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The Technicians
Individuals who acquire specialized product or service know-how and establish new businesses based on it
As any start-up develops its own ways of doing things, the employees who do them gain proprietary skills (whether having to do with computer technology, truck-chassis assembly, or the cooking of blackened redfish) that serve as valuable currency for founding their own companies. The impetus to branch out often comes when an employee's personal growth outpaces his or her employer's growth.
Founded by three former Apple technologists, futuristic research-and-development firm General Magic "is an excellent example," says Albert Eisenstat, now Apple's executive vice-president, "of what happens when Apple people provide an outlet on their own."
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The Inspired
Individuals stimulated by the start-up activity of others to start a business of their own
The pull of someone else's leaving to go into business encourages stay-behinds to ponder the possibility of doing so themselves. Atari founder Nolan Bushnell calls it the "Existence Proof." His definition: "When a person at the desk next to you leaves, starts a business, and becomes successful, by extrapolation -- since at one point you both 'existed' at the same spot -- you ask, Then why not me? Everybody who lives in Silicon Valley knows somebody who's made a lot of money, and they can see he's smart, but he's not that smart. People with normal aspirations, normal education, normal capabilities start thinking maybe they can do it, too. The minute that happens, a new world opens up."
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The Opportunists
Individuals who start businesses to capture the complementary industrial and consumer markets that a growth company introduces
"I would absolutely say [local-area-network builder] Tops never would have been successful, nor have been inspired the way it was, had it not been for Apple's Macintosh computer," effuses A. Nathaniel Goldhaber, Tops's cofounder, who's now CEO of Kaleida Labs Inc., an Apple-IBM joint venture in interactive multimedia. "The timing was perfect. We rolled out our first product simultaneously with the first spurt of the Mac in late 1986. We had back orders for 20,000 units the day we started shipping." Goldhaber parlayed Tops's eventual sale into seed money for several other start-ups.
Macworld Exposition, a trade-show manager, stages two Apple-oriented consumer expositions a year, one on each coast. In the August 1992 expo, 424 companies rented booths. Among the countless enterprises born to offer products or services in the market Apple created -- peripheral-equipment makers, newsletter publishers, magazines, trade shows, and the like -- is MacTemps Inc., an employment agency that got its start by placing office staffers who worked only on Macs.
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The Camp Followers
Individuals who found companies to provide goods and services to a core company
The lawyers, public-relations firms, accountants, travel agencies, and such that administer to a growing start-up usually are preexisting enterprises that expand to accommodate the new business. Vigorous growth, however, stimulates the genesis of a fresh entourage.
Two years after setting up shop -- known as Kim's Khocolate -- in her mother's kitchen, 18-year-old Kim Merritt began selling custom-made confectioneries to Apple's company store. A year later, in 1987, Apple ordered 77,000 chocolate Macs for a direct-mail campaign. The order paid down two years of debt and kept the flabbergasted Merritt in business.
For years, massagers from Pacific Health Systems would come in to rub the necks of tired Apple employees -- until outside shareholders put a stop to it.
Knickknack broker Wood Associates Inc. was started to answer Apple's call for ways to pump up its salespeople. The solution: morale boosters like pens, coffee cups, and jackets.
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The Incalculable
Individuals we haven't even counted
Maybe Markkula was right after all in suggesting we calculate taxes. Despite multiplier-effect researchers on both coasts and the help of enthusiastic volunteers, Inc. couldn't capture it all. Whatever the ultimate numbers are, they turned out to be magnitudes larger than anyone could anticipate.
Don't forget -- the farmer who got rich selling his prune orchard to Apple probably buys his Ferraris down the street; either that, or he started a new business himself. Whichever, it's one more branch.
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Reporting contributed by Abby Christopher. Note: financial references are to fiscal year 1992; market values are as of June 15, 1993.
The Multiplier Effect in Person
SHAWN MILLER: INSPIRED
Shawn Miller, 36, hardly considered herself a natural. "I had never thought before my stint at Apple about starting a business," she confesses. But after two kids and five years in sales and marketing for Apple, she encountered a not-so-simple problem at home: she couldn't find a nanny. Whereas Miller the mother working 80-hour weeks might have panicked, Miller the Apple marketer whispered, Eureka!
Apple had, after all, trained her to look for new markets -- and she knew that other women throughout Silicon Valley shared her child-care troubles. But beyond helping her develop that marketer's eye for opportunity, Apple had equipped Miller -- who in 1988 founded a nanny-placement service, I Love My Nanny, based in San Jose, Calif. -- with a complete entrepreneurial tool kit.
