Finding a technical cofounder would have been difficult for me. I was an English major and didn’t know any computer programmers.

Programmers have not been professionals because they haven’t really cared about quality.

Wozniak: Well, we added up to the total everything that was needed. If there was anything that neither one of us knew how to do, Steve would do it. He’d just find a way to do it. He was just gung ho and pressing for this company to be successful. And me, I was pretty much only in my technical head with the circuits.

The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three of four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands see business as it’s practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.

You’ve got to say you are a step ahead of where you actually are to move to the step that you want to be at.

I didn’t really want to patent it because, for one, I don’t like software patents, and, two, if you patent it, you make it public. Even if you don’t know someone’s infringing, they will still be getting the benefit. Instead, we just chose to keep it a trade secret and not show it to anyone.

Lots of people were skeptical, but that’s always true when you do something that hasn’t been done before.

I’d say determination is the single most important quality in a startup founder. If the founders I spoke with were superhuman in any way, it was in their perseverance.

Finding a programmer to work with if you don’t already know one will be a challenge. Merely judging if a programmer is exceptional vs. competent will be very hard if you are not one yourself. When you do find someone, work together informally for a while to test your compatibility.

People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn’t fit with what they already know.