Pod Insights a16z Podcast The Human Behind the Genius About this episode In this special episode, we share never heard before footage from Steve Wozniak alongside his cofounder and best man, Alex Fielding.
Listeners get an inside look into what drove Woz to building a computer, but also how Steve’s zest for life was applied beyond computers – from the rare opportunity to play Tetris on the side of a building or throw a concert across borders.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Steph Smith? What would you do if you co-founded the world's largest company? Would you do it again? Well, we're lucky enough to have someone on this earth whose answer is, why not? That person is Steve Wozniak. In today's episode, we're sharing a portion of our Privatier interview with Steve. Privatier, of course, is his new company, but also some never-heard-before footage with his best man and his coworker of many decades, who also happens to be Privatier CEO, Alex Fielding. Now, as you listen, you might ask, why are we sharing this? Well, I was excited to share this because we're at that inspiring part of the year, where you think you can accomplish just about anything in the remaining 300-plus days, maybe even change the world. And there are few things more inspiring than hearing from someone who did.
0:44 Steph Smith? In this short episode, you'll get an inside look into the brain and heart of Woz, but also the curiosity that led to game-changing technologies that many of us benefit from today, like the phones, or as I like to say, pocket computers, or AirPods that you're probably using to listen to this episode. If you'd like to hear the full episode and get up to speed on Privatier, the company that Alex, Woz, and their co-founder Moriba are working on to clean up the next frontier, then check out episode 684, "The Data Highway Above." Let's start this episode by hearing from Steve Wozniak directly about what inspired him to build a computer in the first place.
1:18 Speaker 01 The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see a16z.com/disclosures.
1:48 Steph Smith? I had the privilege of talking to Alex yesterday, and he told me the story about you from the very, very early days, where when you were younger, you basically told your dad... Hey Dad, I want to have a computer someday. And he said, because at this time, this is true, he said, you're crazy. Computers cost as much as a house. And you told him, well, Dad, I'll live in an apartment. And you seemed to really, really just want a computer at that time. To your point earlier, starting Apple was not about building one of the biggest businesses in the world. It was wanting a computer and wanting other people to have that. I'm curious just to know from a personal perspective, what did you see back then? Was it truly just like a personal need for this device? Or I want to, you know, dig into that early Woz brain and, and hear your perspective on what was going on in those early days.
2:34 Speaker 02 A lot of great things come personally. And I learned even, I taught middle school and elementary school for eight years straight, full time. Full time, like every hour of the day up to seven days a week, no press allowed. So it's not a big story, but I learned that it was less important that you're speaking facts and knowledge from your mouth. Knowledge was less important than the motivation of my students to learn. Had to find ways to make it fun, make it understandable. And that's when I decided, you know what? Wanting something is even more important. And I go back, I wanted a computer, it was in my heart. And I didn't know if I'd ever get it. I didn't know if designing computers would ever be a job for engineers. Cause we were back in the analog days, you know, smart math stuff. But I kept it in me and eventually I found the path to do it. So I was building a computer for myself.
3:16 Speaker 02 And it turned out that the point in time, luck is sometimes there's a lot of luck in business success. And the point in time that I was going to build that computer, no matter what it was worth, turned out to be worth a ton. Now governments have all the resources, you know, but they're stale in their approaches because of it. Here's what we can do very successfully, very stably. We know we'll get there if we put enough money in and test enough. And private industry works so differently. I've only been in private and I just love having ideas and thinking about them and thinking different. And the creativity that comes about when you think, my gosh, I could do something they haven't done before. Or maybe the resources are cheaper, the sorts of huge computing devices are cheaper to make. And maybe certain types of motors, sensors that didn't exist before.
3:59 Speaker 02 You've got to always shoot for the top, being, you know, one of the leaders in the world. And that's just how we think. So a lot of times when I think of government versus private, I also come down to types of people, which is very important. And you have an inventor who could be given a job and they have the right skillsets and they've gone through the right university. You know, majors and K H Ts and, and they're an engineer and they can design what you sign them. But then there's the inventor. Inventor goes along, thinks, oh, my gosh, is there something I'm interested in that I could do? And would it work? And maybe it hasn't been done before. And can I make a difference in the world? The inventor wants to run into a laboratory, hook up some demos real quick, try to get some sort of prototype to show that the idea is right. And that's the sort of person I am. It's in your personality. You don't change it.
