Apple marked its 50th anniversary on April 1 with a reminder of how far the company has come from a garage in Cupertino, California, where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computer in 1976. One of the clearest links to that beginning is Chris Espinosa, now 64 and still on the company’s payroll as Apple’s eighth employee.
Espinosa met Jobs at the Byte Shop in California in 1976 and was recruited to write software for the Apple II using the BASIC programming language. He said the first years carried both promise and fear. “It was a time of both great promise and great trepidation,” Espinosa said, adding that young companies could disappear just as quickly as they appeared because “the ability to have a great idea, start a company and then either not find your customers and go out of business or not manage growth and go out of business — that was just the rule.”
That is part of why his staying power stands out. Silicon Valley has long been a place where startups burn hot and fast, and where careers often move from one company to the next. Espinosa did not. From 1978 to 1981, he paused full-time work at Apple to attend the University of California, Berkeley, while continuing part time. In 1981, Jobs persuaded him to leave school and come back full time. “I was wondering what I was going to do because I had no college degree and I had only worked at one company,” Espinosa said.
He also held on through the years that followed Jobs’ departure in 1985, when Apple went through repeated layoffs and an uncertain stretch under then-CEO John Sculley. Espinosa said his manager told him he had been kept on because his tenure made severance too expensive. “I was here when we turned the lights on. I might as well stick around until we turn the lights off,” he said. But the lights did not go off. Espinosa described 1997, when Jobs returned, as a turning point, saying the company regained its sense of direction after years of drift.
Apple has since grown into one of the world’s most valuable companies, with a market value nearing $4 trillion, annual profits above $100 billion and 2.5 billion devices in use globally. Espinosa said he is still working on the operating system for Apple TV, a small sign of how much of the company’s history still runs through people who were there before it became a giant. Wozniak also gave him 2,000 shares shortly after Apple went public in 1980 under the “Woz Plan.” Those shares would now be worth nearly $57,000 each, or about $114 million combined.