A tribute to a great investor, Ronald Wayne.
Everybody knows who Steve Jobs is. If you follow technology or the stock market, you probably know who Steve Wozniak is.
Do you have any idea who Ronald Wayne is?
In April 1976, Wayne was the third co-founder and 10 percent shareholder of Apple Computer. For reasons that are both interesting and relevant to today’s discussion, he sold his stake for a mere $800. Had he held onto to it, that 10 percent stake would today be worth $62.93 billion of Apple stock.
I’ll let that seep into your brain for a minute . . . $800 into $63 billion.
This may possibly be the worst stock trade — ever.
The Apple founding partnership agreement signed by Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne. Wayne sold the document for $500 in 1994. It sold again for $1.6 million at a Sotheby’s auction in 2011. (Scott Eells/Bloomberg)
There are lessons for all of us in this. Before we get to those, a brief digression.
Apple was born 40 years ago, on April Fools’ Day 1976. The story of Jobs, the marketing genius/visionary, and Wozniak, the brilliant engineer/hacker, toiling away in a garage is well-known Silicon Valley lore. But less well-known history is that of Wayne, the third partner, who was there from day one.
His contributions were not insignificant: He designed the company’s logo, wrote the Apple 1 computer user’s manual and drafted the company’s original partnership agreement. But after less than two weeks with Apple, he had had enough, and on April 12, Wayne sold his stake for $800. In Wozniak’s autobiography (“iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It”), he described Wayne’s contribution: “Ron ended up playing a huge role in those very early days at Apple.”
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