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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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