Atari founder Nolan Bushnell says Steve Jobs was a problem employee

STEVE Jobs’ former boss, Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, reveals what he was like as an employee — and what it feels like to miss out on Apple billions.

You win some, you lose some: Atari founder Nolan Bushnell has learned to accept the hand fate has dealt him. Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

HOW do you know when you should go all in, and when to walk away?

If you’re Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, you don’t. Had Bushnell taken up the late Steve Jobs’ offer of a $50,000 one-third stake in Apple in 1976, he’d be hundreds of billions of dollars richer today. But he turned it down.

“I thought that (Apple co-founder Steve) Wozniak could definitely create something that was world-shaking, but I didn’t feel like there was any ‘there, there’ in terms of management,” he tells host Alex Malley in an upcoming episode of Channel 9’s The Conversation with Alex Malley.

With Apple tipped to be approaching a market valuation of $US1 trillion, it’s proven to be a bad call. But Bushnell, who hired Jobs as a technician in 1973, remains good-humoured about the whole thing.

When Malley asks, “How do you get the balance right between leaving too early on a project or staying too long?” he admits, “It’s very hard ... I’ve always gotten it wrong.”

Bushnell also recalls what it was like being Steve Jobs’ boss, and how the eccentric genius maintained a constant presence at the Atari office.

“Steve had one speed: full speed ahead,” Bushnell says. “I’m not sure about this but I actually think Steve was living there, so people used to complain that he didn’t smell that well ... I’d come in on the weekend and he’d be there, I’d come in late at night and he’d be there.”

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs created the first Apple computer in 1976.

Bushnell has previously described Jobs as a “difficult” person who made his superior intelligence known to those in his vicinity, though he considered him a friend.

“I didn’t see the bad Steve Jobs, but he caused enough problems that I put him on the engineering nightshift, of which it didn’t exist — he was the first member of that,” he says.

All the while, the tech company success story of the century was brewing right under his nose.

Bushnell, who is regarded as the godfather of the gaming industry, made what would turn out to be another regrettable decision when he sold Atari to Warner Communications in 1979 for $US28 million.

“I probably would not have sold Atari if I’d just taken a two-week vacation,” Bushnell tells Malley.

“In the early days of Atari, your only standard was ‘I have to work as hard as I can, because this may be my only shot, and I don’t know how hard I have to work to be successful.’ As a result, you sacrifice family, leisure time, and a lot of stuff.

“It’s very easy when you’re in that mode to lose perspective ... I had a very good team around me, but we just grew so fast ... I thought ‘oh, I can get a lot of money, and these people can take all my problems away.’”

Five years later, the company folded and its assets were split, a result of poor management and the video game crash of 1983.

For Bushnell, it’s all part and parcel of an entrepreneurial life.

“We’re a little bit of business adrenaline junkies, we get addicted to the adrenaline of doing something truly remarkable,” he says.

Nolan Bushnell will be on The Conversation with Alex Malley on Channel 9 at 10am this Sunday.

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Originally published as Atari founder Nolan Bushnell says Steve Jobs was a problem employee