• Join The Fed
• Advertise with The Fed

• About Us
• Contact

In This Issue

• Confessions of a Dangerous Broccoli Head
• English Majors, Decades Later
• How to Spend Your Time After Co-Founding Apple
• The Cyborg Army of Death
• Salvation is a Prophet Away
• Chris Tucker to Play James Bond
• The Fed Point–Counterpoint: You Just Stabbed Me
• What Would You Do-ooh-ooh...
• Loose Lips Sink Credit Reports
• Bowling as Symbolism
• The Wonders of the Undersea World
• It is Imperative that You Spoon that Fruit Indiscriminately
• “They” Watch Reality TV, Drink Coke Blak for Fun
• Behind the Scenes at MythBusters Headquarters
• Good Night, and Good Luck
• Campus Bureaucracy Replaced With Rube Goldberg Machine
• The Seeker
• Tales of the Inexpressible
• The Most Trusted Name in News
• It Swings Both Ways
• They Watch
• The Fed Index
• King Kong Returns

Andres Vedova

Andres Vedova

Andres Vedova

Andres Vedova

Steve Wozniak is best known for co-founding Apple Computer with Steve Jobs in 1976. He spoke to The Fed about that experience and what he's done in the 30 years since.

Can you talk about your involvement in starting a Segway polo league?

Yes. I was the first person to purchase a Segway as a real consumer. I've been very enthusiastic about Segways since they were brand new. I looked around; in the very first days, there was nothing. But soon there was a Segway group in the Bay Area. So I joined the Segway group, and we would occasionally take our Segways out for glides along the beach.

And we tended to come more from the hacker background, you know, the people who like to look for little, special things that are out of the norm, out of the ordinary. That's the main thing we had in common.

I started finding some of the places that the Segway was very useful. Certain distances around town-so much easier to just hop on a Segway instead of a car. It's like a bicycle. Just hop on, take off down the sidewalks.

Where do you park it?

I park it right next to a building. Sometimes I don't even turn it off. Sure, somebody could step on it and ride away, but almost nobody knows how to ride it well enough (laughs).

Is Segway polo a dangerous sport?

No, the learning curve is pretty minor. You have to practice on it to get smooth. There're a couple techniques you can learn, but you learn them very quickly. Segway polo came about because the way the Segway was originally designed, you needed at least one hand on the Segway-still do. Well if you have one hand on the Segway, you can't play sports like baseball and football. But there's a sport designed for one-handedness called polo on horses (laughs).

A couple of people in our group went out to a hardware store and bought some equipment that they managed to screw together and make some sort of mallets (laughs). Just weird little plastic mallets, and they bought a ball, and they tried Segway polo. Every time the Segway went over that ball, boom-it would dump the people. So they learned that the right size ball matters. And finally, they went down to Toys ‘R Us and found a good-size NERF ball.

I was out of town for the first couple matches, so I didn't make it until about the third match. I came out there thinking, "This is gonna be the dumbest sport." When I got out there, it was fun! I was sweating and sweating and sweating and sweating even though the Segway has a motor. You're leaning this direction and that direction with your body, reaching out to try and stop somebody else from getting the ball, trying to skirmish for it. It was the most fun I'd had in ages.

Are you an aggressive player?

Aggressive player, and I was actually a little clumsy. When the ball's there, I'm trying to get the ball, and I might be bumping around with somebody. At first, you do that. I noticed that the beginners try to get in, charge too much, and bump a little. And so I think just because I was a big hitter, they thought I was more aggressive. I really try to play with the rules and be safe and don't really bump people. But they'd make a rule about collisions, and they'd make a rule about rideaways.... One time, I hit the ball up like a golf shot, right over the heads of all the defenders, so they made a rule that your shot has to go through the goal within a certain height of the flags.

Then I was real clever. I'd be chasing somebody down, and they're going to take a shot on goal, they're getting ready, they're getting closer to the goal, they're going to take that shot! So what I would do-unlike horse polo, where you can't really do this-is toss my mallet right onto the ball and mess their shot up. And they made a rule against that after the third time I did it.

And I've got another one planned. My next one is a little push-button that hydraulically extends the mallet. I haven't built it yet; I need a more mechanical mind to help me out.

There's this notion in the folklore of Apple's beginnings that has you as the genius engineer behind the scenes and Steve Jobs as the marketing guy, each focused on your separate areas. How clear was that distinction really?

That's a fair description of myself. I was solo, I didn't have one other person. I had to work out designs: "Should we put this in that way?" "Should somebody write the code here?" I didn't have to make one tradeoff. I just built the machine that I wanted for myself. There was no idea to have a company. I was just building the machine I'd wanted my whole life, and I'd finally figured out a formula to do it. There were a lot of reasons [for that], one of which was that I had some genius; another of which was that I had some lucky, good inspirations; and another of which was that I had worked on several other home projects of my own that just happened to be exactly the right ones to converge into the next product, the Apple II, which was the one that was good enough to cause this whole revolution to happen.

Steve Jobs, calling him just a marketing mind is a little bit shallow because he sort of had the whole idea that these computers could be a product that makes a lot money, that makes a big company, but also that fits everybody's life and really changes life forever. He had this idea to have a company, and he did all of the phoning to check on stores that might want to buy our product, to get parts from distributors.

