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What Happened To The First 10 Apple Employees

mike-markkula
Apple, unlike any other company in the world, has its identity tied to one individual: Steve Jobs.

 

And without question, Jobs was the driving force that turned Apple into the world’s most valuable tech company.

But, Jobs didn’t do it alone.

We decided to take a look at the first 10 employees at Apple, and see what they did and where they are today.

Apple’s first CEO, Michael Scott, gave us a bunch of color on the early days, and Steve Wozniak helped with a list of early employees, though it was based on his memory. We got our full list from another early employee.

The Apple employee numbers aren’t the order each person joined the company. When Scott came to Apple he had to give out numbers to each employee to make life easier for the payroll department.

 

10. Gary Martin was in charge of accounting

10. Gary Martin was in charge of accounting

Steven Roberge via Flickr

We couldn’t find a photo of Martin

Martin thought Apple was going to flop, but joined the company anyway. He stayed at Apple until 1983. From Apple he jumped to Starstruck, a company working on space travel. For the next few decades he moved from one CFO position to another at a few companies. Martin is now a private investor and is on the board of cloud company LeoNovus, where he was named CFO in December.

9. Sherry Livingston was the right hand for Apple’s first CEO

9. Sherry Livingston was the right hand for Apple's first CEO

DigiBarn

Some of the early files on Apple, which Livingston probably had to organize

Livingston was the first secretary at Apple and she did a lot. Michael Scott, who hired her, said she basically did all the odds and ends work for Apple in the early days. She recently became a grandmother, and we’re not sure if or where she’s working now.

8. Chris Espinosa was working at Apple part time in high school

Chris Espinosa joined Apple when he was 14, and still in high school. It looks like he’s still with the company today. On his personal blog he said he ended up as employee No. 8 because when CEO Michael “Scotty” Scott was giving out numbers, he was at school. He arrived late and ended up with the “wrong” number.

7. Michael “Scotty” Scott was the original CEO

7. Michael "Scotty" Scott was the original CEO

Michael Scott

Scott told us he gave himself  No. 7, as a joke. It’s a reference to James Bond, 007. Scotty, as he was known, picked all the numbers for employees and organized the company. He was brought in as CEO by Mike Markkula, the man who invested $250,000 in Apple, and helped it map out its business plan.

6. Randy Wigginton ended up working for multiple important tech companies

6. Randy Wigginton ended up working for multiple important tech companies

Bruce Damer/ DigiBarn

Dan Kotkke (#12), Randy Wigginton (#6), Chris Espinosa, (#8)

Wigginton’s main job was to rewrite BASIC so it would work for the Apple II, Michael Scott told us in an interview. In his post Apple-life he’s worked at eBay, Google, Chegg, and he’s now at Square, the payment startup.

5. Rod Holt was super important in the development of the Apple II

Holt was a highly regarded designer, who was skeptical of joining Apple initially. But, in “Return To The Little Kingdom,” he says Steve Jobs “conned” him into taking the job. Holt helped develop the power supply for the Apple II. After six years at Apple, Holt says he was pushed out of the company by new management.

4. Bill Fernandez was the first employee after the two Steves

Bill Fernandez first met Steve Jobs at Cupertino Junior High School when Jobs was a new student. Fernandez was also a neighbor and friend of Steve Wozniak. When Jobs and Wozniak started Apple, they hired Fernandez as the first employee. He stayed with Apple until 1993, when he left to work at Ingres, a database company. He’s now CEO of a stealth startup called Omnibotics, which seems like it’s going be like Nest. Its sparse site just says, “Filling homes with technological conveniences.”

3. Mike Markkula was the money man

Markkula was as instrumental in developing Apple as either of the two Steves. He made an investment in Apple worth $250,000. In exchange for his investment, he took 30% of the company. He also helped manage the company, develop a business plan, hired the first CEO, and insisted Steve Wozniak join Apple. (At the time he was thinking about joining HP.)

Markkula was an early Intel employee and became a millionaire by the time he was 30 when the company went public. According to “Return to the Little Kingdom,” his investment in Apple was less than 10% of his total worth at the time.

He stayed at Apple until 1997, overseeing the ouster and return of Steve Jobs. When Jobs came back, Markkula left. He has since invested in a few startups and donated money to Santa Clara University, for the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.

2. Steve Jobs was given the number two just to irk him

2. Steve Jobs was given the number two just to irk him

Stephane de Luca

Why is Jobs employee No. 2 and not No. 1? Michael Scott says, “I know I didn’t give it to Jobs because I thought that would be too much.” Jobs, as we all know, was ousted from Apple, then came back and returned it to glory. In between, he led Pixar. He died in October 2011.

1. Steve Wozniak was the technical expert

1. Steve Wozniak was the technical expert

Wozniak almost didn’t join Apple. He had a job offer at HP in Oregon, and was considering taking it. He made the right choice. He’s still an Apple employee on some nominal level.

 

BONUS: Ronald Wayne decided to sell his shares for $1,700

BONUS: Ronald Wayne decided to sell his shares for $1,700

CNN

Wayne from a 2010 CNN profile

Ronald Wayne was an original partner in Apple with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, but decided the business wasn’t for him. He left. To make things official Markkula bought out his stake in the company for $1,700 in 1977.

In 2012, Wayne wrote an essay on why he left Apple. It’s quite good: “I didn’t separate myself from Apple because of any lack of enthusiasm for the concept of computer products. Aside from any immediate apprehension in regard to financial risks, I left because I didn’t feel that this new enterprise would be the working environment that I saw for myself, essentially for the rest of my days. I had every belief would be successful but I didn’t know when, what I’d have to give up or sacrifice to get there, or how long it would take to achieve that success.

