
Apple's forgotten founder still wandering in the desert - blogimus
http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-news/ci_15214122
======
lionhearted
This might be unpopular, this might get me downvoted, but I have comment on
this:

> But he cautioned Jobs never to forget that the money was just a vehicle for
> creating things. "But he forgot," Wayne says now. "He probably won't like me
> for saying this, but I think he got caught up in the business of business.
> He became so enamored with succeeding at this stuff that he began doing it
> for the sake of itself. He began making money for the sake of making money.
> What can somebody do with $200 million that they can't do with $100
> million?"

That's loser talk. That's fully not getting it. Jobs isn't in it for the money
at this point, he _is_ doing things that matter to him, he's got a team of
crazy-bright designers and engineers and he's pushing the world forwards. I'm
actually much less of an Apple fan than most people, I think the Apple's got a
lot more hype and sizzle than steak, but you do have to hand it to them for
what they've done.

And Jobs himself? Forced out of Apple. Builds up Pixar. I mean, Pixar! There's
a happiness-spreading company right there, maybe even more than Apple. Then
Apple gets into trouble, and Jobs goes and digs through the ruins and builds
this amazing company.

So typical loser thinking goes, "Oh yeah, well, maybe he's got hundreds of
millions, but he lost focus! Yeah, that's it, he's not doing things that
_really_ matter!" Like playing penny slot machines?

Never fall into that trap. If you catch yourself making a loser statement
about how much someone else has, stop yourself and be gracious. Not for the
builder's sake, but for your own.

~~~
fluxcapacitor
> And Jobs himself? Forced out of Apple. Builds up Pixar. I mean, Pixar!

Also, before Pixar he founded NeXT, absolutely breakthrough stuff, though not
a big commercial success:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXT>

~~~
scott_s
I actually consider NeXT a commercial success since the company was bought by
Apple, and NeXT OS was essentially the basis for OSX.

~~~
hugh3
Yeah, NeXT got acquired for $427 million, and that was in 1997 dollars. Jobs
personally pocketed $100 million in that transaction, plus 1.5 million Apple
shares (and remember the stock has split several times since then).

~~~
philwelch
He sold all that stock later in 1997 as a gambit, though.

------
mwerty
Classic contrast bias. It's pretty interesting that he is considered super-
unlucky when he is likely in the top 10% of humanity.

Number 9 in <http://freebsd.zaks.com/news/msg-1151459306-41182-0/>

------
raganwald
This story is a classic case of survivor bias. Magazines only interview the
people who bailed out of companies that went on to succeed. Between 1976 and
now, how many people have bailed out of startups that went on to flame out?
How many of them are perfectly happy and possibly wealthy?

~~~
_pius
_This story is a classic case of survivor bias._

Not really. Merely telling the story of a survivor isn't survivorship bias;
the bias would be extrapolating from this story to believe that his situation
is common.

~~~
raganwald
Or extrapolating from his story to infer that failing to take risks in an
early-stage venture is a mistake.

------
kqr2
The original Apple logo which he designed:

[http://www.digibarn.com/history/06-11-4-VCF9-Apple30/images/...](http://www.digibarn.com/history/06-11-4-VCF9-Apple30/images/original-
newton-apple-logo.gif)

~~~
WiseWeasel
The way this story portrayed Ron Wayne makes me think the quote on the
etching, "A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought -- alone,"
might be quite revealing of Wayne's own psychology, which seemed to tend
towards paranoia.

------
aresant
Counter point -

He was terrified of creditors, of debt, of risk - in other words of all the
things that great entrepreneurs embrace and manage.

He was 42 and living with his mother at the time.

His role was to be the "problem solver" between Woz & Jobs.

He was to be the "respected adult" and provide guidance.

What if he'd blocked the development of the macintosh platform?

What if he'd blocked jobs from coming back?

Just useless after-lunch daydreaming, but my point is this guy looks more like
a bullet Apple dodged, than a sure fire loser of billions . . .

------
spking
John Draper (a.k.a. Cap'n Crunch) is another of Apple's early core
contributors who managed to slip through the cracks. Not directly or
officially part of Apple, but arguably way more involved in the genesis and
early success of Apple than Ron Wayne. Now he lives out of a van and has been
to jail several times.

[http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB116863379291775523-lMy...](http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB116863379291775523-lMyQjAxMDE3NjE4MzYxMzMzWj.html)

