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Stanford Business magazine

 

Woz’s Apple Recipe: Mix Oil and Water

Steve Wozniak has a recipe for a great high-tech startup: Begin with two young guys, one a computer nerd and the other a marketer, add money, and maybe you’ll wind up with a company as successful as the one he and his buddy Steve Jobs built.

To get startups through their often lean, early years, founders need to have complementary strengths, the Apple Computer cofounder told students at a talk sponsored by the Entrepreneur Club. He suggested they look for an engineer with many skills “and not divide it down into one guy will do this design, one guy will draw on paper, one guy will write the manual, another will actually design, another will build it, and yet another guy will test it.”

“From the technologist’s perspective, is there value in having a partner on the business side?” asked Garth Saloner, codirector of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.

“It’s absolutely critical,” Wozniak responded. “I totally admire the business people,” he said, but he wouldn’t want to be one. “I decided I’d just be an engineer at the lab, hooking up wires and doing that for all my life."