4:43 Speaker 02 You don't just say tomorrow, I'm going to be an inventor. Today I'm an engineer. You're usually one or the other.
4:48 Steph Smith? Yeah, definitely. Another word sometimes people use for inventor is visionary. And I'm curious, in the early days, when you were just out of passion, creating these computers, could you see the path to today? Of course, you can't picture everything with so many advancements since those early days. But like, how far along were you actually envisioning? And I'm asking this partially because even if we apply this to space, a lot of the things that people talk about also sound kind of like science fiction, right? They probably won't be eventually. But I'm trying to understand how far along you see or the extrapolation that maybe goes on in your brain when you're originally talking about, yes, a computer with 200 transistors. And now we're talking billions and the applications that have kind of sprung from that.
5:31 Speaker 02 I myself, I was really a great engineer in certain field. And I was designing the hottest products in the world for Hewlett Packard without even having a college degree yet. And then you talk about visionary, vision, seeing the future. That's different than invention, though. Inventor really wants to actually go in and create something today that didn't exist and not have a vision that's 50 years out or 10 years out, because that's science fiction a lot. And everybody can talk about it and say later on, see, I proposed it, but it wasn't really possible to do with money. And the engineer says, feet on the ground? What can I actually do and build and deliver to people? When we started Apple, you know, we had a great product. It was going to be all the revenues of Apple for the first 10 years. We had a great lead and we were comfortable. We could do what we wanted. But the amount of memory that would hold a song.
6:15 Speaker 02 Costs, you know, we were back in the days of tape. It cost about a million dollars, a good fraction of a million dollars. Do you think we saw today where you have a device in your hand with a thousand songs on it even? No, Steve Jobs is very instrumental in always taking us, do what we can do today. Try to do something a little more tomorrow, a little more. You can have a lot of failures too, if you'll have one great product bringing in the revenues. But the whole idea was we'll move towards the future and we'll be a part of it. And we'll be in with it. And after all, you look back at it, it was kind of invisible, the steps we took, but they all led to today. Steve Jobs' Apple II was really the iPod music, music. And that was the first time, oh my gosh, up till then, our company valuation was the same as the old Apple II days.
6:57 Speaker 02 And then all of a sudden, we sold it to everyone in the world and our sales doubled and our profits doubled. And the board gave Steve billions and stock options and jet airplanes. That was the turning point. And then the iPhone was even better and it was based on the iPod, not the reverse. Not a phone and we'll include an iPod, more like it's an iPod, but you get a phone with it. And so it's hard to say that you really see the future more than a year ahead when you're working a year ahead on your projects. Whenever I tried to see the future a year ahead, I knew it one year ahead because I was working on it. If I looked two years ahead, made some guesses, oh my gosh, other aspects, other technologies and all came out of, from outer space and people's desire, which way they wanted to go was different. It's very hard to predict even two years ahead successfully, the way I work.
7:41 Speaker 02 Nowadays, we got huge, big companies. So it's kind of like, you know, anything they work on is going to be successful. It's not, not as much of a gamble, but you know, real inventors like to gamble, like to prove the world that they can do more than you ever imagined.
7:55 Steph Smith? Now here's Alex reflecting on what it's been like to work with someone so influential over the years. Getting to witness just how human even those who are superhuman are.
8:04 Speaker 03 We've known each other for a long time, but I will say, working between him and getting to work with Steve Jobs back in my time at Apple. The thing that's interesting, I was helping Woz clean out his garage. This is a true story. Like you don't think about Woz cleaning out his garage, right? But in his garage, I came across a blue three-ring binder. And it was filled with HP graph paper from when he worked at Hillard Packard before they started Apple. And he was modelizing, working on his designs for Apple I and Apple II. And this was a solo endeavor. I mean, this is different from the type of endeavors that we have to do at the scale, right? But I'm going through it page by page as an engineer and looking at every trace and every chip that he hand drew on every page for Apple one and Apple two.