To counter much that has been written in the press about me as of late, I didn’t lose out on billions of dollars. 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.”

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-first-10-apple-employees-2014-4?op=1#ixzz2zMegXtdn Read More

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Confessions of an Apple Store Employee

Apple is famous for its secrecy, with a code of silence that runs from top management all the way down to its retail employees. One Apple Store employee decided to throw protocol to the curb and tell us what it’s really like working at the vaunted retail outlets

apple

Product Launches

We are completely in the dark until they do a keynote speech. We have no idea what is coming and are not allowed to openly speculate. You can get into serious trouble if you speculate—especially to a customer. I am asked five times per day about the next iPad or iPhone, and I quite simply don’t know. But I would be in huge trouble if I said something like “The next iPad is going to have a camera.” I actually avoid the technology section of the newspaper so I have no points of view to accidentally comment with or drop into conversation. I’d rather just be dumb about it. The day of a big keynote, everybody at the store watches it. It’s also really easy to get out of work that day by saying you want to watch the keynote from home. They’ll never say no. Then they’ll start preparing us for the big launch and start scheduling crazy shifts. During the iPhone 4 launch, they brought us food—and good food! Somebody told me that the 5th Avenue store in New York had a masseuse during one launch, and that another store had a kiddie pool full of goldfish as, like, a Zen thing. They also really emphasize how important it is for us to stay hydrated, and we can get big bonuses if we work really long hours on a launch day.

Evil Customers

Its amazing how badly behaved some customers are. I have seen customers have complete meltdowns and get phones exchanged that were like two years old. They scream, cry, curse. And it works. People can be horrible. Sometimes it’s like working at McDonald’s, with better pay. I’ve never been treated so badly in my life.

Dealing With Drug Dealers

We get a lot of drug dealers who try to buy iPhones with fake IDs. You can tell them instantly just by how shady they act, and they know you know, but you obviously can’t start accusing them of being drug dealers—they are customers, after all. But when they try to check out, they’ll use what are obviously fake IDs or fake credit cards, and it often turns out they’re using a dead person’s Social Security number or something. And when you call them out on that—then, they run.

Pushing MobileMe

We aren’t paid on commission, but you fear for your job if you’re not selling enough. We’re supposed to sell AppleCare product support with just about everything, and honestly, those aren’t that hard to sell, since they aren’t a bad deal. But we’re also supposed to push MobileMe, and that’s really hard to sell. Nobody ever sells it.

Sales Competition

We have a posted list of our metrics, and you can see everybody else’s. It shows you how much money each person is pulling in for the company. If you aren’t doing very well, you start getting manager meetings, and they sit you down and try to figure out why you aren’t selling more.

Chinese Resellers

When the iPad first launched, we got tons of resellers from China coming in and trying to pay in cash. Back then, you had to reserve an iPad before you could pick it up, so they would go to the computers in the back of the store and create e-mail address after e-mail address just to reserve an iPad on the spot. We’d get a lot of weird e-mail addresses, like 9494893@ymail.com. And they tried to haggle us on the price for iPads! This is Apple—no way would that work.

The Apple Credo

Sometimes the company can feel like a cult. Like, they give us all this little paper pamphlet, and it says things like—and I’m paraphrasing here—”Apple is our soul, our people are our soul.” Or “We aim to provide technological greatness.” And there was this one training session in which they started telling us how to work on our personality, and separating people into those with an external focus and an internal focus. It was just weird.

Security

There are security guards everywhere. They are undercover, so you can’t tell who they are. A lot of them are retired cops, and they get paid really well. They have to deal with people doing things like wheeling in strollers and trying to use them to roll off with Time Capsules and iPods.

How to Get Fired

They have a really lenient attendance policy. You have to be late like 15 times before they’ll fire you. But if you talk to the press or speculate to a customer about the next iPad? That’s the end of you. The Public Computers A lot of teenagers come in and use Photo Booth and then ask us how to upload their shots to Facebook. A lot of homeless people come in and do live webcasts. Those are fine. Then we have some really scary homeless people who come in and listen to death metal really loudly on the Bose speakers. My favorites are the teenagers who play Britney Spears really loud and start dancing. Not many people use the computers to access porn, but a lot of people change the languages on them. And it isn’t easy for us to figure out how to switch it back from Korean or Russian!

The Phone Room

The worst is when we have to work the Phone Room, which is where calls to the store are answered. The other day, I felt like I was working a suicide hot line. People sometimes call us up and treat us like we’re their therapists. Or we have women who want help with their computers as they try to prove their husbands are cheating on them. Usually I just transfer people to AppleCare so I don’t have to deal with them. Unlocked iPhones We get tons of people asking us for unlocked iPhones, which, of course, we don’t sell. We usually have to tell them that if they unlock their iPhone, it won’t work. That it’s going to be like a $700 paperweight, and that the antenna will fry itself on T-Mobile. Of course, that’s not true, but that’s what we tell them. And if they have an unlocked iPhone, we won’t touch it at the Genius Bar.

Working There Makes You Power Hungry

When I’m there, I get sucked into the competitive culture. Normally I’m pretty low-key, but when I’m at the store, it’s all sell, sell, sell! I wanna work my way up, get promoted and eventually get to the Genius Bar—which is where you want to be. Who doesn’t want to be a genius

 

Sourced from popularmechanics.com

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