Start With Why

PART 6 
DISCOVER WHY 

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13 
THE ORIGINS OF A WHY
It started in Vietnam War-era Northern California, where 
antigovernment ideals and distain for large centers of power ran 
rampant. Two young men saw the power of government and 
corporations as the enemy, not because they were big, per se, but 
because they squashed the spirit of the individual. They imagined a 
world in which an individual had a voice. They imagined a time 
when an individual could successfully stand up to incumbent 
power, old assumptions and status-quo thoughts and successfully 
challenge them. Even redirect them. They hung out with hippie 
types who shared their beliefs, but they saw a different way to 
change the world that didn't require protesting or engaging in 
anything illegal.
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs came of age in this time. Not only 
was the revolutionary spirit running high in Northern California, 
but it was also the time and place of the computer revolution. And 
in this technology they saw the opportunity to start their own rev-
olution. "The Apple gave an individual the power to do the same 
things as any company," Wozniak recounts. "For the first time ever, 
one person could take on a corporation simply because they had the 
ability to use the technology." Wozniak engineered the Apple I and 

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START WITH WHY 
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later the Apple II to be simple enough for people to harness the 
power of the technology. Jobs knew how to sell it. Thus was born
Apple Computer. A company with a purpose—to give the 
individual to power to stand up to established power. To empower 
the dreamers and the idealists to challenge the status quo and 
succeed. But their cause, their WHY, started long before Apple was 
born.
In 1971, working out of Wozniak's dorm room at UC Berkeley 
the two Steves made something they called the Blue Box. Their little 
device hacked the phone system to give people the ability to; avoid 
paying long-distance rates on their phone bills. Apple computers 
didn't exist yet, but Jobs and Woz were already challenging a Big 
Brother-type power, in this case Ma Bell, American Telephony and 
Telegraph, the monopoly phone company. Technically, what the 
Blue Box did was illegal, and with no desire to challenge power; by 
breaking the law, Jobs and Woz never actually used the device 
themselves. But they liked the idea of giving other individuals the 
ability to avoid having to play by the rules of monopolistic forced a 
theme that would repeat many more times in Apple's future. '
On April 1, 1976, they repeated their pattern again. They took on 
the giants of the computer industry, most notably Big Blue IBM. 
Before the Apple, computing still meant using a punch card to give 
instructions to a huge mainframe squirreled away in a computer 
center somewhere. IBM targeted their technology to corporations 
and not, as Apple intended, as a tool for individuals to target, 
corporations. With clarity of purpose and amazing discipline, 
Apple Computer's success seemed to follow the Law of