What do you think of this fact?
When people talk about Apple’s founding, two names come up: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. There were actually three. The third made one of the most famous bad calls in business history, but he doesn’t think it was one.
The man with 10 percent
Ronald Wayne was much older than the two young founders and handled administration and paperwork. When the company was founded in April 1976, Jobs and Wozniak each got 45 percent and Wayne got 10 percent.
About 12 days after the founding, he dropped out and sold his stake for 800 dollars. Later, he got another 1,500 dollars for giving up any further claims.
Why he left
Wayne had his reasons. Jobs had borrowed 15,000 dollars to fill a computer order for the Byte Shop, a store with a reputation for not paying its bills. Wayne, as he put it, “had a house, and a car, and a bank account”. If the company had gone bust, he would have been personally liable.
He also worried he’d never get a project of his own next to the two young geniuses.
Bonus fact: According to Fortune, Wayne’s 10 percent would be worth up to 400 billion dollars today if his stake had never been diluted.
Does he regret it? No, Wayne says. He couldn’t have kept up with Jobs and Wozniak. Had he stayed, he might just have become “the richest man in the cemetery”.
The math is still hard to ignore. 800 dollars versus a few hundred billion. Wayne shrugs it off, and that might be the real achievement.