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Wozniak: You have to be very diligent. You have to check every little detail. You have to be so careful that you haven't left something out. You have to think harder and deeper than you normally would. It's hard with today's large, huge programs.
I was partly hardware and partly software, but, I'll tell you, I wrote an awful lot of software by hand (I still have the copies that are handwritten), and all of that went into the Apple II. Every byte that went into the Apple II, it had so many different mathematical routines, graphics routines, computer languages, emulators of other machines, ways to slip your code in and out of an emulation mode. It had all these kinds of things and not one bug ever found. Not one bug in the hardware, not one bug in the software. And you just can't find a product like that nowadays. But, you see, I had it so intense in my head, and the reason for that was largely because it was part of me. Everything in there had to be so important to me. This computer was me. And everything had to be as perfect as could be made. And I had a lot going against me because I didn't have a computer to compile my code, my software.
Livingston: What advice would you give to hackers who are thinking about starting a company or making something on their own?
Wozniak: First of all, try to have the highest of ethics and to be open and truthful about things, not hiding. If you have to hide something for company reasons, at least explain what you're doing. Don't mislead people. Know in your heart that you are a good person with good goals because that will carry over to your own self-confidence and your belief in your engineering abilities. Always seek excellence: make your product better than the average person would.
The hardest thing was, though, after having a big success ... see, I didn't seek the success—I wasn't like the entrepreneur who wants it. So the money to me didn't really mean much. Pretty much I gave it all away to charities, to museums, to children's groups, to everything I could. It almost was like an evil to me. That was because it wasn't the motivation that I was after, and I wanted to remain the person that I would have been without Apple. So that's why I went back and did the teaching. I would have done teaching were there no Apple.
love himmm
Wozniak: As a matter of fact, when we went public, I was a little disturbed that five people who had been with us in our little office from the start and had been so important—Randy Wigginton, Chris Espinosa, a couple of young kids, and a couple of older ones, just hadn't gotten any stock. I felt that they were a part of this whole energy and excitement and passion for what computers were going to be and what we were doing and how right it was. If somebody is sitting there working till 2:00 a.m. with you, helping to write a little code, and says, "Wow, that is a cool one," those words mean a lot to you and they deserve something. So I gave each of those five a large amount of stock, probably a million dollars in that day. And that was an early day for a million dollars.
Even though I'm not technical—I was a political science major—your role models at Stanford if you're at all entrepreneurial are tech entrepreneurs. You don't have to look very far and you see buildings with names like Hewlett Packard, etc. There were even classes on this stuff that I started taking.
One of the founders was working a part-time job at Oracle, and back in those days, you could take home VT100 terminals to work from home. The way you got them to your car was by going to the supply closet: you took a VT100 and you put it on this $1,000 Herman Miller chair, and you rolled the chair out to your car, put the terminal in your car, and brought the chair back into work. So we thought, "That's a good idea. We could get some VT100s and some chairs all at once." We rolled up a U-Haul and brought down six chairs and six terminals and rolled away.
ha
For example, we had this VP of marketing that I worked to get for about 3 months. He was the former VP of marketing at QVC. He called me literally the day before he was supposed to move out to California and said, "I can't do it." I said, "Well, we're going to have dinner tonight, so I'm coming out to New York." I got on a plane and went to New York and sat down with him. And I got really lucky: we're at the restaurant and we were quiet for a second and you could hear people talking about the Net. They were talking about Hotmail and AOL and the Internet boom going on. So I said, "Look, these people aren't talking about home shopping, they're talking about the Internet. So your choice is, 'Do you want to be part of the past or do you want to be part of the future?'"
Livingston: I heard you came up with the famous "Don't be evil" principle. Can you give me the background?
Buchheit: I believe that it was sometime in early 2000, and there was a meeting to decide on the company's values. They invited a collection of people who had been there for a while. I had just come from Intel, so the whole thing with corporate values seemed a little bit funny to me. I was sitting there trying to think of something that would be really different and not one of these usual "strive for excellence" type of statements. I also wanted something that, once you put it in there, would be hard to take out.
It just sort of occurred to me that "Don't be evil" is kind of funny. It's also a bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent. They were tricking them selling search results—which we considered a questionable thing to do because people didn't realize that they were ads.
lolll
Livingston: If Robert was so reluctant, why did you start the company with him?
Graham: Well, first of all he was my best friend, so I really trusted him, but he's also one of the best programmers in the world. I'd rather have a quarter of his brain working on some problem than 100 percent of most other people's.
these people love their little hyperbolic statements
You know, in retrospect I think the big problem with our investors was that we weren't forceful enough with them. I think investors like to be bossed around, like horses. It reassures them when you're in control. But these guys were much older than us and had given us huge sums of their money, so it was hard for us to boss them around.
andrew mentality