Ronald Wayne

When people think about the original founders of Apple, most people usually think of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. These guys are two of the most notable figures in tech history. However, Apple has a third co-founder that is rarely ever mentioned. In fact, the latest Jobs movie starring Ashton Kutcher didn’t even include him as a character.

Meet Ronald Wayne, some media outlets in the past has dubbed him as “the unluckiest man in the world”, because he sold his 10% stake in Apple 12 days after co-founding the company — his stake would be worth around $35 billion today [with a b]. Aside from that, in the early 1990′s he saw that Apple was plummeting and decided to sell the original document of the first Apple company agreement for $500. After nearly two decades, that same exact document was sold at an auction for $1.8 million dollars. Now if you think thats not bad enough, at one point in his life, he had all his life savings stolen from him as well. He likes to summarize his entrepreneurial enterprises as always being “either a day late, and/or a dollar short”.

A random story about Steve Jobs

I had a stamp store in Tucson, Arizona. And I got a phone call, from Steve Jobs, direct. It hadn’t happen before! “Hi Steve, how’re you doing?” He says, “Look, I haven’t got a whole lot of time. There would be airline tickets waiting for you at the airport and my chauffeur would pick you up when you get here at San Jose and we’ll set you up — no it was San Francisco because they set me up at the Mark Hopkins. And I said, “Well what’s this all about?” He says, “We’re doing a presentation and I thought it would be nice of you to join us.

Okay, fine, but I was wondering what the heck is this is all about. What’s going on here because Steve… this is out of character for Steve Jobs. But anyway, okay. So I got on the plane, got picked up on the airport, they set me up in the hotel. The next morning, he has people come in and pick me up and take me down to the auditorium where they were doing a presentation on G3, I think it was — something like that. They were presenting [the iMac]. Anyway, he did this spiel on stage and afterwards he comes and gets me and we go over the back and there’s a buffet with coffee and sandwiches and whatever and we took the tour of the convention, and we jumped in the car we go off to the Apple facility where Steve Wozniak joins us in the cafeteria, had lunch and we’re sitting in this table out in the patio. They’re carrying on this conversation about absolutely nothing — small talk — and then that’s it. Have a good trip back and we’ll see you! And I’m thinking was all, “What the heck was this all about?” And I never was able in my life to find out what the heck it was all about. It was very anticlimactic! At the end, as I’m on the plane going home, “It must have been something he had in mind! What did he do this for?” I couldn’t understand! [I] still don’t know to this day what that was all about.