For every founder who left a company early and lost out on millions there are thousands of other founders who left a company early that went on to fail. Ronald Wayne's story is interesting but it's not advice. If you take anything from it that should be the lesson that he is an outlier, and in practically any other startup doing what he did would have been a very good idea.
Just looking at the title and having known about the initial years of Apple is enough to know what this article may be about. Taking a quote that would be relevant here — Steve Jobs said in his famous Stanford commencement address of 2005 [1]:
“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”
Looks like the trust wasn't there at that time. Without a time machine, such regrets are unproductive.
Sorry, but who cares? A guy makes a bad financial call VERY early on in a company’s lifetime because he has different priorities. Does anyone reading this not have their own story to tell about bad decisions that only hindsight could have prevented? Sure, in this case there’s a lot more money at stake, but who’s to say that if he had stayed, the company’s history wouldn’t have been written differently? Apple is where it is today because of Woz and Jobs initially, and then Jobs in the later years.
> A guy makes a bad financial call VERY early on in a company’s lifetime because he has different priorities.
It wasn't necessarily even a bad call at the time. Apple was originally founded as a partnership, and Mr. Wayne was worried that he would personally be on the hook for foolish debts incurred by Steve Jobs.
It seems to be really difficult for people to understand that a bad outcome doesn’t necessarily imply a bad decision, nor does a good outcome imply a good decision.
It's sort of like texas holdem. You can play your cards the right way and fold on the flop, then the river comes and it turns out you would have won if you stayed in the game and played 'foolishly'.
If his role was to be a tie-breaker vote when Jobs and Woz couldn't agree on a next move, then it is true that there's no way to know in retrospect how that might have affected the company's fortune for better or worse, esp. considering all the ups and downs Apple has gone through. We see Apple as a big success now, but that was hardly a forgone conclusion twenty years ago.
What if he did stay on Apple and somehow derailed the Apple II project?
Its an interesting story that people always are interested in because all of these What If? questions basically assume that they would have a positive outcome if they made one single decision.
Also, it's all relative. There's obviously a peak somewhere, but you never know when the peak is until after the fact. That 10% would be $100 billion today but what if it would be $1 trillion tomorrow? At what point does it stop mattering? I don't think there's a solid answer.
Sitting on 10% for decades might've made Ronald Wayne a multimillionare but only in exchange for not being able to sell any of the stock until literally today. For some people it's unfortunately not practical to wait it out.
Oh, and not to mention there were plenty of points in Apples history where it's future was not so certain.
Exactly. People don’t get that. The whole allure of venture capital is that your downside risk is only the money you invested but your upside reward doesn’t have a limit. If you invest $10,000 in a corporation, that’s the most you can loose. If you invest $10K in a partnership where you are personally liable, your risk is whatever your share of the partnership’s liability is.
Regarding the wrong auction price, I wonder if the $300K discrepancy was Sotheby's fee, so the article is trying to say that Wayne might have pocketed $1.3 million? (Or it could be sloppy journalism.)
I thought I noticed another error in the article where it said that Wayne "gave up his 10 percent of Apple for just $2,300", but Sotheby's scan of the amendment to the contract (the 4th page) says "Wozniak and Jobs agree to pay and deliver to Wayne, the sum of eight hundred dollars ($800)".
That part wasn't an error. The Sotheby's Catalogue Note at the same site says that Wayne "received another $1,500 when Apple found the funding they needed shortly thereafter", which would bring the total he received to $2,300.
