The Backstory: Two Steves: Nerds Create a Trillion Dollar Company

We all know about Steve Jobs and Apple. But how did he and his much quieter partner Steve Wozniak create this massive business that, like it or not, now controls our lives? What role did they each play in making it into the world’s first trillion-dollar company? And why did Steve Jobs get most of the money and fame?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, answer me this. Don't you wonder how people
come up with a groundbreaking idea and then turn it
into an international sensation, because those are really two separate
skill sets. One is creative genius and one is business genius.
A remarkable example of a pair of guys who had
both are the two Steves, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak,

(00:22):
the founders of Apple. I'm Patty Steele. From a garage
workbench to a three and a half trillion dollar company.
That's next on the backstory. We're back with the backstory.
All right. Imagine you're a nineteen year old kid with
an idea. You don't know exactly how to develop it,

(00:44):
how to launch it, or how to sell it. You
just know that computers are going to take over the
world and you want to be part of it. Steve
Jobs grew up in California in what, by nineteen seventy
one was called Silicon Valley. He's an electronics and computer nerd,
and while he's in high school, a mutual friend introduces
him to Steve Wozniak, a guy who's a little bit

(01:07):
older and a whole lot nerdier. They bond and they
start hanging out with an entire squad of nerds in
a local computer club. Before Jobs even turns twenty, he
gets himself a job at Atari, where he just tinkers
with logic boards. Later he said Atari was where he
learned the value of building something fun that people would

(01:29):
actually want to use. But as it turns outa Was,
as he's still called, is actually the guy who can
build all this stuff. In fact, in nineteen seventy six,
Waz shows up at their computer club with a simple
single board computer he's been building just for fun. The
nerds all flip out, especially Jobs. He thinks they should

(01:50):
find a way to sell it. So this is the
beginning a creative computer genius and a marketing guy with
a passion for this new tech. First board eventually becomes
the Apple one. Now to raise cash for parts, Job
sells his Volkswagen microbus and Was sells his HP sixty

(02:11):
five calculator. That's a big sacrifice for a nerd. Now, remember,
nobody knows them, so there are no venture capitalists banging
on their garage door. They're just kids pawning their favorite
toys to buy components. They get a prototype built out
and create a business plan with a third partner, who,
by the way, backs out twelve days later, worrying about risk.

(02:34):
He gets less than twenty five hundred bucks to walk
away or his deal. In business history. Now they call
the new company Apple. Why Apple? Well. Years later, Jobs
told his biographer Walter Isaacson that at the time he
was on a fruititarian kick. He liked apples, and he
liked the sound of the word. He said it sounded fun, spirited,

(02:56):
not intimidating, and he and WZ liked the fact that
Apple would come before Atari in the telephone book. It
felt right and it would be hard to forget. So
the two Steves set up shop in the Jobs family
garage in Los Altos, California. Waz says the garage was
actually more of a home office where they planned for
the future and worked on the first prototype. But it's

(03:19):
a thrilling atmosphere. They start trying to drum up business,
and that is jobs specialty. He takes Waz's board and
heads to the Byte Shop, one of the very first
computer stores on Earth. The Byte Shop's owner bites, but
with one condition, He'll buy fifty units at five hundred
bucks apiece if they come fully assembled. He's not interested

(03:42):
in kits. That's a big ask. It means Apple has
to actually build computers and deliver them quickly. But Jobs
doesn't blink. He takes the order. Now twenty one. He's
beside himself to make it real. He keeps saying out loud,
or I have a customer, but it's machines cash on delivery.

(04:02):
Jobs reaches out to a supplier who is willing to
wait to be paid until after Apple is paid. A
hobby is now turning into a company that pairs was
is wizardry with jobs, brilliance at storytelling and sticking to
deadlines for weeks, friends, neighbors, and the two Steves work
around the clock, soldering boards, testing with old televisions, and

(04:26):
lining up the finished units along the garage wall. They
deliver on time, and they get their first cash influx.
The Apple one is real, a sold product. And by
the way, if you bought one, you got a bare
bones unit. You had to supply the case, the monitor,
and the keyboard. You paid six hundred and sixty six

(04:47):
dollars and sixty six cents for it. But that same
computer today could sell for as much as a million bucks. Anyway,
from there, the company begins to grow like crazy, with
investors willing to back future growth, and then comes the
Apple two. If the Apple one is the proof of concept,
the Apple two is the real product. Waz designs an

(05:11):
all in one unit, ready to plug into a TV
and go. Jobs is obsessed with its looks, a friendly
plastic case with a built in keyboard, so it doesn't
feel like somebody's science project. It looks like something you
could have on your desk at work or even in
your kitchen. The whole idea is not to impress other
computer nerds, but to begin selling the idea that every

(05:34):
home should have one of these friendly looking devices. But wait,
how did Jobs, not Wahs, the guy who designed it,
come to create the company Apple as we know it today. Well,
it's simple and not all that different from inventors like
Thomas Edison. They both used other people's inventions and then
figured out how to mass market them. Jobs, a brilliant storyteller,

(05:59):
framed the Apple's story and told it with passion. Waz
designed beautiful boards, but Jobs saw a market and identified
their customers. He understood that even the name Apple, the
rainbow logo, the clean case are all invitations to regular folks.
He answered the question, what can this thing do for me?

(06:20):
I mean, think about what they did. No money, sell
the bus in the calculator, no credit for parts, use
a purchase order to get what you need upfront, no
fancy factory. Put it all together in a bedroom and
display it in a garage while you line up the
next order. His answer was always yes, what's interesting is

(06:41):
as complex as computers are. He realized the value of simplicity,
the name, the design, what you can do with it
without needing a complicated computer class to understand it. He
stripped away anything that could be confusing, and mostly he
kept creating and shipping new device to us. While Steve

(07:02):
Jobs had ups and downs with Apple over the years,
in the end, it was his company and it's now
worth a mind boggling three and a half trillion dollars.
Unlike Jobs, who was a billionaire, Steve Wozniak gave away
a lot of his Apple shares to employees early on.
Though he's still a multimillionaire, he says he never cared

(07:22):
about making stupid amounts of money. At seventy five, he's
still living the good life. At the end of the day.
The one thing Steve Jobs couldn't control was time. He
died in twenty eleven after suffering from pancreatic cancer and
opting for unconventional treatment to fight it. He was just
fifty six years old. Hope you're enjoying the Backstory with

(07:46):
Patty Steele. Please leave a review and follow or subscribe
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feel free to dm me if you have a story
you'd like me to cover. On Facebook, It's Patty Steele
and on Instagram Real Patty Steele. I'm Patty Steele. The

(08:11):
Backstories a production of iHeartMedia, Premiere Networks, the Elvis Durant Group,
and Steel Trap Productions. Our producer is Doug Fraser. Our
writer Jake Kushner. We have new episodes every Tuesday and Friday.
Feel free to reach out to me with comments and
even story suggestions on Instagram at Real Patty Steele and
on Facebook at Patty Steele. Thanks for listening to the

(08:34):
Backstory with Patty Steele. The pieces of history you didn't
know you needed to know