"Fun" and "Profits" as Motives for Entrepreneurship
(p. 184) After we started selling the boards to Paul Terrell--working day and night to get them to him on time--we had profits like I never imagined. Suddenly our little business was making more than I was making at HP. That wasn't very much, admittedly. But still, it was a lot. We were building the boxes for $220 and selling them wholesale to Paul Terrell for $500.
And, of course, we didn't need a ton of money to operate. I had a day job, so I looked at it as, Hey, cool. Extra money for pizza! As for Steve, he was living at home. I was twenty-five and he was only twenty-one at the time, so what expenses could we have, really? Apple didn't have to make that much to sustain itself and be ongoing. We weren't paying ourselves salaries or paying rent, after all. We didn't have any patents to pay for. Or lawyers. It was a small-time business, and we weren't worried that much about anything.
My dad, watching this, pointed out that we weren't actually making money because we weren't paying ourselves anything. But we didn't care, we were having too much fun.
But note, only several pages later:
(p. 194) Like I said before, we needed money. Steve knew it and I knew it.
So by that summer of 1976, we started talking to potential money people about Apple, showing them the Apple II working in color in Steve's garage.
Source:
Wozniak, Steve, and Gina Smith. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006.
