Ron Wayne, who sold his stake in Apple Inc. two weeks after founding it with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976, said he knew the company would be a roller-coaster and also very successful.
Ron Wayne with Steve Wozniak
“They were absolute whirlwinds aside from the fact they were intellectual giants, which I recognized, and it was like having a tiger by the tail; you can’t hang on and you can’t let go,” said Wayne, 77, in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “If I’d stayed with them, I was going to wind up the richest man in the cemetery, so I figured it was best for me to go off and do other things.”
“I was very, very happy to participate with him for the thrill and excitement of being part of something that was really possessed of enormous promise and something that I felt was going to be very, very successful,” Wayne said. “I also felt it was going to be something of a rollercoaster which, since I was 20 years older than these guys I felt I was perhaps getting a little too old for.”
Less than two weeks after its founding, Wayne sold his 10 percent stake. Jobs went on to build Apple into the world’s most valuable technology company, now worth $350 billion.