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Apple II to IPO: How a Garage Startup Became a Billion-Dollar Company
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The Apple II changed everything — and within three years, Apple's IPO minted hundreds of millionaires overnight. This episode traces the explosive growth that turned a scrappy startup into a publicly traded corporation, and the corporate tensions that came with it.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Before Apple became the most valuable company in the world, it was a garage operation that almost no one took seriously. Before the stock price, the shareholders, the Wall Street coverage, there were two men in Cupertino who couldn't get a bank loan.
The turning point was the Apple II. Not just as a product, but as a statement.
By nineteen eighty, Apple Computer was one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States. The decision to go public wasn't surprising.
In nineteen eighty-three, Apple recruited John Sculley to become its chief executive. Sculley was president of PepsiCo at the time, a marketing legend who'd overseen the Pepsi Challenge campaign and built an elite consumer brand into something culturally dominant.
Before the Macintosh, there was Lisa. The Lisa computer was Jobs' project, his vision for what a personal computer could be if it fully embraced a graphical user interface.
The Macintosh launched in January of nineteen eighty-four with one of the most famous advertisements ever made. The ad aired during the Super Bowl.
By early nineteen eighty-five, the tension had become a crisis. The Macintosh division's sales were disappointing.
After Jobs left, Sculley took full control and Apple kept operating. The company wasn't in freefall.
Here's what the nineteen eighty IPO and the years that followed actually represent in the larger story of Apple. They represent the moment a vision had to survive contact with institutional reality.
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