Famous Handshakes In History:
How Jobs And Wozniak Met
To some of you, it might come as a surprise that solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot.
Having multiple founders is not a prerequisite, but a matter of fact is that most successful tech companies took two brains to make it work. Partnerships like Wozniak and Jobs (Apple) and Page and Brynn (Google) are good examples of how two people can literally change the world. Some of these partnerships were the result of two kids sharing a gym class (the founders of Ben & Jerry) others because they were siblings. But in all those cases there were two people, sharing a passion.
Not everyone is born with a brother like Elon Musk and most people didn’t have gym class with Jerry Greenfield and Ben Cohen. So how did some of the great the partnerships of the last century came to be? When was the first time they shook hands? We will highlight different famous and less famous partnerships. Focusing not only on the people that worked together but also on how they have met.
In this post we will tell the story of how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak met and the man that made it this possible. They were a strange pair, some might even call them a mismatch, but the fact that this story is written on a MacBook and you as a reader probably own an Apple product yourself, proves the opposite. So where did this seemingly strange collaboration start?
In 1971 Steve Wozniak met Steve Jobs met each other for the first time, Jobs was still in high school and Wozniak was a freshman in college. They got introduced by a mutual friend named Bill Fernandez. Fernandez and Wozniak were good friends during high school and even build a computer together called the “Cream Soda Computer”. The reason why Wozniak and Jobs got introduced is quite a funny story, as Wozniak recounts.
“We first met during my college years, while he was in high school. It was 1971 when a friend said, you should meet Steve Jobs, because he likes electronics and he also plays pranks. So he introduced us.”
Pranks and a strong love for electronics were the basis of one of the most epic partnerships in the modern age. And it was due to a mutual friend that facilitated that first handshake. Bill Fernandez ended up working for Apple as employee number 4 and help design the Apple 1. What happened after this is of course known history, but it all might have never happened if it wasn’t for Bill Fernandez.
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