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Hey, it's Sam. Today's story is about a company you've probably heard of — Apple — and the two guys, both named Steve, who started it in a garage with basically no money at all.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak met in the early 1970s in Silicon Valley, back when computers were the size of refrigerators and only universities and big companies could afford them. Woz, as everyone called him, was a shy electronics genius who could build almost anything out of spare parts. Jobs wasn't as good at engineering, but he had something just as rare: he could look at something Woz built for fun and see a business. Their first project together wasn't even a computer — it was a little illegal gadget called a blue box that could trick phone systems into making free long-distance calls. It didn't make them rich, but it taught them they made a great team: Woz the builder, Jobs the dreamer and salesman.
By 1976, Woz had designed something incredible on his own time: a fully working computer circuit board, at a moment when almost nobody had a computer in their home at all. Jobs looked at it and said, basically, forget just giving this away to our hobbyist friends for free — let's sell it. That idea — sell the thing Woz loved building for fun — is the whole reason Apple exists.
On April 1st, 1976, Jobs, Woz, and a friend named Ronald Wayne officially started the Apple Computer Company. Their headquarters was the Jobs family garage in Los Altos, California. To pay for the parts, Jobs sold his Volkswagen bus and Woz sold his prized scientific calculator — that was basically their entire startup funding. Ronald Wayne, the third founder, actually got cold feet about the risk just twelve days later and sold his 10% share of the company back for eight hundred dollars. If he'd held onto it, that stake would be worth well over a hundred billion dollars today. Twelve days changed everything.
Their first product, the Apple I, was just a bare circuit board — customers had to add their own keyboard, screen, and case. But their second computer, the Apple II, released in 1977, was a real machine: it had color graphics and came in a real plastic case, built for regular people, not just engineers. It became one of the first personal computers to sell in huge numbers, and it made Apple a real company almost overnight.
In 1980, Apple went public, selling shares on the stock market for the first time. Steve Jobs was twenty-five years old and instantly worth over two hundred million dollars. But success brought tension. As Apple grew into a big corporation with a board of directors and professional managers, Jobs clashed with the very executives he'd helped hire, including one he'd personally recruited from Pepsi. In 1985, after a power struggle, the board sided against him — and Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, was pushed out of his own company.
Getting fired from Apple could have ended the story right there. Instead, Jobs started a new computer company called NeXT, and he bought a small computer-graphics division from filmmaker George Lucas and renamed it Pixar — yes, that Pixar, the one that would go on to make Toy Story. Meanwhile, back at Apple, without Jobs, the company drifted and nearly went bankrupt in the 1990s. In 1997, in a twist nobody expected, Apple bought Jobs's company, NeXT, mainly to get its software — and brought Steve Jobs back, first as an advisor, then as CEO of the company that had fired him twelve years earlier.
What happened next changed the world: the colorful iMac in 1998, the iPod in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, and the iPad in 2010. Each one took something people already sort of had and made it so simple and beautiful that everyone wanted one. By the time Steve Jobs passed away in 2011, Apple had grown from a garage with a homemade circuit board into one of the most valuable companies on Earth. And it all traces back to one moment: a builder who loved making things, a dreamer who saw what they could become, and a garage in Los Altos on April Fools' Day, 1976.