He understood technology; he didn't design stuff. He was way shy of my level, so he didn't participate in the design in any way, but he could understand some of the concepts of why this chip was good, that one bad. He was a person you could talk to technically, whereas with a lot of managers or executives that might be in marketing, you couldn't really get down to the technical. So he was a good contributor, sort of like second-level to the technology.

When you were starting out, how much of the way you regarded your work was "two guys working in a garage," and how much of it was "we're going to change the world and make a huge company?"

There's a bit of a mistaken image that comes from the phrase "started in a garage." Everybody thinks, "Oh my God, you set up the workings of a company: telephones, chairs, desks, and all this stuff," like the way Hewlett and Packard had done it. Turns out that we had products before we had a company. I designed the computers and gave them away, and then Steve came and said, "Why don't we start a company to sell them?" So that came second, and the company wasn't really in the garage.

All of the design that I did was in my cubicle at Hewlett-Packard. They turned me down five times, by the way; I wanted it to be a Hewlett-Packard product. I did it all in my cubicle at Hewlett-Packard, or I did it at home. I did it on nights, weekends, vacations, that sort of thing. The garage did become dear to our hearts for a while, but that was later in the game. The computers were not manufactured in the garage; they were built at a company in Santa Clara. We would drive them to the garage, hook them up, and test them. The ones that worked, we put in a box. We didn't have room in the living room-that's the only reason [we were in the garage]. We'd drive the boxes of good computers down to a store, and they would pay us cash. We had thirty days' credit on the parts, so that's how we ran the company with no money.

So the garage had sort of a minor importance, but it could have been any room in the house, and it didn't even have a telephone. It wasn't a company; it was a staging area. But it was still dear to our hearts. It was where we would bring people to talk to them, to show them what the Apple II was going to look like, for example.

Apple, obviously, became very successful, and so you made a lot of money. How would you describe the experience, at a young age, of having this big change in your life where you were all of a sudden successful and making a lot money?

I was probably not the normal. Most people make a lot of money, and then they use it to make more money. I was one of those people that grew up with a social mind. I never wanted to run things. I never wanted to direct other people. I wanted to be at the bottom of the org chart for my whole life. I had a lot of internal philosophies; I wanted to remain an engineer my whole life, and I've managed to do that. I didn't want the money.

When the decision came to start Apple and leave Hewlett-Packard for real, I said no. Then I changed my mind when I was told I could be an engineer and not have to run the company. I kept doing my good engineering work and thought, "Well, it's good. I'll be getting my work to the rest of the world."

That is a way to make some money, but boy, the amount of money we made was so much more than we ever needed. I felt a lot of guilt. I went into a lot of philanthropy at a very young age, started museums in San Jose, gave [money] away, helped the city expand. Those museums are still there 25 years later. I put my money into groups of people because I believe that if the people have an incredible passion to do something, they'll come through and do it well, the same as we had with Apple. In all those cases, all the museums and Valley companies are still going.

So they named a street after me (laughs). So I do not have big money, and I don't want to have it ever. I think it corrupts you and makes you a person that doesn't get along with normal people. My friends are not CEOs, they're not the rich people. My friends are anything from young people to old people to the homeless to guys that have interesting stories. That doesn't mean that a wealthy person can't also be a friend, but that's just not the crowd I want to run in. I want to be more normal.

Like you said, you're involved with a lot of projects. You're on the board at Danger [the manufacturer of the T-Mobile Sidekick]-

I'm not on the board at Danger currently. I was on the board, and then I went to the advisory board. I'm on a number of boards that aren't mentioned, and some non-profit boards as well. I even have a new company that just started up, and it's getting a lot of press in the financial world. We just announced a $250 million acquisition deal.

It's a holding company, right?

Sort of a holding company. It's so strange, I would never do it again (laughs), but I was doing it with a couple of friends. Sometimes you do a company because you like the people you're doing it with. We don't, at this stage, own any of it-the money that we've raised. We can't pay ourselves a salary; we can't touch it. But if we make an acquisition deal and it gets approved by our investors, then we've got something to play in the technology game.

So how do you spend a day? Do you have a single full-time job, or do you go between different ones?

For a long time, I was retired. I filled it up for eight years by teaching fifth-graders, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth-graders, giving computers to schools, wiring schools, connecting schools with T1 lines, then moving it to wireless.

And the Internet! I got onto the Internet so early that I got a three-letter dot-com. That's unheard of. I got woz.com. But because I'm a non-commercial person, I've always used woz.org instead. So I did that for a long time and eventually stopped the work with the schools.

I had a company that made wireless GPS products, and we were basically unsuccessful. The work is still going on, the products are still going on, but the consumer product that I envisioned, we couldn't build it well enough for that market. So we're marketing the technology to some government agencies instead, now. But I'm separated from that. And this new company-whatever you want to call it, holding company, blank-check company-I'm one of the principals of that. We basically just announced that we're buying an [integrated circuit] foundry. We're going to trim it down, fix it up, and go somewhere with it (laughs).

Steve Wozniak's memoir, iWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It, is in bookstores now.