Technip Energies - Interview with Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple

Don't go out and say things because they sound good. Say because you know them. Disruption is a word for, you know, if somebody comes along something else than you have and disrupts you, that means like putting you out of business. My goal was to help the world and obviously your goal at Technip is obviously to help the world.

When I graduated high school, I knew I'd be an engineer, but I did not think engineers designed computers. I wanted to have my own computer someday. But I didn't think engineers did it. I was so advanced in my abilities. Told my dad in high school I'd have my own computer someday. A 4K computer so I could type programs on it. I'd have my own computer. My goal was to help the world. And obviously your goal at Technip is obviously to help the world in a very important way, but I wanted to help people have more ability than they had before.

Well, to me working together was always very important rather than that means cooperating instead of conflicts. You know, somebody's not like you. They're from a different place in the world. The end user was always so important to me. Make it understandable to the user. That puts the human more important than the technology. And I believe that to this day.

Yeah. I mean, first of all, I was building a computer that was going to be the only successful product of Apple Computer for the first 10 years of the company. I had a great product, but how would I get it to the world? And Steve Jobs had no money. So about once a year, he came into town, saw my latest invention, turned it into money for both of us. He was the business side. He wanted some sort of success out of these things and saw this one product. I developed a couple products that were worth a company and he said, 'Hey, we should start a company.' Because the motivation to have a company, to sell it, to make some money that brings my product to the world. And would Steve Jobs have been successful without the great product I had? Probably not. But the two of us together added up to a big solution. And there was a third person. By the way, Steve Jobs, one time I was designing Pong games. I designed Breakout for Atari. But Steve came in and he said, 'No one at Bushnell of Atari wants this one-player Pong game.' So sometimes it's not necessarily a team that starts, but it's a team that finishes.

Yeah. In a lot of places, it's common for engineers to feel that, oh, they're working on things that could go long term. Long-term is represented in the capital value of a company, but they're complaining, oh, business side and marketing side, they want to do this and this and this, just get it done quickly and have schedules and it sort of seems like one side's in it for the quick term. Well, the most important job in the company is CEO. And the CEO's most important job, keep the money going. If we had high profit margins, we could continue forever as a business. That's the role of business. Don't die. And we wouldn't need to keep borrowing money and giving away more and more of our business to people that came in with money. So I like to look at it as a product leading to success and users owning products. But the long term, when you think about long-term, it's better to find, you know, when you work on a product as an engineer try to be the best engineer in the world, think of ways that you can be a little more efficient, get a little more out for a little less in, do a better job and it's going to pay off for your company and for yourself especially your own motivation. So that gets back to that engineer versus inventor idea. Again, companies should be aware that in the long term things could come along that you can't plan on if you keep the money wheel going and just concentrate on the near-term. Well, disruption is a word for, you know, if somebody comes along something else than you have and disrupts you, that means like putting you out of business. That's a horrible thought. So I'm all for a chief disruption officer. Chief disruption officer should analyze little trends going on. Things are being discovered in physics and chemistry and science and space and everything and should be aware of wow those could someday add up to influence our business to affect us or not.

Well, a lot of times there's real great inventors that innovate well, good innovation, and it doesn't necessarily succeed in the marketplace. If you're going to influence a lot of people's lives, you kind of have to wind up eventually having a good-sized company that's profitable. And return on investment is almost the important way to think about any, you know, here's our company. So you got to try that. You got to take some chances. The CEO. Look at Hewlett-Packard. We were in a recession. Every division of Hewlett-Packard was losing money. 1973 and our little calculator division was making so much the whole company was profitable. And it was really because Bill Hewlett wanted to build this little handheld device that fit in a pocket and it replaced slide rules. Now, we had a little incident with copying because you're talking about monetizing with IP. Well, when we started with the Apple II and Mike Markkula put his money in, he said I had to go down and talk to a guy named Ed Taylor. He was an attorney, a patent attorney in Beverly Hills. I tried to describe and I was just a raw engineer then transcribed in engineering terms and he put it into the patents and a couple of those patents were so incredibly valuable that wouldn't come to almost anybody so far out of the book, almost violated books on how color television was supposed to be done and that was very important and soon thereafter one day I saw a copy of our computer the Apple II and it was a PC board with all the same chips in the same order so we had a lawsuit. But we didn't fight it on patents. It was simpler to fight it on copyright because there was a huge amount of that code like, you know, 100 pages worth of my handwriting that was in there that made the Apple II work and they just copied it. So, it was easier to fight it as a copyright case. Whatever you do, it should be creative, new, your own, and you should always build in a role of having fun.

