Apple's oft-forgotten third co-founder says he has no regrets about departing the company just 12 days after it was founded and relinquishing an $800 stake that would be worth billions today.
Ronald Wayne, now 77, was the old guy in the trio that founded Apple on April 1, 1976. This week, he took to Facebook to offer a brief, first-person account of why he parted company with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak a little more than a week later, giving up his 10 percent stake in the fledgling company. (In addition to the $800, Wayne also took $1,500 to forfeit any claims against Apple).
The avuncular Wayne, who worked with Jobs at Atari before forming Apple, writes that he left the company because he "didn't feel that this new enterprise would be the working environment that I saw for myself, essentially for the rest of my days." Though he never went on to fame and fortune?Wayne retired to a small Nevada town after post-Apple stints at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and running a stamp shop in Milpitas, Calif. ?today he downplays the future fortune he left on the table after leaving Apple.
"To counter much that has been written in the press about me as of late, I didn't lose out on billions of dollars," he writes on Facebook. "That's a long stretch between 1976 and 2012. Apple went through a lot of hard times and many thought Apple would simply go out of business at various times in its maturity. I perhaps lost tens of millions of dollars. And quite honestly, between just you and me, it was character building."
Wayne claims that if he had known that Apple would launch an initial public offering in 1980 and turn its founders into millionaires, he would have hung around but "walked away" because "Steve and Steve had their project ... [t]hey wanted to change the world in their way ... I wanted to change the world in my own."
The man who wrote the manual for the Apple I and devised its first logo (pictured at right) also says that he didn't really exit the company for a pittance, relatively speaking.
"We've had a 2500 percent increase in inflation since the end of World War II," he notes. "The $2,300 ? $800 and then later, another $1500 ? I received from Apple Inc. in 1976 would be roughly the same as $9,200 today. I'm sure you would agree with me that's not bad pay for only 12 days worth of work."
Inflation is a subject close to Wayne's heart. His Facebook post appears to have been published to promote his book Insolence of Office, in which Wayne says he discusses "the driving factors behind [post-World War II] inflation ... in great detail."
Wayne also describes conversations he had with Jobs when they were both working at Atari, back when Wayne says he was making $22,000 or "$88,000 a year in today's money." Some reports on Wayne's departure from Apple have claimed an unwillingness on his part to risk his job and assets as a factor in his decision to leave.
Interestingly, it was Wozniak who later maintained a friendship with Wayne after they parted ways as business partners. Wozniak wrote the forward to Wayne's recent autobiography, Adventures of an Apple Founder, a project "Jobs outright refused to participate in, telling Wayne, bluntly, 'I don't think you're a founder of the company," in an email," according to a recent Engadget profile of the forgotten Apple founder.
Source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2400652,00.asp?kc=PCRSS05039TX1K0000760
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