~~~
jamesbritt
Wow.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. should pool some money and fund some sort of
Social Security for aging hackers.

~~~
mahmud
A core Linux kernel hacker and an IBM employee was kicked out of his home, and
made homeless _while_ he worked on Linux. He was too sick to keep his job, so
they let him go. He lived out of his car when I heard of him last, and last
year someone heard me speak of him on IRC and messaged me in private to say he
was on his death bed.

I wont discuss him further out of respect to him, but stuff happens, even to
people with "jobs".

------
philwelch
This actually came up in Woz's Founders at Work interview:

<http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html>

Livingston: What about Ron Wayne? Wasn't he wasn't one of the founders?

Wozniak: Yes, but not when we incorporated as a real company. We had two
phases. One was as a partnership with Steve Jobs for the Apple I and then for
the Apple II, we became a corporation, Apple Computer Incorporated.

Steve knew Ron at Atari and liked him. Ron was a super conservative guy. I
didn't know anything about politics of any sort; I avoided it. But he had read
all these right-wing books like "None Dare Call it Treason" and he could
rattle the stuff off. I didn't realize it until later.

He had instant answers to everything. He had experience with businesses and
times he'd been gypped out of stock deals. He always had something very quick
to say and, wow, it sounded like he was very knowledgeable about this stuff.
He sat down at a typewriter and typed our partnership contract right out of
his head using lawyer type words. I just thought, "How do you know what to
say, all rights and privileges and all the different words that are in
there"—I don't even know what they are. He did an etching of Newton under the
apple tree for the cover of our Apple I manual. He wrote the manual. So he
helped in a number of ways. Steve had 45% of this partnership, I had 45%, and
Ron had 10% because both of us agreed that we could trust him to resolve any
dispute, and we would trust his judgment.

Then what happened was that we were going to sell PC boards for $20 each and
fund it out of our own pockets. I sold my HP calculator, Steve sold his van,
so we had a few hundred bucks each. Then Steve got the $50,000 order. Over at
the company that was making our PC board, as soon as the PC boards were made,
they opened up a closet that had our parts and it started a 30-day clock
ticking. We had 30 days to pay for the parts. The parts got stuffed into the
computers, we made them work, we delivered them to the store and got paid in
cash. The parts suppliers—the distributors in Mountain View—had checked with
the store owner and knew that he was going to pay us. So basically, we didn't
have the credit; he was good for it. But, here was the problem: What if he
didn't accept them one time or didn't pay us? We would owe a ton of money on
those chips.

I had no money and Steve had no money. We didn't own cars, we didn't have
savings accounts, we didn't have houses. So Ron Wayne figured they'd come
after him for his golden nuggets that he kept under his mattress. (He actually
tells me it was in a safe—but he was afraid they'd come and get his gold.) So
he sold out. It was too risky for him, so he sold out his 10% of Apple to us
for a few hundred bucks. Maybe $600, maybe $800, maybe $300, but a few hundred
bucks. And this was even when we had an Apple II designed and were heading
toward future business. He was just scared that something was going to catch
him.

------
10ren
> I thought if I stayed with Apple I was going to wind up the richest man in
> the cemetery.

Maybe he's right. If you're the type to worry - and everyone has that to some
extent - it is very stressful.

I think you need to get to the point where it's in the lap of the gods; you
just do your thing and the outcome does its thing. _I am a leaf on the wind_
Doesn't Steve Jobs have some non-attachment/buddhist/meditation thing? Like he
doesn't have any furniture (or didn't at one point).

------
jrockway
_Wayne insists he has no regrets about the choice he made_

Fair enough, but I am going to regret it for him. 22 billion dollars. That's
twice as much as eleventy billion!

~~~
robryan
I don't know what type of investment apple had but if he did stay wouldn't
he's 10% have been diluted by future investment?

~~~
ojbyrne
Given that Steve Jobs' net worth is $5.5 billion (source:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs>), that number does seem deliberately
misleading.