8:49 Speaker 03 And then in assembler for Apple ROM and Apple DOS. And then I get to the back of this book that is it's an engineering PhD manifesto that I don't think you could create today. Like this should be a part of engineering school curriculum for every kid that wants to go into STEM. At the back of the same book, on the same HP graph paper before he started Apple, were handwritten song lyrics from the Beatles and Bob Dylan that he had heard on the radio while he was working on Apple one and Apple two. And I thought, man, how like, how can you be the human that did this and be the human that cared enough to write this down?
9:30 Speaker 03 And to live by those things. And I think it is important that we make a difference and we make an impact. And, you know, there are a lot of things that on a planet earth that are technology projects that I really don't care about. I mean, I, I'm not the type of person that's going to go start the next Tinder or, you know, the next, I'll skip all the other great app examples, but they're fleeting. And I'm a big believer that Elon oftentimes actually means what he says. Sometimes he doesn't. I mean, I think he's pretty damn funny. But I think sometimes he says exactly what he means and people glance over it because it sounds so crazy. But all of these enabling stepstones on the way to Mars and on the way to an interplanetary species, on the way to ultimately a spacefaring civilization.
10:16 Speaker 03 Oh, absolutely critical. And we can't start on it at the last minute. There's going to be a million baby steps to get that one giant leap. And we have to work on it now.
10:27 Steph Smith? Something I took from what you just shared there, even the example of seeing the drawings in Waz's garage is that I think you've had the unique perspective or ability to see something from its very, very early stages, like those drawings, to obviously the giants that Apple became today and getting to work with someone who had the capacity to understand something that can emerge from being a seed into something much, much bigger. Now here's where the bonus footage comes in. Here was Alex and I chatting after our interview was finished. Of course, we've confirmed with him this footage could be shared. You'll get to hear how Steve's zest for life was not only applied to computers, but also the rare opportunity to play Tetris on the side of a building or throw a concert across borders.
11:12 Speaker 03 I think Steve is one of those very, very rare personality types where he can see and connect the dots forward. And it has never been a motivation of money, even at the start. Like, Apple...
11:26 Steph Smith? He was just building computers for fun, right? Like, he was doing that well before Apple even existed.
11:33 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah. I mean, he called me one time. I was working at a company with our former CTO at Apple. She laughed and took me with her. She ripped me out of Steve Jobs's hands. And unfortunately, she just passed away this year. Ellen Hancock. I mean, she is single-handedly responsible for saving Apple. And I say saving because when I was there, we were on the way to bankruptcy. And Ellen is the reason why Apple abandoned a very large, multi-billion-dollar software development project for a new operating system and went out and bought Steve Jobs's company next and brought him back. And one day, I get a call from Woz. I'm at my day job. I'm working for Ellen. And he calls me, like, 10 o'clock at night. And he goes, "Dude, do you remember when you told me if we could play Tetris
12:17 Speaker 03 on the side of a building, you would be there no matter what?" And I was like, "No, I don't remember saying that." And he was like, "You..."
12:23 Steph Smith? But you do.
12:25 Speaker 03 And he was like, "I definitely remember it. And if you don't do it right now, you're not a man of your word. You're not a person of principles. You are just full of BS if you don't get on this plane with me and go play Tetris on the side of the Brown University Library building in Rhode Island tomorrow morning."
12:41 Steph Smith? Oh, my God, I love that.
12:43 Speaker 03 "Steve, I manage a bunch of people and I can't just bail." Like, "What do you mean tomorrow morning?" He's like, "I already booked you a plane ticket. 7:00 in the morning, we're going." And I was like, "Dude, I can't just up. It's 11 o'clock at night, right? What am I gonna do?" So he goes, you have to do it. So I call Ellen, I call our management chain. I'm like, I've got a once in a lifetime opportunity. I have to do it. I'm going to be gone for like three days. I'm gonna, so I'm just thinking.
13:10 Steph Smith? Get me playing some Tetris.
13:11 Speaker 03 And play some Tetris. Next thing I know, I'm in Rhode Island. I'm across the street from the Brown Universal Library Building with Steve. We're playing Tetris, using the whole building as a display.
13:20 Steph Smith? Oh, that's amazing.
