Career
He worked with Steve Jobs at Atari before he, Jobs, and Wozniak founded Apple Computer on April 1, 1976. Serving as the venture's "adult supervision", Wayne drew the first Apple logo, wrote the three men's original partnership agreement, and wrote the Apple I manual.
Wayne received a 10% stake in Apple but relinquished his stock for US$800 less than two weeks later, on April 13, 1976. Legally, all members of a partnership are personally responsible for any debts incurred by any partner; unlike Jobs and Wozniak, then 21 and 25, Wayne had personal assets that potential creditors could seize. The failure of a slot machine company that he had started five years earlier also contributed to his decision to exit the partnership.
Later that year, venture capitalist Arthur Rock and Mike Markkula helped develop a business plan and convert the partnership to a corporation. Wayne received another check, for $1,500, for his agreement to forfeit any claims against the new company. In its first year of operations (1976), Apple's sales reached US$174,000. In 1977 sales rose to US$2.7 million, in 1978 to US$7.8 million, and in 1980 to US$117 million. By 1982 Apple had a billion dollars in annual sales. Wayne has stated that he does not regret selling the stock as he made the "best decision with the information available to me at the time."
Wayne also stated that he felt the Apple enterprise "would be successful, but at the same time there would be bumps along the way and I couldn't risk it. I had already had a rather unfortunate business experience before. I was getting too old and those two were whirlwinds. It was like having a tiger by the tail and I couldn't keep up with these guys." Had he kept his 10% stock it would have been worth over 58 billion dollars in August 2012.
After leaving Apple, Wayne resisted Jobs's attempts to recruit him back to Apple, remaining at Atari until 1978 when he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and later an electronics company in Salinas, California. He is retired and sells stamps, rare coins, and gold from his Pahrump, Nevada home, and had never owned an Apple product until 2011, when he was given an iPad 2 by Aral Balkan at the Update Conference in Brighton, United Kingdom.
Wayne also ran a stamp shop in Milpitas, California for a short period of time in the late 1970s, "Wayne's Philatelics", on Dempsey Road. After a number of break-ins he moved his stamp operations to Nevada. The logo for the business was a wood-cut style design, with a man sitting under an apple tree, with the "Wayne's Philatelics" name written in a flowing ribbon curved around the tree. This was the original logo he designed for Apple Computer.
He holds a dozen patents but never had enough capital to make money from any of them.
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