When you look at it squarely, Jobs could have sold any average product and made money, and Woz' product was so far above average it could have sold on its own (to a more limited extent), with each unit sold making money either way.
Money would be made by each person regardless but this combination not only got more units to fly off the shelf, it got the company off to a more above-average likelihood of future products doing well with growth from there.
The longer that structure can be maintained, the better.
Most of the time a miraculous salesman or marketing strategist has an average to below-average product to represent, and they will still do very well.
So well in fact, that they themselves may never find out what the full upside would be if they had a product that actually was above-average enough for it to be able to sell on its own one way or another. And then act as a multiplier to that.
Through the roof can be hard to avoid then.
Same business plan I had as a preteen, way before Apple got going.
Woz took the Apple 1 to HP to see if they wanted it, since he was working there at the time. They passed on it. It seems Woz would have just kept working as an HP engineer and bringing designs to the homebrew computer club to give them away as a hobby.
Jobs went on to start NeXT (which became modern Apple) and turned Pixar into a the studio that released Toy Story.
Jobs wasn’t just a salesman, he was a serial entrepreneur. His footnotes would be most people’s whole career. His talent wasn’t just sales, but also building teams of talented people and selling them on his vision.
When you look at it squarely, Jobs could have sold any average product and made money, and Woz' product was so far above average it could have sold on its own (to a more limited extent), with each unit sold making money either way.
Money would be made by each person regardless but this combination not only got more units to fly off the shelf, it got the company off to a more above-average likelihood of future products doing well with growth from there.
The longer that structure can be maintained, the better.
Most of the time a miraculous salesman or marketing strategist has an average to below-average product to represent, and they will still do very well.
So well in fact, that they themselves may never find out what the full upside would be if they had a product that actually was above-average enough for it to be able to sell on its own one way or another. And then act as a multiplier to that.
Through the roof can be hard to avoid then.
Same business plan I had as a preteen, way before Apple got going.
Woz took the Apple 1 to HP to see if they wanted it, since he was working there at the time. They passed on it. It seems Woz would have just kept working as an HP engineer and bringing designs to the homebrew computer club to give them away as a hobby.
Jobs went on to start NeXT (which became modern Apple) and turned Pixar into a the studio that released Toy Story.
Jobs wasn’t just a salesman, he was a serial entrepreneur. His footnotes would be most people’s whole career. His talent wasn’t just sales, but also building teams of talented people and selling them on his vision.
I fully agree, Jobs was like the ideal founder.
And so was Woz.
What actually hapened couldn't have happened any other way.
>It seems Woz would have just kept working as an HP engineer and bringing designs to the homebrew computer club to give them away as a hobby.
If so it could only continue for so long before a lesser entrepreneur took the position that Jobs undertook.
And Apple might only be about half the size it is now.
Is that so bad?