A third of the company · 1977
Mike Markkula
Apple, 1977
A retired Intel marketing manager backed two men working out of a garage, took roughly a third of the company, and then went to work there — the clearest example on this list of an angel who was not passive.
What happened
By the beginning of 1977 Mike Markkula had already made enough money at Fairchild and Intel to retire in his early thirties. He was introduced to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, looked at the Apple II, and did something that almost no investor of that era would have done: he backed it, and then he joined it.
What he brought was not principally money. He wrote the business plan, arranged the credit the company needed to actually manufacture, brought in the first professional chief executive, and became employee number three. The famous one-page marketing philosophy that shaped how Apple presented itself — empathy, focus, impute — was his.
The financial outcome was extraordinary by any measure. Apple listed in 1980 in one of the most significant public offerings of the era, and Markkula's holding was worth a sum that made him one of the wealthiest people to have come out of the first wave of personal computing.
He also sold. Over the decades that followed he divested, which is why the arithmetic people enjoy performing on his stake — what a third of Apple would be worth now — describes a decision he made rather than money he received. That distinction is the whole point of including him here.
Where sources disagree
What we do not claim
Credible sources describe the investment at least three different ways: roughly $91,000–$92,000 of his own equity plus a $250,000 line of credit he personally guaranteed; a flat $250,000; and a $250,000 total split between equity and a loan. We do not pick one. What is consistent across sources is the shape — a modest personal equity cheque plus a personal guarantee that unlocked far more credit than the equity itself — and that shape is the more instructive fact anyway.
For your own cheque
What an angel takes from this
- The most valuable thing Markkula supplied was not capital but credibility and a credit line. A company that cannot manufacture does not fail for want of an idea; it fails for want of working capital, and the person who solves that is worth more than the person who matches the cheque.
- For an angel the transferable version is smaller but real. Introductions to a first serious customer, a first credible hire, or a bank that will actually extend terms are worth more to a pre-revenue company than another £25,000 — and they are things a former operator can supply and a passive cheque cannot.
- The other lesson is about selling, and it recurs throughout this section. Markkula sold down over many years, which was an entirely reasonable thing for a person to do with a concentrated position in a volatile company. It also means the eye-watering figures attached to his name describe a road not taken.
Checked, not remembered
Sources
Every figure on this page is traceable to published reporting. Where credible sources disagree we say so above rather than picking the most quotable number, and we do not state what a stake is “worth today” — that moves with the share price and is stale the moment it is written.
The mechanics