Collaboration is a fundamental of business growth practiced by professionals such as Jeffrey Kallister. It relies on different parties pooling their individual skills and knowledge, in creating something far greater than its component parts. One of the classic examples of collaborative effort involves Apple Computer’s founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The future partners were born in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s, with Jobs becoming fascinated by personal computing as a teen in high school, attending Hewlett-Packard Company lectures.
It was at an HP lecture that Jobs met Wozniak in 1971, when the former was 16 and the latter 21. Wozniak had dropped out of the University of California, Berkeley, to take a position at Hewlett-Packard. Through the HP connection, both became involved in the Homebrew Computer Club, which allowed them to create new hardware and software, including the underpinnings of video games. The following year, Jobs entered Reed College in Portland, though he dropped out after a single semester to take a job with video game pioneer Atari.
Both entrepreneurs, despite a five-year age difference, found themselves in a similar position as young professionals with unique visions of the future, working in companies with often vastly different priorities. They collaborated on small projects, as with the building and selling of “blue boxes,” or devices that enabled long-distance phone calls at no cost by mimicking phone companies’ activating tones.
Envisioning the concept of an easily accessible personal computer (PC), Jobs convinced Wozniak to quit his job and join him in founding Apple. This required raising $1,300 in working capital, which meant selling treasured possessions. For Wozniak, that was a programmable HP calculator, while for Jobs, it was a Volkswagen minibus. They were able to make use of the family garage at Jobs’ parents’ home in Los Altos to create their first Apple machine in 1976.
As with many successful collaborations, the skills that each partner brought to the table were unique and distinct. An engineering wizard, Wozniak excelled in the nitty-gritty of coding and putting together a user-friendly personal computer. The single-board Apple 1 combined a video interface with Read Only Memory (ROM). Their first production of 50 machines went to the Byte Shop in Mountain View, a local computer dealer.
Jobs’ primary skill was taking a technical understanding of what Wozniak was doing and translating it into compelling marketing and consumer design that brought the product to the public. This skill came to the fore in 1977 with the introduction of the Apple II, which featured a plastic housing for all the electronic components and color graphics. Having this compact, ready-to-use product on hand encouraged programmers to unleash their creativity and, within months, more than 15,000 applications existed that harnessed the machine for various tasks.
This early adoption of the PC among innovators in the tech community helped secure venture funding through former Intel executive Mike Markkula, who took on a role as chairman and brought $600,000 to the table. The collaborative pathway forged by Jobs and Wozniak provided a template for entrepreneurs in many fields, including Jeffrey Kallister in the automotive sphere.
