Comment by OhMeadhbh
8 hours ago
It's kinda funny... In '89 a friend and I were talking about starting a startup like the two Steve's (we didn't know about Ron Wayne back then.) We both knew exactly what Woz did, but were a bit sketchy on Jobs role in the early days. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Jobs was a layabout, only that the strengths he brought to the table were more abstract.
So I would also say... the kinds of things we learn from Woz are concrete and we get immediate feedback if we learned them wrong.
Woz talked about the early days in an interview, and he said something like (paraphrasing) "Steve [Jobs] could call companies and get free samples for me, and negotiate low prices for other stuff, something I simply couldn't do".
It sounds like they complemented each other during the startup. And it was Jobs who suggested that they should try running a company.
At the end of the day many different types are needed to make complex products work. Humans at least are unlikely to be able to accomplish all this individually as it requires character traits that are in conflict with each other.
With all humans the difficult part is getting all the needed traits to make a business/product work without getting ones like backstabbing/jealously that cause problems later.