Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs wasn’t a natural-born leader, he worked to ‘develop his communication’ skills
By | Tom Huddleston Jr. | www.cnbc.com
Steve Wozniak knows the importance of communication, especially when building a business. After all, he co-founded Apple with one of the tech world’s greatest communicators and marketers of all time: Steve Jobs.
The late Jobs has long been heralded as a “genius” for the way he marketed and sold Apple products, most of which were designed and built by Wozniak in the company’s early days. But Wozniak tells CNBC Make It that his partner wasn’t always a marketing and communications guru – those were skills Jobs had to develop to compensate for not being a particularly skilled computer engineer.
“He learned a lot of marketing principles because he wasn’t really capable, engineering wise, you know, computer hardware [and] software,” Wozniak says of Jobs. “He had to find other areas to make himself important.”
Last year, Wozniak began starring on the online reality show “Unicorn Hunters,” alongside former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios and singer Lance Bass, among others. On the show, he and the other judges field investment pitches from tech start-up founders, and Wozniak says he’s sometimes “amazed” at how ineffectively some entrepreneurs communicate.
“We watched a lot of pitches that were kind of rough and stuttering, and they’d kind of lose themselves, and that doesn’t help when you’re pitching to investors,” he says.
