The Seeds of Success

Engineers and designers at the headquarters of Apple Computer Inc. in Cupertino, Calif., are accustomed to seeing a slender figure saunter past their offices wearing frayed jeans, suede boots and a cowboy shirt. The boyish-looking fellow with the stringy mustache is Steven Jobs, Apple's chairman of the board. At 26, Jobs heads a company that six years ago was located in a bedroom and garage of his parents' house, but this year it is expected to have sales of $600 million. Like so many new entrepreneurs, Jobs is a child of California's Silicon Valley. As a student at Homestead High School in Los Altos during the early 1970s, he was fascinated by technology.

After school, he attended lectures at Hewlett-Packard, the big electronics firm. One day he boldly called William Hewlett, the president, to ask for some equipment for a machine he was building. Impressed, Hewlett gave it to him and helped arrange summer employment. One of Jobs' best friends at the time was Stephen Wozniak. Pooling their talents, the two Steves built and sold so-called blue boxes, which were illegal electronic attachments for telephones that allowed users to make long-distance calls for free. On one occasion, Wozniak called the Vatican and, pretending to be Henry Kissinger, asked for Pope Paul VI. As Wozniak tells the story, the Pontiff was summoned, and Vatican officials caught on to the ruse only after a bishop came on the line to act as translator. In 1972, Jobs entered Oregon's Reed College, but he left two years later to ease his family's financial hardships. He then took a job designing video games at Atari. Wozniak, meanwhile, had dropped out of Berkeley to become a designer at Hewlett-Packard. After hours, Wozniak worked hard building a small, easy-to-use computer. In 1976 he succeeded. The pint-size machine was smaller than a portable typewriter, but it could do the feats of much larger computers.

To Wozniak, the new machine was simply a gadget to show his fellow computer buffs. Jobs, in contrast, saw the commercial potential of the machine that could help families do their personal finance or small businesses control inventories, and he urged that they form a company to market the computer. The two raised $1,300 to open a makeshift production line by selling Jobs' Volkswagen Micro Bus and Wozniak's Hewlett-Packard scientific calculator. Jobs, recalling a pleasant summer that he spent working in the orchards of Oregon, christened the new computer Apple.

To build the company, Jobs adroitly tapped the network of support services that has made Silicon Valley such a fertile place for fledgling businesses. Says he: "We didn't know what the hell we were doing, but we were very careful observers and learned quickly." Jobs pestered Regis McKenna, the area's premier public relations specialist, to take on Apple as a client. After refusing twice, McKenna finally agreed. For advice on how to raise money, Jobs consulted both McKenna and Nolan Bushnell, his former boss at Atari. They suggested that he call Don Valentine, an investor who frequently puts money into new firms. When Valentine came around to inspect the new computer, he found Jobs wearing cutoff jeans and sandals while sporting shoulder-length hair and a Ho Chi Minh beard. Valentine later asked McKenna: "Why did you send me this renegade from the human race?"