
Employee #1: Apple - craigcannon
http://themacro.com/articles/2016/07/employee-1-apple/
======
GuiA
_One of the first projects they collaborated on was this huge sign of a hand
with the middle finger raised. It was a huge cloth poster and they put it up
on the roof of our school and weighted the ends with rocks, I think. This was
the end of the building that all of the parents faced during graduation. And
the idea was that during graduation they would cut some strings which would
release this thing to roll down over the side of the building and it said,
“Best Wishes, Class of ‘72!” and it was giving them the finger. [...] So that
was like, their first prank together._

 _Sometimes, like when a student was entering the telephone booth, Woz would
call the telephone booth and it would ring and student would answer it. Then
Woz would say, “This is Ramar the Mystic. I see wetness in your future,” and
as the guy is saying, “What?” Woz would throw a water balloon at him from the
second floor. The guy would be all angry and Woz would say, “Well, Ramar was
only trying to help.”_

These kind of remind me of those YouTube pranks where guys randomly kiss girls
on the street or pick fights with people for "social experiments". Not really
"pranks", just idiotic fun at other people's expense.

 _Jobs got a printed circuit board made and he figured out where to get all
the parts._

Jobs often gets put down as just "the marketer" from Apple's early days, with
Woz doing all the execution, but when you get deeper it sounds like Jobs
enabled a lot of the logistics, supply chain, etc. Without him, Woz's
prototype would have remained just that - a one off. In this light, Woz almost
appears as the "idea guy" (where idea includes initial concept + first
execution), whereas Jobs is the one who made it a viable product and company.

~~~
dpark
> _Not really "pranks", just idiotic fun at other people's expense._

The middle finger thing is really not at someone else's expense. It's a dumb
prank. The water balloon thing is a bit more mean spirited, but it's still far
more innocuous than assault or sexual assault "pranks".

~~~
Retra
A water balloon is mean spirited only because we've built roofs everywhere.
Humans can get wet with very little to be afraid of.

~~~
dpark
It's still mean spirited to dump water on a stranger even if it doesn't
actually hurt them. It's subjecting someone to something they don't want for
your own amusement.

The claim that humans have nothing to fear about getting wet is also less true
than ever now that people are carrying electronics with them constantly, but
that's not really relevant for people Woz targeted in his 20s.

------
bluedino
Look at the diversity in the first three employees: Jobs, half Middle-Eastern,
Woz, a every-day American descending from mix of a handful of European
countries, and Bill Fernandez, a Hispanic/Latino.

~~~
brandnewlow
Even more interesting is how they were brought together largely by parents
making decisions to learn technical skills and then being adept enough to
obtain employment at a top company, choosing to live in the neighborhood they
lived in near other technical people with access to surplus parts, and then
making enough money to provide their children with the space, time and
security to tinker.

~~~
overcast
Yes, their story is not without its share of enablers. It was the perfect
setup, with the right people meeting to create something huge. Most times, if
you read into the background of the big players, you'll see a common right
place, at the right time theme. Imagine where we'd be as a civilization if
everyone had the those opportunities.

~~~
flukus
> Imagine where we'd be as a civilization if everyone had the those
> opportunities.

Exactly. You have to wonder how many Einsteins we've had over the
centuries/millennia that never even learned to read.

------
Schwolop

      Bill : Also, be prepared as either a founder or an employee to spend your life on it. Be prepared to
      give your life to the enterprise. Forget about family, forget about children, forget about your pets
      or your garden. It is going to be all-consuming and that’s one reason why I’m starting my startup so
      late. I waited until I could neglect my children without harm to them.
      Craig : [Laughter] How so?
      Bill : They’re out of the house now so I figured, “Okay, now I can do what I want.”
    

I really like this attitude, and it's something that's on my mind too as I'm
abandoning my kids by working 6 evenings a week to deliver my startup's first
product. I hope there are a whole bunch of older entrepreneurs hiding in the
wings, just waiting until their kids are young adults before jumping out into
startup land with amazing ideas and a career's worth of experience to actually
build them sensibly.

