The co-founder of Apple talks about his influences—and how one early mentor set the stage for the tech giant’s future success.
Steve Wozniak co-founded one of the most important companies in U.S. history, Apple. On Nov. 19, he’ll travel to Kansas City for the 20th anniversary celebration of the Helzberg Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program. (For information on tickets, visit this website.)
He spoke with Thinking Bigger Business about his early teachers—including the mentor who played a key role in Apple’s early days.
Who were your mentors? How did they influence you?
My father, you know, was an engineer. … When I had questions (and) I got interested in his field, he would pull out blackboards. He was patient. He was a good teacher, and absolutely never left me behind in learning. He knew where my head was at, what level of mathematics I could understand, that sort of thing. So he was a great mentor.
My high school teacher had a better program than any of the local colleges in electronics, and he wrote his own tests. He knew what the state of our minds was as students, and what equipment we had, and he wrote his own material rather than use a canned book that is the same for everybody in the country. And that was something that I took into account when I did my own teaching for eight years later on.
A very important mentor when we started Apple Computers, the entrepreneurship-type mentor, was our investor, Mike Markkula. …
When we got funded, our funder (Markkula) had business experience. He had made money, he knew how business worked. He knew how to judge markets. And he started teaching us, A, what are the job roles that you have to create to have a technology company, what are the responsibilities of each person, how do you hire, how are you professional.
Really, he gave us the fundamental start that made us quite a bit different from a lot of other startups, in addition to our great product. I’ll never forget that. It made all the difference.
Mike Markkula was very instrumental. He invested, he owned as much stock as Steve Jobs and myself, but he wasn’t after any publicity or notoriety. He was more of a try-to-stay-low-type person and, you know, not have people know who you are and what you’re doing. So all the PR didn’t include him. But he was really the person that set up the company and the guidance, and set up our original culture, right from Day One.
Last year, you became a mentor at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia.
I am an adjunct professor. I don’t have time to be there very much, but anytime I’m there, I try to speak to students and serve as a mentor in ways of telling stories, ideas of what I’ve seen and heard that works, and preparing people for a future.
Because young people who are learning, no matter what age, even if you’re starting kindergarten, they look to older adult humans. They look to humans for the guidance of “Where should I go?” It’s very, very few people that can trust even online education just by itself. They kind of want human guidance to say where you should go and to be able to answer questions. So the role of mentorship continues right up until you’ve had a business success or two of your own.
You taught computer classes in the Los Gatos, Calif., school system for eight years. What did you enjoy about that work?
Tell you the truth, I had a goal my whole life to be a teacher. My goal was to be an engineer first and a teacher second. …
I had given computers to schools, and I thought, to give yourself is a much harder thing, a much greater sacrifice. So I started teaching. I just started, made up my class of what I thought was important to learn, to teach students how to use the computer for all the subjects in classes, how to take care of their computer as an owner of it, and other side aspects, like networks, how to communicate with people.
That was a very, big important part of my life. I did it for eight years straight. My course for fifth-graders would be 200 school hours per year, 200 hours in my course. It was volunteers, and the kids loved it, it was all voluntary, and I did it for eight years. I got up to teaching sixth- through ninth-graders, and I would also teach classes of teachers on occasion.
What’s the biggest unsolved problem in education today?
Taxation without representation. … Governments spend money according to votes, and the family of five only gets two votes. That’s the biggest problem.
Now, to me, in my own experience, I boiled it down—I could do much better the smaller the class was. You could never fail (with) one teacher per student. It was very easy to do an excellent job with one teacher per six students. I was able to go to 17 students, great, but 30 was beyond me. Some wouldn’t be paying attention. The class size was the biggest factor.
It seems like you’ve got the freedom to tackle just about any project you choose. How do you find work that’s worth doing?
For quite a while, obviously, I got into education quite a bit. And I have a lot of friends in technology, so every once in a while, I join a company that I think is worthwhile in technology. And I’ve had some startups of my own. Some did very good, some failed. I’ve joined companies that were huge successes, changed the world of technology, like replacing hard disks with chips. Joined some great companies, met great founders.
I still have a little bit of that going on, but a friend of mine started calling me from all over the world, and he was traveling and speaking. I hadn’t used a passport in 10 years because California is beautiful, but I said OK, my last kid had graduated high school, I was home alone, you know, big house and no family … Now I like to go around speaking, and I feel so good because it’s like I’m mentoring.
Your wife is from Kansas, so you’ve been to Kansas City, right?
I have been there many times, visiting her family, and Kansas is almost like a second home to me. I get there whenever I can.
For more information about Wozniak’s Kansas City appearance and to buy tickets, visit www.hempkc.org.