So, you need some vision from the top that's actually looking for those sort of things. Maybe the CEO, the chief disruption officer could have a role in that and spotting the little guys in the company that seem to be working on something not worth money.

You should protect, you know, everything you have because there's a million people out there looking for like an easy route to follow or ideas. And ideas, general ideas are, you know, you get a lot of, see a lot of patents sort of written that way. Those specifics should be patented because other people come along would just like to sniff the wind and copy them. So almost everything you do, little tiny things you don't think are worth that much could wind up being so valuable to your company.

That's really a hard one to say. I already talked about my Apple II computer that was all the revenues of Apple for the first 10 years took us to the Fortune 100. That one was, I mean people didn't like the big computer company they didn't think it was worth that much. It just we really had to pursue it. Specific examples of failed ideas are usually our ideas weren't of that type. Failed and then they made it successful. It's usually like we had good ideas and they failed because of marketing mistakes and business mistakes. Like after our Apple II computer, we had the Apple III and it was so dumb we had to put chips in to disable features people wanted and marketing told engineering to do that to make one side of the computer, the Apple III, seem a lot better than the Apple II that was selling greatly. Another one was, 'Okay, we saw the Xerox PARC GUI machine with mouse, hand menus and things and, oh, it cost $50,000. Maybe they bring it down to $20,000.' And Steve Jobs was not being an engineer, not knowing the hardware and software of computers said, 'Oh, we can do it for $1,000.'

No. Right away, Steve Jobs said, 'We're the company that should do this. We can do this. This is the future of computing.' Not what they showed us, but variations based on it. It was a general concept. And I said, 'Boy, once you get this type of machine, you'll never go back to what was before it.' But I didn't think, 'Oh, we're just going to be able to do it right away.' And we rushed in, hired a lot of great people out of Xerox PARC that were good about like educators, academics. What is the relationship of a computer to a human brain? And we hired the best from the east coast computer companies and the west coast computer companies. People saw it so well and they developed the Lisa in one building and it came out so incredibly good and seven pieces of software for all the business users but it cost $10,000. That's like $20,000 today. That's too much for a personal computer. So Steve didn't realize we should have just waited five years as the cost of memory comes down and then shocked the world by jumping ahead of the whole world at the right time. We jumped in too soon. But it really was fascinating. Matter of fact, the people that finally made the Lisa failed for cost. The Macintosh failed because didn't have any software, anything you could really do with it like the Apple II and it was our hardest failure ever. Fortune 100 companies stock drops by a third in a week.

Well, obviously when we started Apple, we had color. Our first logo was six colors. That's not an easy decision. Means everything you ever print with your logo on it has to go through six separate printing steps. But we were so far ahead of the world in presenting color for free instead of for $5,000. You always want to be more efficient than competitors. You want to be better than your competitors. Efficiency is a mathematical thing in engineering. Output divided by input. Numbers. So, you want to get more out for less in. That's the good thinking in a company. Find better ways to do these things. But there's also alternatives where you can find a different approach, winds up at the same solution, but it went off an easier path or a less costly path. Another one I look at, I don't really admire Elon Musk always, but when he started with the electric car, he not only built the Tesla Model S, he built the first six supercharging stations so you could drive this electric car on the long roads on a long road trip. Oh, it was the complete solution. I talked to engineers at Chevy when they came out with one electric car, the lower cost one, and I said, 'Oh, are you going to use the Tesla superchargers?' And they looked at me weird and they said, 'We just build the electric car. Other people do the charging.' Sometimes you need the complete solution. Somebody look at the complete solution, what's really needed and not just a part of it.

Well, I wouldn't. I know my head was in good shape and I was well advised especially by Mike Markkula and our patent attorneys and I felt that we took all the proper steps. Now Steve Jobs might say well with the Macintosh Microsoft just came in and copied it but it was kind of an idea and Microsoft did their version of it.

You know, it probably isn't in computers if I sit back and think, but I'm going to computers and I think it was the Apple G4 Cube, which is sort of treated as it was a failure of Apple's because the engineering, it was incredible engineering not to have to use a fan to have a little chimney for the heat to rise up through. And the Apple Watch, oh, I love the Apple Watch because I can send messages and do all the stuff on it. I generally go to my computer to the watch and I skip the phone carrying around and doing all my work on the phone. I just don't do that.

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Actually, honesty. Don't go out and say things because they sound good. Say because you know them. Everything should be very logical and rational and thought out like science and come to conclusions and you have to know it in your own head and speak what you know and you can justify it. Whenever I talked about something I knew how to do it. Whenever an idea came up for the next direction for Apple I just knew in my head exactly how to do it.

Oh, so glad to have been here talking to you. Thank you.

Keep doing the good you do.