13:22 Speaker 03 They took Christmas tree lights and relays and they lit all the windows so that we could play. And there was a live Russian band behind us playing Tetris music while we were playing. So I don't think anything of it. And Steve and I are playing stupid pranks on each other the whole time. I fly home. Ellen calls me, kid, my office. What? Okay. So I go in her office. I'm a total idiot. No idea what's going on. She goes, family emergency, huh? I was like, family emergency? I was like, no, no, no. Once in a lifetime. She whips open the New York Times. And there's a picture of Steve and I playing Tetris.
13:52 Steph Smith? I want to see if I can find this. Is it still online? Probably.
13:56 Speaker 03 It's got to be out there somewhere. And she was like, what about this? And I go, well, Ellen, it was a once in a whole lifetime opportunity. I had to do it.
14:07 Steph Smith? You're like, you know, Steve, you know, when it's like.
14:10 Speaker 03 And she, she does, it was, it was hysterical. But like, these types of things, I mean, he would call me in the middle of the night when we live nearby each other and we'd go, milkshakes. We drive tonight. Bob's Big Boy in Burbank. We're going. Like, we gotta get milkshakes. I'm like, Steve, I can't just, he's like, you gotta do it. We got it. We gotta drive down right now. Like, drive from the Bay Area to Burbank to go get Bob's Big Boy?
14:35 Steph Smith? Yeah, I love these stories. Cause yeah, you hear, I mean, obviously Steve is a legend, but it's always cool to see or hear these stories of him just like wanting a milkshake or wanting to play Tetris with his friend. Those are awesome stories.
14:50 Speaker 03 I've told him, like, the biggest prank he's ever fooled is that he has tried to convince people that he is anything like us. He's not wired the same. He doesn't have, maybe this is just me, you know, Steve is one of those people, and he'll tell you this probably more than anything else. He's had a history like with Steve Jobs. Woz would come up with some crazy technology for fun or for prank or something that he thought would improve the world. And Steve Jobs would show up and be like, how do we make money on this? And you need that. Combination of stuff to make businesses work. It's like Hiller and Packard, or maybe it was like Bill Gates and I wouldn't even want to say bomber, but maybe it was like Bill Gates and Paul Allen. I think you need those weird combinations of personalities.
15:33 Speaker 03 You can't, like, you can't have a diversity of ideas with a bunch of people that look and think the same. So Steve's one of those very rare personalities. He threw the biggest concert on planet Earth because he missed Woodstock. Okay, he spent forty million dollars throwing a concert. He threw the US festivals when I was a child. So nineteen eighty-three, he threw the US festivals. Bigger than Woodstock, more attendance, middle of California. He had to build the amphitheater to put it on. Lost forty million dollars on a concert because he wanted to have his own Woodstock. He just wanted to be there.
16:12 Steph Smith? That's amazing.
16:12 Speaker 03 He opened the gates, right? And by the way, that event, it was really for the rest of us.
16:17 Steph Smith? Oh, got it.
16:17 Speaker 03 Called it the US festivals. And we're talking about like, at the time, like, you know, Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest and Van Halen and Fleetwood Mac. And it was broken out by like Country Day, Hard Metal Day, like Classic Rock Day, like Folk Day. So it was like the first mega concert, multi-day concert thing outside of Woodstock. Well, at that event, we were in a hugely contentious environment in nineteen eighty-three. This is the fall of the Berlin Wall a year early. The wall is still up. What does Steve do? He goes, man, we should go talk to the Russians and we could set up a live satellite simulcast
17:01 Speaker 03 in both directions so that people in Moscow can attend the US festivals remotely.
17:05 Steph Smith? That is so amazing because that is so far before, you know, the times.
17:11 Speaker 03 Well, and he did it. One of my friends that got to go to both sides of it actually gave me his Russian pass to attend on the Moscow side because they gave him the pass. They're like, ah, it's was, it's not going to start a war.
17:23 Steph Smith? That's so amazing. I mean, we talked about exponential curves before, and I just feel like so many people are very similar to each other. And then you have these people who are true outliers. They're just like so, so different from the rest.
17:37 Speaker 03 It's ridiculous, like the number of very hysterical events over a couple decades of knowing Woz.
