stands on the tallest hill, surveying their newly acquired "unconquerable" territory, and suddenly they're not crazy, but genius.

re: "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.

Even 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.

You'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.

The 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.

It'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.

What about iMac?

Yeh 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.

Jobs 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.

First 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.

It's worth checking out how many of Jobs' "failures" eventually came to pass. Crazy ideas like the stability of Unix with an Apple GUI..

"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.

This 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.

It 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

I 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.

A 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.

I’ll say it again: Don’t follow in the footsteps of Woz, Jobs, or Gates: Seek what they sought.

Steve Jobs was one of the hardest working man in the industry. Enough said.

Is it possible that great founders can be different types of people (engineers, professionals, visionaries or some combination of the three)? Weird.

a better piece for an argument on jobs ethos http://goo.gl/yHRct

There 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.

Apple 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.

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