FAW #3: Steve Wozniak of Apple Computer
The value of constraints
The feature that glaringly stood out about the Apple story was the leanness of the product forced by the necessity of working within extremely tight resource constraints. Steve Wozniak designed the hardware and software for the first Apple computer and relentlessly optimized hardware in the pursuit of design elegance but also in order to save chips and money. He had an amazing depth of understanding of the guts of the computer through years of tinkering and building computers on paper because he couldn’t afford them. He would rework ideas in his head and find ways to eliminate extraneous chips to distill it to the most minimal requirements, which lead to cheaper and more maintainable computers in the end.
We’re faced with a very tight budget ourselves having bootstrapped JumpBox from scratch and taken only minor outside investment. This forces us to run extremely lean watching what we do and focusing on only the activities that advance our cause the most. This was a common trend across all stories that by having no wiggle room, it forced an evolution of the company and the product that has so far yielded a minimalistic, focused offering.
“You can stay an engineer and get rich”
Steve Wozniak turned Steve Jobs down when Jobs asked him to start the company originally. Woz loved his job at Hewlett-Packard as an engineer and was afraid that by starting Apple, he would get roped into a managment position and have to give up what he loved which was hands-on engineering. It was an epiphany for Woz when his friend Alan Baum told him “Look, you can start Apple and go into management and get rich, or you can start Apple and stay an engineer and get rich.”
While it’s true that the early days of a startup dictate that you play roles that aren’t necessarily what you’d prefer, companies grow and being in at the ground floor means you can make your own position later on. It’s funny to think that Woz almost bailed on the Apple opportunity because he assumed he would have to give up engineering and trade it in for a management role. Our headcount right now is at four (five as of next week). Kimbro and I conducted an exercise in the weeks prior to starting JumpBox where we actually drew a massive org chart of the roles we foresaw in the company and then assigned each of the roles to one of us knowing that at some point as demands dictated, they would be delegated out. This was a very valuable exercise because it helped us to identify all the functional roles and understand the hats involved and that they were only temporary coupled by being assigned to one person.
The Midnight Run
The “midnight run” as the Sloan brothers of StartupNation.com call it, is a commonly-recurring scenario in many of the founder stories. In Apple’s case, it happened on a roadtrip to the Consumer Electronics tradeshow in Vegas. Woz was literally building the first floppy drive and writing the software to interface with it as they drove to the show. He managed to get it working and had the code for the driver stored on a floppy. To test his work he tried copying a disk and ended up overwriting the disk with the code on it. This was the night before they were to demo the floppy drive. He ended up staying up all night rewriting the code and miraculously just in time the next morning to have the floppy drive working.
We haven’t had any harrowing incident like that but we did have a midnight run roadtrip the day we formally launched the company. We were in La for VMworld and left that night and drove across the desert to Phoenix in order to announce the company the next morning at the Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference. I definitely commiserate with Woz on the delerium one experiences when you’re running on pure adrenaline after having been up for 24hrs straight.
The importance of complementary founders
Woz and Jobs each brought skills that the other lacked- Woz’s technical ability and Jobs’ drive and energy were perfectly matched. While I would not place ourselves in the same realm as the Apple founders, I definitely attest to the value of having a partner that complements your skill set. There is a balance and centering quality that would not occur otherwise. And while I’m sure some startups succeed in spite of having a single founder, I suspect the great majority that ultimately make it have at lease two or more original members that round out the deficiencies in one another.