~~~
ajtaylor
5 billion. 22 billion. Who cares what number comes in front of all those
zeroes! It's the zeroes that matter. Once you start getting up in to the tens
of millions I can't even imagine how to spend it all.

~~~
nathanieljones
See, I understand if you meant "how to spend it all on my desires for
luxuries."

But if you truly meant "how to spend it all," I disagree with you. Every day,
I think of a new company that would make the world a slightly better place.
Every day, I wish I had 50 billion dollars so I could call my manager up, tell
him "you have 3 million, find someone who can solve this problem," and have it
done.

Hey, just building a worldwide cellphone network with enough bandwidth to not
suck and decent international rates could take up more money than I could ever
possibly earn.

Dream big.

------
BRadmin
Serious question:

What's their rationale for forming a partnership and not incorporating right
away as a means of protecting personal assets? Was the official / lawyering
process radically different (i.e. terribly expensive) back then?

~~~
mechanical_fish
I'm sure that the startup legal process was a lot less popularly understood
than it is now. And even today people ask a lot of questions about legal
foundations for startups.

But I think you can't abstract away the particulars. I'm sure it didn't occur
to the Steves to spend money to protect their assets, because they didn't have
any. Assets or money, that is. And this fellow Ron could have done so, but
perhaps it didn't occur to him because he was too busy burying gold nuggets in
his backyard and cleaning his weapons collection.

The early history of Apple is such a fun story. I now have this awesome vision
of the Apple cofounders as the bowling team from _The Big Lebowski_.

------
latch
I think his attitude is wonderful and refreshing. It makes me happy to take
him at his word.

I saw a story recently of a guy released from jail after some 20 years of
wrongful incarceration, and his attitude was so amazing. Wayne reminds me of
that. We can learn a lot from both - they both make me feel so petty.

------
SoftwareMaven
I honestly don't know if I could live with myself. I just turned down a really
great position in favor of a start-up I'm working on, specifically because I
don't want to be in this guy's position.

~~~
jimbokun
First, how many times are you willing to spin the wheel? It was pretty clear
that he tried to start a business at least once before, and it blew up in his
face. That probably changed his outlook on risk-reward tradeoffs.

Second, it confuses me that this guy is living off Social Security.

"After Apple, he spent two years creating the model shop at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, then was chief engineer at Thor Electronics in Salinas
for 16 years. He holds a dozen patents, but he has never had the money to
develop them into products."

Being a chief anything for 16 years in the Valley, I would think should let
you sock enough away for a comfortable retirement, even investing
conservatively. I suspect this guy is just bad at managing money all around,
which he pretty much admits.

"I don't know why, it just never happened. It's probably because I'm not the
businessman I should be."

~~~
wooster
Salinas isn't in Silicon Valley, it's in the Salinas Valley. It's mostly an
agricultural area, and incomes are much lower.

------
motters
It's an interesting yet sad story, showing how a single decision, which
probably seemed completely rational at the time, can make or break your future
prospects.

Ron Wayne's conservative disposition probably helped him a great deal up to
the point of selling out of Apple, but counted against him subsequently. None
of us can know the future, and we can only rely upon previous experience to
estimate the possible outcomes which a decision might have.

------
moolave
Like what Mike Shuster said on Jason Calacanis' interview (or rephrased), "You
have to give up your current job, be passionate on what you're doing with this
startup, and then believe that it's going to work no matter what." Ok, I
didn't say it right, but you get the point.

------
_pius
One of the most interesting aspects of this story for me is that the guy was
single and living with his mother. His risk profile should have been _ideal_
for keeping his stake in the company.

------
blizkreeg
Bad luck couldn't get any worse than this, I suppose.

I wonder why Jobs or Woz never gifted a tiny fraction of their shares in Apple
at a later point to Wayne, as a token of appreciation (if tiny). It would have
been a nice gesture.

~~~
philwelch
Woz gave away a lot of his shares to early employees pre-IPO because he felt
it was unfair that they didn't get any from the company. I suspect that by
1980, most of those employees did a lot more than Ron Wayne to make Apple what
it was.

