Steve Wozniak

In 1976, Steve Wozniak offered his personal computer design to Hewlett Packard, where he worked as an engineer.

HP said no, so he and Steve Jobs started Apple.

Four years later, Wozniak was worth $88 million.

Then he did something that Silicon Valley still doesn't quite understand.

Something that violated every rule of how you're supposed to win in the Valley.

The man who created the computer that built Apple into a Fortune 500 company never wanted to run a company at all.

He just wanted to stay at the bottom of the org chart, building cool stuff.

This is the story of the founder who won by refusing to play the game everyone else was playing.

While Steve Jobs was building a mythology, Wozniak was in his HP cubicle designing computers on paper because he couldn't afford the parts.

While Jobs dreamed of changing the world, Wozniak just wanted to impress the homebrew computing club.

But here's what almost no one understands.

Wozniak's radical openness, the philosophy Jobs fought against, is the exact reason that Apple survived long enough for Steve Jobs to become Steve Jobs.

There's a lesson here about what happens when you refuse to compromise, even when it costs you billions.

It's time to listen and learn.

Silicon Valley didn't exist in 1957.

The place that would birth Apple and Google was still called Santa Clara Valley.

It smelled like apricots.

Seven-year-old Steve Wozniak had just moved to Sunnyvale with his family.

Their street was bordered by orchards on three sides.

But Steve wasn't thinking about fruit trees at all.