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Comment by dporan | Hacker News Reader

  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.

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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.

What's BO?

He smelled.

body odor

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.

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.

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