Grey Ghost

Steve Wozniak designed the first Apple computer alone, by hand, in his spare time. That machine became a company worth over $3 trillion. His net worth today is around $100 million, less than Apple earns in a few hours. His best friend Steve Jobs secretly underpaid him on their very first deal, HP rejected his computer five times, and he still gave away millions of his own stock to employees Jobs left behind. In the video below, it's 1984. Woz is 33, already a legend, and he says something nobody in Silicon Valley wanted to hear. Back in 1975, Atari offered Jobs a bonus to build Breakout with as few chips as possible. Jobs handed the job to Woz. Woz didn't sleep for 4 nights and pulled it off. Jobs told him they got $700 and paid him $350. The real bonus was worth thousands. Woz found out 10 years later. He never planned to build a company. He was just building a computer for himself. No manager. No business plan. Total freedom. He offered that computer to his employer HP. They said no. Five times. To fund the first Apple, he sold his HP calculator for $500. Jobs sold his Volkswagen van. Their third co-founder, Ronald Wayne, sold his 10% stake for $800. When Apple went public in 1980, Jobs refused to give stock to some of the earliest engineers. Woz sold them his own shares at a fraction of their value. He called it the Woz Plan. In 1981 he crashed his own plane and lost his memory for weeks. When he recovered, he went back to Berkeley to finish his degree under a fake name: Rocky Raccoon Clark. But in this interview, he's not talking about money. He's looking at the industry he helped create and he doesn't like it. Business meetings. Three-piece suits. Managers fresh out of school. Almost no real creativity left. Then he makes a prediction. Every 10 years, a new group of kids will build a market from zero to billions. They'll show up at trade shows in a mobile home with something homemade. Everyone will laugh at them. "That's what they said about us." 10 years later, the internet exploded out of nowhere and turned a new generation of garage kids into billionaires. Jobs got the stage, the fortune and the legend. Woz got to build the thing that made it all possible. Some lessons are written in other people's mistakes. Watch it once. Remember it forever.