> 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.
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.