During a Jan. 30 speech at Georgia State University, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) co-founder Steve Wozniak told students to find interesting side projects to complete for self-fulfillment, not profit.
“If you try to do a bunch of projects for yourself,” Wozniak said, “you develop skills that are so good, it’ll put you up in the cream of the crop, and any company will want you based on these skills.”
Apple Inc. (AAPL), in fact, emerged from one of Wozniak’s “hobbies,” when he worked as a Silicon Valley engineer. Wozniak told students how Apple’s tiny seed was planted in the confines of a Hewlett-Packard computer. While earning a wage designing HP scientific calculators, Wozniak spent his free time designing the hardware, circuit boards and operating system for what would become the Apple I.
That personal history has led Wozniak to encourage today’s companies to provide employees access to resources and tools in order to pursue personal projects.
“They are developing their minds and their ability to create things,” he said. “I was such a nerd coming out of high school, that in those days I had little chance of having a girlfriend, or a wife. So, when I finished designing calculators at HP in the daytime, I went home, watched Star Trek and then” worked on computer projects.
In what may be one of the greatest missed opportunities in corporate history, HP rejected Wozniak’s “project” after he proposed what would become Apple.
“I begged to make the (computer),” he said. “Five times they turned me down.”
It was Steve Jobs’ business vision that would launch Wozniak’s computer project into the best-selling fruit of all time.
“I constantly build things for the fun of it,” Wozniak said. “Every great thing I built, I would have just given away, if I hadn’t been talked into going into Apple.”
But Jobs didn’t initially envision a multi-billion dollar computing corporation, Wozniak recalled in Georgia. Instead, he suggested starting a company that would create a single part—a circuit board—that would allow consumers to assemble a computer for $20 and sell the part for $40. Wozniak sacrificed his most-prized possession in order to finance Apple (AAPL). He sold his HP-65 calculator for $500.
The rest of Apple’s (AAPL) story is—as they say—history, and much of it is told in the new independent biopic “jOBS,” costarring Josh Gad as Wozniak. Since “The Woz” left Apple in 1987 he has continued to focus on various engineering projects. Credited with developing the first programmable universal remote control, in recent years Wozniak has appeared on “Dancing with the Stars” and “Big Bang Theory,” while playing the Nintendo Game Boy during his free time.
Wozniak sees voice recognition software as an emerging technology, but future opportunities may include computers that approach a level of consciousness.
“Computers can do the job, but a brain has to figure out how to do it,” he said. “I think computers can figure out how to do it not too far off.”
Wozniak also gave his opinion on the patent wars currently gripping Silicon Valley—including the ongoing patent war between his previous company and Korean-based Samsung. Woz believes that although patents can inhibit innovation, they certainly have a place in the industry.
“Sometimes you come up with something very great and clever,” he told students. “But I don’t think a patent should go forever.”
