Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak shares his advice for start-ups
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has shared his advice to entrepreneurs and engineers who may be thinking about starting up their own tech company.
Wozniak, who founded Apple along with Steve Jobs in the 1970s, spoke to Econsultancy's Ashley Friedlein at the Festival of Marketing in London about some of the ingredients needed to create a successful company.
"When you start a company, you better have good engineering or a good product and you should have a working model of it before you seek money," he said.
"Most important of all, as I said, is marketing," he added.
"Mike Markkula (Apple's second CEO) came in and he started teaching us marketing principles. He would teach Steve Jobs, who was just a young 21-year-old, principles of design and speaking to the press and what you say and how you describe computers and Steve became the excellent marketer of our big, successful product: the Apple II."
According to Wozniak, the best engineers have the right aptitude, not necessarily the best grades.
"The engineering isn't necessarily grades in college," he explained. "Find someone who has been building things in their little home or their garage all their life."
Wozniak is best known for designing the hardware, circuit board and operating system of Apple's first product, the Apple I, and leading the design on the Apple II.
He also talked about the different and sometimes mistaken ways in which movies have presented him and Jobs over the years.
"I've liked every one of them, I say every one of them is me," he said. "They may not be accurate movies in a lot of ways, but they always portray me as being brilliant and nice."