#entrepreneurship #business #people #organization
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You need both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak for a company to succeed. The myth of the college dropout becoming a millionaire does not exist without the less visible talented technical person who completed college.
Without Steve Wozniak, there is nothing for Steve Jobs to sell but warm air.
Without Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs is just Elizabeth Holmes.
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The story of Theranos and its enigmatic founder Elizabeth Holmes provides us with so many lessons about mistakes we're making as a society, including our misallocation of value, recognition and reward.
After reading Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, my first reaction was to label Holmes a sociopath who deserves everything she gets. But watching the Disney+ series The Dropout made me think more deeply about why she did what she did. And in many ways it isn’t surprising at all.
The things we celebrate as a society provide the kindling for the next generation's fires of ambition. And over the past 20 years we've come to celebrate celebrity and showmanship more highly than almost anything else.
To the younger generation, we do not celebrate or recognize staying in school and then working hard for many years to become a global expert at something in order to advance your field.
Instead, we celebrate dropping out of school, raising money at a high valuation, running a company with lots of staff, and becoming a young billionaire (yes that's with a B not an M).
Holmes’ hero Steve Jobs is the epitome of this fantasy. He flittered around at university taking LSD and sitting in on calligraphy classes before dropping out to become a billionaire running Apple.
But the reality is quite different to this misperception. In reality, Jobs met Steve Wozniak, who had stayed in school and spent thousands of hours becoming one of the best computer engineers in the world. And Jobs sold Wozniak's genius to the world.
Don't get me wrong, I am as inspired as anyone by Jobs' story. But I've always viewed Wozniak as equally, if not more, fundamental to the success of Apple and everything that has flowed from that.
Today, children grow up worshipping the Jobses and largely overlooking the Wozniaks, so it's completely unsurprising to me that Holmes dropped out of Stanford University to raise money and run a company, as that's exactly what Jobs did.
Unfortunately for Holmes she had no Wozniak, so no Apple I, so her castle was built on sand. And without a Wozniak, tech companies become more like Ponzi schemes, and their leaders become more like fraudsters.
Yesterday I spent some time telling my son about Alexander Fleming, how he changed the world and saved millions of lives, and why almost nobody has heard of him.
Fleming discovered penicillin. He refused to say he invented it, as it was created by nature, and refused to patent his discovery, even though he knew doing so would have made him one of the richest people in the world.
But he didn't care about the money or recognition. He just wanted to save lives.
And for that he should be both celebrated and recognized.