Daniel Kottke Biography
Daniel Kottke is an American businessman who was a college friend of Steve Jobs and one of Apple Inc.’s first employees.
How old is Daniel Kottke? – Age
He is 68 years old as of 4 April 2022. He was born in 1954 in Bronxville, New York, United States.
Daniel Kottke Family
In 1972, Kottke met Steve Jobs while both were undergraduates at Reed College. In 1974, Kottke and Jobs traveled to India in search of spiritual enlightenment, stopping at Neem Karoli Baba’s Kainchi ashram. When they arrived at the Neem Karoli ashram, it was almost deserted due to the death of Neem Karoli Baba in September 1973. They then made a long journey up a dry riverbed to Haidakhan Babaji’s ashram.
Daniel Kottke Education
After returning from India, Kottke enrolled at Columbia University as a literature and music major in 1975. He kept in touch with Jobs, and the two of them visited fellow Reed College classmate Robert Friedland’s All One Farm.
Daniel Kottke Net Worth
She has an estimated net worth of $1 million.
Daniel Kottke Stock
Jobs, on the other hand, refused to give Kottke stock in the new company, claiming that he “will give him zero” (co-founder Steve Wozniak would later give Daniel some of his own shares in Apple). Chrisann Brennan writes in her memoir about her life with Jobs that she later asked Kottke about not receiving the stock options.
Daniel Kottke Apple Founder
Jobs asked Kottke to participate in a hobbyist computer project during his junior year at Columbia in 1976, where he assembled and tested the boards over the summer. He also arranged for Kottke to work “for an hourly rate part-time assembling circuit boards for a company called Call Computer,” which didn’t necessitate technical knowledge. During that summer, Kottke discovered his own interest in computers. In an interview with KQED/PBS, Kottke stated that he and Jobs’s sister Patty (who was also assembling boards while watching TV) were the company’s first part-time employees, while Bill Fernandez was the first full-time employee.
Kottke joined Apple as full-time employee #12 in 1977, shortly after graduating from Columbia. Jobs, Kottke, and Jobs’s girlfriend Chrisann Brennan shared a house near Apple’s Cupertino headquarters at the time.
Kottke stayed with Apple for another eight years, debugging Apple II printed circuit boards, building Apple III and Macintosh prototypes, and designing the Macintosh keyboard. The Apple II was a huge success, eventually becoming one of the best-selling personal computers of the 1970s and early 1980s. Kottke was also a founding member of the Macintosh development team, and his signature can be found embossed on the internal wall of early Macintosh computers. Furthermore, when Time magazine published a major, but unflattering, profile of Jobs in 1982, he publicly “berated” Kottke for confirming to Time that he had a daughter, Lisa Brennan.
