As part of my research, I started reading Jessica Livingston’s Founders at Work to get a feel for the overculture.

I chose the word overculture deliberately, but It’s interesting to think that this book came out in 2008, two years before The Social Network. Back then, the startup world was not the “overculture” it was an underdog, and in fact the foreword (written by Paul Graham of course) is largely an argument for how the big businesses could stand to learn from the startupy way of doing things. How times have changed.

The book itself consists of a series of interviews with founders about the early days, what they struggled with, how they got their ideas, what the early company was like.

Wozniak’s interview struck me - it hits all the notes of his career that entered my hacker consciousness - building computers on paper as a kid, the genius of the apple II, that trick I don’t fully understand with color¹, that time that Jobs screwed him out of thousands of dollars from their Atari bonus. I’ve read through almost everything on folklore.org back in the day so these stories all ring familiar and true.

What stood out on this read is the stuff about camaraderie, which also existed for him at Hewlett Packard. If anything he wasn’t sure about starting Apple because he didn’t want to lose that comradery of the engineer-driven HP culture.

Livingston: How did they [Atari] know you?

Wozniak: Steve Jobs worked there part-time. He would finish up games that they designed in Grass Valley. He brought me in and showed me around, and Nolan Bushnell offered me a job on the spot. I said, “No, I’m never going to leave Hewlett-Packard. It’s my job for life. It’s the best company because it’s so good to engineers.” It really treated us like we were a community and family, and everyone cared about everyone else. Engineers—bottom-of-the-org-chart people—could come up with the ideas that would be the next hot products for the company. Everything was open to thought, discussion, and innovation. So I would never leave Hewlett-Packard. I was going to be an engineer for life there. Then

Livingston: Had you quit Hewlett-Packard? Wozniak: That was very tough. Westarted selling the Apple Is, and I stayed at Hewlett-Packard. I still intended to be at that company forever.Our calculator division moved up to Corvallis, Oregon, and my wife didn’t want to move to Corvallis and I did, so that was lucky because otherwise I would have been up in Oregon and Apple never would have happened. So I stayed here and I moved into another division of Hewlett-Packard across the street that made the Hewlett-Packard 3000 minicomputers.

And the the denouement, when Apple when public in 1980 a lot of the employees didn’t get any shares and so…

Livingston: Didn’t you give away your Apple stock early on to other employees?

Wozniak: As a matter of fact, when we went public, I was a little disturbed that five people who had been with us in our little office from the start and had been so important—Randy Wigginton, Chris Espinosa, a couple of young kids, and a couple of older ones, just hadn’t gotten any stock. I felt that they were a part of this whole energy and excitement and passion for what computers were going to be and what we were doing and how right it was. If somebody is sitting there working till 2:00 a.m. with you, helping to write a little code, and says, “Wow, that is a cool one,” those words mean a lot to you and they deserve something. So I gave each of those five a large amount of stock, probably a million dollars in that day. And that was an early day for a million dollars. I also did a program where I sold stock to about 40 Apple employees . . . I had a chance to sell some stock and get a house. There was an outside bigwig investor type that was willing to buy it all at a certain price. And I said, “Rather than sell it to somebody who’s already got a lot of money, why don’t I give the Apple employees the opportunity?” We were going to go public soon and it was going to be worth a lot more (and was eventually), so basically I sold it to 40 Apple employees. Our legal department was very concerned because they were supposed to be sophisticated investors. They finally gave me the OK. I did the deal and sold it to them, and they each pretty much got a house out of it.

Livingston: That was so generous.

Wozniak: But it’s that whole thing I was talking about: Hewlett-Packard, we’re a community. There was a recession in ’73 and Hewlett-Packard had to cut back 10 percent. Instead of laying off 10 percent of the people, they cut everyone’s salary by 10 percent and gave us one day off every two weeks. So basically they said “nobody goes without a job.” And I like that sort of thing. So a bunch of Apple engineers and marketing people got to benefit from going public. Otherwise, they’d have no stock at all. Mike Markkula kind of felt that some of these people didn’t deserve it; some people shouldn’t get stock. But I disagreed with him on that. Nobody stopped me, so I did it.

What struck me here is the inspiration for his generosity is not his vietnam-era politics, not some communitarian startup ethos, but the Hewlett-Packard corporate culture. And as a counterpoint, Apple the scrappy startup is already screwing over early employees 4 years into its existence.

I’m curious about what made Hewlett-Packard so great in Woz’s eyes and why. He probably didn’t own much stock, it certainly wasn’t a worker-owned co-op. What aspect of the culture made him feel so fulfilled and so loyal?

I want to ask other than the practicalities of corporate structures that make people feel ownership, what aspects of workplace culture make people feel fulfilled? I ask this question holding the truth that culture stuff can be used as a distraction while the real material gains are taken away - you don’t get to keep any equity but boy is the culture great! Holding that critical lens I think the next thing I should read should be about fulfilling workplace cultures.

Peer Review: https://github.com/1rglabs/summer-fellowship-2024/pull/9