ALMOST AS SOON as the young men had started selling the first batches of Apple 1’s, Woz told Steve that he knew he could design a much better machine. As Woz imagined it, the next model would display its results in full color, pack a lot more power and performance onto the same-size “motherboard,” and have multiple “slots” that could be adapted to help the machine perform more tasks. If Steve and Woz were going to have any chance of producing and selling such a snazzy machine, they would have to scrounge up some serious working capital. They needed far more than they could get by continuing to cadge personal loans from friends, parents, and advance payments from proprietors of hobby shops. Not knowing exactly where he could get that kind of money, Steve began to make a real effort to connect with Silicon Valley’s cloistered world of successful entrepreneurs, marketers, and financiers.

In 1976, the route to success in Silicon Valley wasn’t remotely as well mapped as it is today, when entrepreneurs can find the path to financing by simply Googling “venture capital.” Back then the Valley had a much smaller mix of lawyers, financiers, and managers, and most business was conducted face-to-face. But Steve had several qualities that made him a superb networker. “I was really lucky to get into computers when it was a very young industry,” he once told me. “At that point in time there weren’t many degrees offered in computer science, so people in computers were from mathematics, physics, music, zoology, whatever. Wherever they came from they loved it, and there were some incredibly brilliant people involved.” He had no qualms about calling anyone up in search of information or help; heck, he’d been doing that since his phone call to Bill Hewlett when he was fourteen years old. Steve had none of the tentativeness most young men or women might have as they set out to learn the nuances of a complicated new world like the venture capital business. He had such faith in the excellence of his work that he assumed someone would eventually agree to fund. He could be genuinely charming when this confidence didn’t lead him into boorishness.

So he tirelessly navigated the Valley’s network of experts, one phone call and one meeting at time, until he finally found himself connected with Regis McKenna, the marketing whiz who had helped promote Intel, and who would eventually be instrumental in establishing Apple’s iconoclastic, and remarkably resilient, public image.

Steve and Woz met McKenna at his offices. Steve certainly didn’t dress up for this meeting—as usual, his jeans had holes, his hair was unbrushed, he wore no shoes, and he smelled. At this point in his life, he deemed deodorant, footwear, and the like affectations. McKenna was a unique member of the Silicon Valley elite. Well coiffed, with magnetic blue eyes, he was frank, unforgiving, and ubiquitously networked, and had a sly sense of humor and brash self-confidence that matched Steve’s. His business card simply read: Regis McKenna, Himself. He saw past the boys’ nerdy slovenliness to their remarkable intelligence, and found himself liking them. “Steve had breadth,” McKenna remembers, “and a sort of thoughtful way about him that would always be there.” So he and Nolan Bushnell, Jobs’s old boss at Atari, steered Steve to Don Valentine, a founding partner of Sequoia Capital, one of the first venture capital firms to master the art of early-stage investing in high-tech companies.

Valentine came from the chip world. He had worked with the founders of Intel before they abandoned Fairchild Semiconductor to open their own shop, and he had once held a senior position at National Semiconductor. He met with the boys only because McKenna was a friend, and quite literally held his nose to hear Steve and Woz out. After their visit, he called McKenna to ask, “Why’d you send me these renegades from the human race?” Yet he did point the boys toward an individual “angel” investor who would be more apt to work closely with an idiosyncratic startup such as Apple.

That’s how Steve was introduced to A. C. “Mike” Markkula, who would become, for better and for worse, one of Steve’s two primary early mentors at Apple. One day, Markkula decided to drive his gold Corvette over to the garage and let the boys walk him through the wonders of the Apple 1. A former Intel sales executive who also owned an advanced degree in electrical engineering, he had made a lot of money in a hurry but had “retired” in his early thirties when he was passed over for the company’s top sales job. Rather quiet, Markkula was at heart a computer geek, and could do some programming himself. He immediately grasped the potential in the ambitious ideas of Jobs and Wozniak, and he also could see how intelligent, resourceful, and yet malleable they were. After a few meetings he bought in, driving a pretty hard bargain. In one of the greatest angel investments of all time, Markkula ponied up $92,000 out of his own pocket and arranged for a $250,000 line of credit with Bank of America, in return for a one-third stake in Apple.

Markkula insisted that Woz, who was still working at Hewlett-Packard, become a full-time Apple employee. Woz loved working at HP, but he also really did want to create another great microcomputer. So he made one last presentation to HP, to give them a final shot to develop his still rough concept for the Apple II. They weren’t interested. “Big experienced companies and investors, analysts—those kinds of people, that are trained in business and much smarter than we were—they didn’t think that this was going to be a real big market,” Woz remembered. “They thought it was going to be a little hobby thing, like home robots or ham radios, that a few techie people would get into.” So he quit his job and signed on.

From the start, Markkula was an unlikely match for Steve and Woz. A short, trim, dapper guy, he seemed to come straight out of central casting for seventies fashion, with his fast car, long sideburns, full head of hair, and flashy leisure suits. His conversational style could be best described as mumbling. While he was smart and technically adept, he wasn’t forceful or combative, nor did he express strong opinions with any passion. And while he had made a lot of money already and was very interested in making more, he really didn’t want to work all that hard. Later, after Steve left Apple, Markkula would work valiantly to keep Apple afloat. But that was in a crisis. At the point in his life when he met Steve, he was pretty content with his big house and his Intel payout. In a move that clearly reflected his ambivalence, Markkula promised his wife that he would spend no more than four years working with Apple.

So when Markkula decided that the company should convert its limited partnership into a California corporation and employ a professional chief executive, he made it very clear that he was not interested in that job himself. He recruited Michael “Scotty” Scott, a thirty-two-year-old manufacturing manager from National Semiconductor, as Apple’s first professional president and CEO. Markkula, thirty-four, became chairman of the Apple board. It was February 1977, and Steve, all of twenty-one years old, had turned Apple over to adult supervision. Unfortunately, neither Markkula nor Scotty could ever become the mentor he needed.

THE COMPANY MOVED out of Steve’s parents’ garage and into real offices on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino. Scotty and Markkula started hiring people and setting up the basics of a corporation. For the first few months, Steve kept doing what he knew how to do best: rally a small crew to produce something wonderful. This time, it was the Apple II—the machine that would really introduce the world to personal computing.