Comment by SkyMarshal
11 hours ago
To be fair, Woz wasn't just a “friendly selfless genius inventor engineer”, he was also the co-founder of one of the most valuable tech companies in the world. And YC is, in their own words: "The Y combinator is one of the coolest ideas in computer science. It's also a metaphor for what we do. It's a program that runs programs; we're a company that helps start companies.". They're not entirely unrelated.
He was a cofounder because of his skill and Jobs talking him into it. Woz would have been perfectly happy as an engineer at HP, that was his plan.
He wasn't entirely unworldly though. He didn't like BASIC as a language, but he gave the Apple I and II a BASIC capable of running the programs from Ahl's BASIC Computer Games because that's what the market was demanding.