------
bluedino
Bill's story is worth the read: [http://www.techrepublic.com/article/apples-
first-employee-th...](http://www.techrepublic.com/article/apples-first-
employee-the-remarkable-odyssey-of-bill-fernandez/)

------
aresant
I've always considered Job's advertising campaign - "Here's to the Crazy Ones"
\- which announced his return and Apple's new direction to be such a
masterpiece because it was so PERSONAL to Jobs.

A recognition of what it had taken to START apple and the recognition that to
survive, and thrive, they would need to get back to those roots, toss the
beige boxes to the wind, devil may care here comes the blue bomdi iMacs
dammit!

Fernandez' quote puts a finger on it:

"It wasn’t like this glamorous thing. It was this huge risk. Basically people
would say, “Why would you quit Hewlett-Packard to go work for a couple of lame
ass guys, you know, one of whom is like this hippy guy who wears Birkenstocks
and torn jeans and dropped out of school and had to sell a beaten up VW van to
just afford to get started on this. . . The short way of saying this, I guess,
is there was no startup culture."

And as much of an egoist as Jobs was he nevertheless realized that he had to
squarely define & embed that culture of "be crazy / think different" into
Apple, and make it bigger than just more to the Jobs' mythos:

"According to Jobs’s biography, two versions were created before it first
aired: one with Richard Dreyfuss voiceover, and one with Steve Jobs
voiceover.[5] In the morning of the first air date, Jobs decided to go with
the Dreyfuss version, stating that it was about Apple." (1)

(1)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different)

~~~
vacri
That slogan always bothered me. It was only 'Here's to the Crazy Ones who had
Mainstream Success', and relied on Survivor Bias. There is no place in that
sentiment for a person like Stallman, or from another angle, a person like
Trump.

~~~
grrowl
I disagree — there were hundreds of scientists working in the era of Einstein,
and without them Einstein would not have reached the conclusions he did,
despite them thinking he was destined to fail. His peers weren't crazy, they
were the mainstream successes of their time. Here's to the crazy ones who flew
in the face of adversity, success or not.

Stallman firmly fits within the statement: "And while some may see them as the
crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world, are the ones who do."

Stallman may not be popular, but you can't argue that he's not crazy, flying
in the face of adversity, and has had a great influence on the state of
computing today.

~~~
vacri
> _Here 's to the crazy ones who flew in the face of adversity, success or
> not._

No. My whole point is that they only chose the proven (and famous) 'crazies'.
There's only room for 'success'. No room for the 'or not'. Stallman is proven
to a niche of techies, but outside that niche, people think he's a whack-job,
despite his profound effect on computing as a whole.

I've got a high opinion of Stallman, but Stallman is very much the kind of
'crazy' that Jobs would want to hide. Not 'bankable' enough.

~~~
sjwright
Listen to the whole message. It's about the crazy people who end up changing
the world. Hence proven and famous.

(Meanwhile, from a storytelling perspective, it would be needlessly
distracting to have to simultaneously educate people about some quiet unsung
heroes. Your implied alternative version would be unworkable.)

------
HillaryBriss
> The infrastructure was there so you could say, “I want sheet metal done. I
> want a printed circuit board made.” You could just go out and someone would
> do it for you. “I want to buy parts,” someone could do it for you.

The ability to reach out locally and have hardware components custom made
seems kind of important for the small innovator in today's fast economy. The
speed of revisions and product evolution and all that.

~~~
dbcurtis
Today that is Shenzhen.

------
ojosilva
> many people, many engineers are really great at designing a product but
> absolutely terrified to actually tell anyone about it or to promote
> themselves or to say it’s good. So marketing and sales are complete anathema
> to them. But you’re going to have to step up to the plate and do some of it.

I agree. There's always a lot of talk about how engineers neglect sales and
its utmost importance to a startup's success. But I haven't seen lots of
literature on encouraging engineers to come out of the shell to (rationally)
"brag" about your product. Not all engineers have the confidence to do it or
are just plain humble - Woz comes to mind.

A search for "marketing for engineers" only turns up content that explains
marketing concepts and strategies to the uninitiated (inbound, organic,
SEO...), but I'd like to see more on how to effectively step outside of your
code editor, take pride and broadcast your technical creation to the world -
for either economic or nonprofit motivations.

------
ktRolster
Cool guy. His analysis of his economic situation is much different than we'd
do today:

 _I figured that this could be pretty interesting and I was living with my
parents and my car was paid off and I was very employable. So I figured that
if this fell through that it would be easy for me to get another job and
there’s no big loss, right?_