17:45 Steph Smith? I wanted to end this episode by coming full circle by hearing Alex touch on Woz's need to own a computer that fueled his desire to build one, touching also on John Draper's similar story of inventing the blue box just so he could make free phone calls. Such an elegant reminder that sometimes the best things in life come from a place of genuine curiosity and the need to solve a problem of your own.
18:05 Speaker 03 I don't think wealth is in his vocabulary because it was never a desire. Like, I remember when we first met, we were talking about what drove you to decide that you had to do Apple. And he was like, I never had to do Apple. I had to own a computer. I wanted a computer.
18:20 Steph Smith? I love that.
18:21 Speaker 03 And I told myself, well, what was that like? He told me his father was a brilliant engineer and Woz is 10 times the engineer his father was. I mean, he is, it's Jedi. I've never seen anything like it. There are tricks that he pulled off before I was born that I still don't know how the hell he did them. And I will probably struggle. And that's the reason I think that book should be engineering curriculum because there were genuine brilliant tricks that he pulled to be efficient in his designs that no one else would have done, but he needed to do it. He didn't have any money. You have to be efficient. You have to be scrappy. And I asked him, so do you know the moment you had to do it? And he goes, yeah, I read about this thing called a computer. And I decided I really, really wanted one.
19:03 Speaker 03 And I went to my dad, who's this brilliant engineer. I think his dad was at Lockheed because he was in the Bay Area kind of old buzzard club, Rocket, people. I have space as a reoccurring theme for all of us. And he said, Dad, I really, I want to have a computer someday. And he said his dad told him, you're crazy. Computers cost as much as a house. You're never going to own a computer. And Steve's answer right away was, I'll live in an apartment.
19:31 Speaker 03 And that tells you almost everything you need to know. Could he see the steps beyond the thing that he was doing?
19:40 Speaker 03 I believe there was an intuition. There might not have been like, I know exactly Tinder's going to exist. Like, I don't think that was 1976. I don't think so. Like, I don't think that was the basis of any of these crazy people doing crazy things. And all of these things for Steve, blue boxes, he didn't invent the blue box. I mean, Captain Crunch, that crazy bastard, you know, obviously invented the blue box so that he could hack the telephone system to make free phone calls. Steve, it was a challenge for himself. He didn't want to sell them. He wanted to take what one person was doing with analog electronics and make it digital and see if he could do it. And of course, he did it. And then Steve Jobs lumped into him and they actually used part of their blue box sales revenue from Berkeley
20:21 Speaker 03 to finance Apple. They sold their most personal possessions. Steve Jobs sold his Volkswagen thing. Woz sold his HP calculator. They used those monies to bootstrap Apple into existence. Those are stories of conviction because there's nothing to fall back on, right? You can't go back. You can only go forward. Burn the boats.
20:40 Steph Smith? Burn the boats. I know. And wow, it's so cool. It must be so cool to have seen all this over the many decades you've known him. And it must be very interesting also to be working on something that you know the visionary level that Woz is. And if he cares so much about this topic and you equally care about the topic, which is cleaning up space and improving it, making it more collective, that must be so cool to get to work with someone who has that level of vision and to align with it and get to build something that is bigger than you.
21:11 Speaker 03 Well, it's been 20 years since he decided he wanted to be president of anything. And I love that he's president of this.
21:17 Steph Smith? Again, that was Alex Fielding, CEO of Privateer, reflecting on his many years of friendship with Steve Wozniak. If you're interested in what both of them are building today alongside their co-founder Marba, again, check out episode 684, The Data Highway Above, where they discuss the growing amount of space debris and what they're doing to fix it. I'll leave you with my favorite part of that episode.
21:39 Speaker 03 All of outer space is probably infinite, but where we put satellites, that's actually finite. In fact, we put satellites on very specific orbital highways. They're very close to Earth. In fact, where are you right now, Steph?
21:53 Steph Smith? I am in Insmitas, California.
21:55 Speaker 03 So I'm closer to low Earth orbit than I am to you. And I think that's what people just don't realize.
22:06 Steph Smith? Thanks for listening to the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, or tell a friend. We also recently launched on YouTube at youtube.com/A16Z underscore video, where you'll find exclusive video content. We'll see you next time.
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