This is a good one, prompted by the title, I could write an entire article. Maybe I just did.

IIRC Apple was a technology startup based on electronics and stuff.

>his name alongside Steve Jobs.

One name comes to mind.

At the beginning Apple just had Woz & Jobs and no other assets.

>You Can't Build Apple with Venture Capital

Of course not. Founders like Woz & Jobs are the far more rare & valuable asset.

If you back-calculate what that really means to Apple[0], I would say that at sometime in 1970's dollars these two were a million dollar asset. Then you have to go quite further back before you reach a point where nobody would ever invest a million in these two, but there was a time.

>Investment returns always correlate with risk.

Always is easy to disprove with a single contrary event. A continuous contrary indication could even be a sign that "never is the new always". How would you like that? I like to do (simple) math, but if that's all there is, comparing risk/reward ratios gets entirely non-meaningful as risk approaches zero, its risk/reward ratio approaches zero too. Simple math. Extrapolating from two close-to-zero numbers is one of the least accurate ways to predict what happens if values rise to far-from-zero. Then when you're considering reward/risk ratio since it is a meaningful concept too, even a mathematical or financial genius will have trouble applying that to the real world as risk approaches zero itself.

And as we now know (for a long time now) Woz &Jobs were still a million-dollar asset back then anyway. Before anybody would ever pay that much.

How quickly people forget.

So without being monetized yet they started out worth more than the "market" could bear.

While the mainstream market could easily bear IBM for decades (still can), after so much wealth had already been extracted.

Valuations are kind of difficult to pinpoint anyway. Aren't they a bit subject to manipulation too? Aren't lots of startup valuations strategically built toward a goal of making money through a lucrative IPO, with the idea of a profitable product playing second fiddle?

This founder contribution really has to be balanced against financial wealth in what looks strikingly like a more than fair arrangement when only the numerical finances are considered, otherwise it will never scale like Apple.

For truly intelligent performance, weights have got to be balanced. If not, eventually there will be predictable limited progress or seismic events which most often come at unpredictable times.

The more you deviate from that generous concept all around, the more your growth rate and ultimate size will be dissimilar to Apple, if not completely abysmal into negative territory, which is the default when the balance is off by even just a little bit. Most money is only bet on the ability to overcome this default, not on anything having a fraction of the potential of Apple to begin with. These are two completely different things, why would you expect similar performance?

Good position to be in, and it's rare to overcome all greedy attempts to derail it. You know who you are.

Jobs had to pull a lot of weight from a young age to be able to contribute intangibly equally to the small fraction of Woz's technology that they intended to monetize. Woz could always pull out more technology to sell and Jobs could always step up to the plate and sell it to those who could appreciate it most. Woz couldn't take it easy until he had a whole team to provide the technology that Jobs spiritually needed to bring to customers for the rest of their lives.

Without being the technical genius that Woz is, Jobs was no slouch and had a high bar to maintain, even after Woz had retired.[1]

However, after the point when the founders no longer owned a majority of the stock, their personal goodwill combined with the stock they did own, meant that it might as well be like the founders still own more than the part of the company they did not own.

As Apple grew to whatever size, along the way.

The whole time.

Let that sink in.

As long as Woz & Jobs were there, Apple could not be stopped. After Jobs picked up the ball single-handedly, as long as he was there, Apple could not be stopped. We saw what happened when he wasn't there, for that period of time, and what happened when he came back. Since he passed, his momentum is still stronger as it fades than all the new increases being successfully fielded.

You can grow like mad after a certain point without the founders any more, but you're not going to start something much like Apple without an ambition comparable to Woz & Jobs.

Takes a lot of continuous good actual will the whole time too, it's very rare when that can overcome the inevitable adverse forces.

[0] some may have to back-propagate to do this

[1] As we know Woz retired after Apple had monetized less than the full 1% of his technical ability. Think what would have happened by now if there would have been a wise enough capital structure to do a little something about the other 99%. Might have even been enough to tempt Woz. Imagine what would it be like to have a technology company 99x the size of Apple at any one point in time? It could have gotten out of hand and eventually you could very well be talking serious shareholder value ;) Too late, nobody in most businesses chases risk-free opportunities, everybody involved had already raked in the bucks beyond their wildest dreams anyway.