Ex-Apple staff are behind hundreds of top tech startups
Andrew OrrMany former Apple employees went on to form startups
Many Apple alums have gone on to found startups in climate, health, and other areas, and they attribute their acquired skills and knowledge to their time spent at Apple.
Apple has played a significant role in the emergence of numerous startups. Former employees have founded an estimated 597 venture capital-backed companies, collectively valued at over $180 billion.
In conversations with BusinessInsider, former Apple employees highlighted that Apple imparted valuable qualities such as determination, adaptability, and the ability to generate innovative ideas. These attributes have proven instrumental in their journeys as entrepreneurs.
For example, Evgeny Bik, a previous Apple employee who has since founded the career coaching startup Day One Careers, noted that "Apple brands itself as a company of thousand nos." The company encourages its employees to consistently advocate for their ideas, emphasizing the need to justify their relevance and value.
Apple places emphasis on developing strong interpersonal skills among its employees. "At Apple, interacting with each other is how they work," Bik said. "That's what motivated me to find and stay with a business partner."
Positive and negative experiences
Insiya Jafferjee, the co-founder of Shellworks, an alternative packaging company, highlights that Apple nurtures a sincere passion and a culture of striving to create aesthetically pleasing products.
"That's something I also really wanted to create at Shellworks, a love for making with your hands, a culture of prototyping, the culture of experimenting," she said. "I think there was a huge portion of that when I worked there."
However, some former employees weren't as positive about their time at Apple. Some described the corporate environment at Apple as "slow," and the tech giant has faced criticism for fostering a culture of secrecy, resulting in departments being highly compartmentalized and isolated from one another, according to an anonymous former employee.
Apple is also known for its stringent protection of intellectual property. Startups that have recruited former Apple employees, including chip companies like Rivos and Nuvia, have faced allegations from Apple of stealing ideas and infringing upon copyrights.
Despite these challenges, former Apple employees haven't been discouraged from venturing into the tech startup scene. Between 2010 and 2015, there were 163 registered startups founded by former Apple employees.
That nearly tripled to 419 startups between 2016 and 2022, and former staffers have also spread to other countries besides the US. Numerous European startups led by former Apple employees in various sectors, such as Acamp, Caura, Origin, and PowerZ, have thrived.
It shows that while Apple's company culture may have criticisms, the evidence indicates that the company has been a hotbed for nurturing entrepreneurs, instilling a spirit of determination, adaptability, and innovation in them.
William Gallagher
Malcolm Owen
Marko Zivkovic
Amber Neely
5 Comments
Ubiquity is also one, no?
How many of these are actually successful in the end? Or, do they end up either selling it off to another company or shutting the company down altogether?
I think that many centers of excellence, knowledge, and innovation spawn enormously beneficial collateral benefits across a number of industries. This applies whether the centers of excellence are private, public, academic, industrial, research focused, domain specific, or whatever. This applies to both intentional spin-offs where organizations purposely break out a part of their business away from their core to focus on specific problems, and unintentional spin-offs where knowledgeable individuals and groups of individuals decide to go off on their own and try to do something in a new or better way based on the knowledge and skills they've acquired from the employer they've left behind, while carefully complying with confidentiality contracts and IP disclosure agreements they're bound to - of course!
As an aside, there are additional second order and beyond benefits that are seen from the next tier of companies that get created to attracted from other areas to support the new spin-offs.
This is in my opinion an overwhelming positive process that sustains growth and encourages innovation that may be held captive (in a sense) if not set free from its current residence, whether in a company, in a lab, or unfulfilled in an academic institution. When successful spin-offs occur they often attract new companies and people to specific locations where people with certain specializations tend to be clustered, like Silicon Valley, Research Triangle Park, and the Route 128 tech corridor. What is there not to like about this continuously compounding benefit, other than increased traffic congestion and escalating housing prices?
In the end I believe the benefits of spin-offs predominantly outweigh the costs. The examples included in this article regarding Apple are mostly case studies at a tactical or individual level. If you look at the bigger picture, i.e., the strategic level, the formation of new companies and even new industries, the net long term benefits of spin-offs are even more amazing.
This is all good.