When Steve Jobs Refused To Give Early Apple Employees Stock, Steve Wozniak Offered Them $10 Million

[joeybee12]

Steve Jobs may have been a brilliant businessman, but he wasn't always nice.

In the early Apple days, when the company was still being run in a garage, Steve Jobs and Apple's board refused to give some early employees stock options.

Apple employee No. 12, Daniel Kottke, was one of these people. He had traveled to India with Jobs and was his college friend, but Jobs still didn't feel he was worthy of stock. Kottke later told Dice that he hoped to meet Facebook's ousted founder, Eduardo Saverin, because he felt the two had similar stories.

"It got to be the summer of 1980 and I never had a stock option," Kottke told Dice. "No one would ever talk to me about it. All I wanted was just to touch base with Steve about it, and he just would not talk to me. He kept me waiting outside his office for hours, on multiple occasions. It was very cold. And you know how he is, he would just be on the phone endlessly until I went away, because he didn’t want to talk to me."

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/steve-jobs-refused-early-apple-141405979.html

[Cooley Hurd]

1. By all accounts, he was NEVER nice...

Despite his knack for innovation, he was a miserable prick to just about everyone...

[CBGLuthier]

10. +1

Yep, even denied his own child. Well known jerk and not much of a philanthropist but the fanboys call Bill Gates an asshole and kiss Jobs ass.

[awoke_in_2003]

11. I loved his products....

but he was a well known prick.

[hobbit709]

2. And they still line up to buy iPOSs.

[unblock]

3. "and $10 million was a lot at the time"

[1StrongBlackMan]

8. $10 Million and I quit my job ...

and work my passion.

That's a hell of a lot of money ... to me!

[randys1]

4. The Woz we know is a good guy, yet the movie chooses NOT to show this

what a joke.

Woz did what I would have done

[1StrongBlackMan]

5. From the article linked to in the link ...

There’s a startup in New York everyone talks about, and the things they say aren't very nice.

The startup sold for ~$80 million and the founders got rich. But, as the rumors go, no other employee made more than $50,000.

That's a common exit scenario. The founders put in a lot of risk in the beginning, and they alone get wealthy if their company is a success.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/non-greedy-startup-ceos-who-turned-employees-into-millionaires-2014-9#ixzz3CU602ZDY

Why does the business media persist in promoting this bogus "the founders put in a lot of risk" myth, since most start-ups that blow up do so with minimal financial investment coming out of the founder's pocket?

Are they trying to quantify effort and/or ingenuity? And even if they are, the founder's "risk", is no greater than that of the early "employees" that made the idea real.

[ProfessorGAC]

6. Great Question

We have taken "entrepenuer" to the extreme. People call Trump that, and he started out with a mere 20 million. That's not impressive to me.

If you start with 20M, and you end up poor you're an idiot. If you start with 20M and end up with 10 B in 30 years, you just did your freakin' job.

[1StrongBlackMan]

9. Speaking of ...

If you start with 20M, and you end up poor you're an idiot.

How the hell does a casino lose money on a casino, without you being a crook (i.e., you're embezzling) or a special kind of idiot?

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/08/30/atlantic-city-losing-2-casinos-5k-jobs-in-3-days/14871579/

[surrealAmerican]

7. Wozniak cared about the key employees ...

Jobs was a self-aggrandizing prick. We get it.