~~~
ericd
Is it? I had the same thought process not too long ago.

~~~
ktRolster
Your thought process was, "I'm in good shape, my car is paid off and I'm
living with my parents?"

~~~
ericd
Pretty much, except for me it was "It would suck, but I could always go move
back in with my parents". The gist of it was that I wasn't risking much except
for my time and a bit of pride, so why not.

------
robotmlg
Technically speaking, Woz was employee #1 and Jobs was employee #2, although
Jobs assigned himself #0 and always had 0 printed on his badge.

~~~
danso
From Isaacson's biography of Jobs:

> _An early showdown came over employee badge numbers. Scott assigned #1 to
> Wozniak and #2 to Jobs. Not surprisingly, Jobs demanded to be #1. “I
> wouldn’t let him have it, because that would stoke his ego even more,” said
> Scott. Jobs threw a tantrum, even cried. Finally, he proposed a solution. He
> would have badge #0. Scott relented, at least for the purpose of the badge,
> but the Bank of America required a positive integer for its payroll system
> and Jobs’s remained #2._

Isaacson, Walter (2011-10-24). Steve Jobs (p. 83). Simon & Schuster. Kindle
Edition.

~~~
exolymph
It's kind of unbelievable what a jackass he was in addition to being a genius.
People are weird multifaceted creatures.

~~~
danso
I actually never finished the book because Jobs, as a character, was just too
inscrutable. And I don't mean in the interesting, complicated ways that humans
generally are. The abrupt shift from brilliant leader and visionary to
petulant asshole child is understandable, even at the start of Apple -- he was
just 21, after all. But the emotional/personality swings pretty much continue
through his entire life, and it was just too bewildering for me to fully
empathize with Jobs. Maybe if other CEOs were as highly scrutinized as Jobs
we'd see the same kind of inexplicable complexity? As it stands, I enjoyed
iWoz (albeit it was written as an autobiography) much more than the Jobs'
biography.

~~~
astrange
That's the fault of the biography, which refuses to ever analyze him and seems
to not even notice when he's changed. Not the only thing it didn't notice -
check out how often people are blatantly misquoted, like where Bill Gates
supposedly claims a disk drive has "too low latency".

Seems like the actual event right before coming back to Apple, where he
mysteriously becomes an amazing CEO, is when he met his wife.

~~~
sjwright
Or indeed where Bill Gates claims that the purchase of NeXT technologies were
just "warmed up UNIX" and was "never really used" by Apple. Isaacson failed to
fact-check anything Gates said, and a lot of it was demonstrably, factually,
objectively false.

------
mahyarm
So what is his new company that he is starting?

~~~
jdhawk
Google Omnibotics?

Robot assisted surgery

------
m1c0l
FYI, "the Hamurabi game" links incorrectly to
[http://themacro.com/articles/2016/07/employee-1-apple/[https...](http://themacro.com/articles/2016/07/employee-1-apple/\[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamurabi)
which causes an error 404.

~~~
craigcannon
Fixed. Thanks :)

------
smegel
> We became fast friends. I got him interested in electronics and so…

> Craig : Wait, really?

I don't know what is so surprising about think. Jobs was not an engineer or
even really a geek. He was a visionary and a businessman. If he had gotten Woz
into electronics, that would have been a big deal.

~~~
frandroid
The surprise is that Woz isn't the one that got Jobs interested in
electronics.

