Earlier this week, I went to go see Steve Wozniak speak right here in Colorado Springs. He came to an event put on by the Business Journal called “Celebrate Technology” at a great new venue, The Pinery At the Hill.
For those who may not know, Steve Wozniak is/was the co-founder of what I think is the greatest consumer tech company in the world: Apple, Inc. He started Apple in a garage with Steve Jobs way back in 1976. “Woz,” as he’s known to Apple Fanboys, was not only the technical brains behind the company and the inventor of the Apple I and Apple II computers, but also invented the universal TV remote control and helped found the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Needless to say, when I found out Woz was in town, I jumped at the chance. I got a ticket from a friend who had an extra (since the event sold out pretty quickly). Woz talked about a few things, tech in general, the future of computing, and shared some stories about working with Steve Jobs.
He’s an electrical engineer, that aspect of computing dominated his perspective (since he’s clearly biased, which is just fine). One of his main points was telling the crowd that if you’re building a tech company, “Don’t wait to hire engineers. Get good engineers to join your company, quickly.” (He mentioned how this is a big mistake some tech companies make). He also talked about Steve Jobs and said that one of Jobs’ biggest failures was that he was a pretty rude person sometimes and wished that Jobs would have been nicer to people.
Overall, it was nice to see a heavy hitter like “The Woz” come to Colorado Springs and talk technology with us mere mortals. We need more of this in our town, I think.