"My goal wasn't to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers"

Steve Wozniak’s words distill a philosophy of creation driven by curiosity, craftsmanship, and service rather than the pursuit of wealth. They reflect an engineer’s ethic: build something excellent first, let value flow from utility and delight, and treat money as a byproduct, not the compass. The emphasis on “good computers” points to quality in the fullest sense, machines that are reliable, elegant, efficient, affordable, and empowering to the people who use them.

Wozniak’s career embodies that stance. At the Homebrew Computer Club, he shared designs freely, motivated by the joy of solving problems and enabling others to tinker. The Apple I and especially the Apple II showed how deeply he valued economy of design, doing more with fewer chips, squeezing performance from modest resources, and writing software like Integer BASIC to maximize capability on limited hardware. “Good” was not just an engineering metric; it included accessibility. A computer that could be built and owned by ordinary people, that invited experimentation and learning, had social value beyond its bill of materials.

There’s also an implicit critique of short-term, profit-first thinking. When money leads, products tend to mirror quarterly goals; when craftsmanship leads, products earn loyalty and create markets that didn’t exist. Many enduring breakthroughs emerge from intrinsic motivation, a desire to explore, to make something elegant and useful, to solve a problem the right way even if that path is slower. Ironically, that approach can become the most commercially successful in the long run, because people recognize and reward integrity in design.

For entrepreneurs and technologists, the line is a compass. Choose the metric you want to optimize. If it’s money, shortcuts tempt. If it’s “good computers,” you keep learning, refine the details others ignore, and build tools that outlast fashions. Wealth, if it arrives, is welcomed, but the real payoff is the work itself and the people it serves.