Daniel Kottke () is an American businessman known for being a college friend of Steve Jobs and one of the first employees of Apple Inc.
Early life and education
Kottke was born on April 4, 1954, in Bronxville, New York.
Kottke first met Steve Jobs when they were both undergraduates at Reed College in 1972. In 1974, Kottke and Jobs made a trek in search of spiritual enlightenment to India to visit Neem Karoli Baba at his Kainchi ashram. When they got to the Neem Karoli ashram, it was almost deserted because Neem Karoli Baba had died in September 1973. They then made a long trek up a dry riverbed to an ashram of Haidakhan Babaji.
After returning from India, Kottke transferred to Columbia University in 1975 as a literature and music major. He stayed in touch with Jobs and they traveled together to fellow Reed College classmate Robert Friedland's All One Farm.
Career
Apple
During his junior year at Columbia in 1976, Kottke was asked by Jobs to become involved in a hobbyist computer project where he assembled and tested the boards during the summer. He also arranged for Kottke to work "for an hourly rate part-time assembling circuit boards for a company called Call Computer" that didn't require technical expertise. It was during that summer that Kottke realized his own interest in computers. Kottke stated in an interview with KQED/PBS that both he and Jobs's sister Patty (who was also assembling boards while watching TV) were the first part-time employees of Apple, while Bill Fernandez was the first full-time employee.
In 1977, after graduating from Columbia, Kottke joined Apple as full-time employee #12. It was at that time that Jobs, Kottke, and Jobs's girlfriend Chrisann Brennan shared a house near the Apple office in Cupertino.
Kottke spent an additional eight years with Apple debugging Apple II printed circuit boards and building Apple III and Macintosh prototypes as well as working on the design for the Macintosh keyboard. The Apple II gained a sizable amount of popularity, eventually becoming one of the best selling personal computers of the 1970s and early 1980s. Kottke was also one of the original members of the Macintosh development team and his signature can be found embossed on the internal wall of early production Macintosh computers.
After Apple went public in 1980 to instant and significant financial profitability, Jobs refused to grant Kottke stock in the new company, stating that he "will give him zero". Co-founder Steve Wozniak, however, would later give Kottke some of his own Apple shares, which Wozniak distributed $10 million of to various early Apple employees. In her memoir of her life with Jobs, Chrisann Brennan states that she later asked Kottke about not receiving the stock options and that he replied: "Oh that ... Steve had offered me a job in marketing ... but I wasn't interested in marketing because I had something like a fever to understand the technology ... so I never pursued the marketing opportunity".
In addition, in 1982 when Time magazine featured a major, but unflattering, profile of Jobs, he publicly "berated" Kottke for confirming the fact to Time that he had a daughter, Lisa Brennan.
Representations in film
Documentaries
Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine (2015)
Feature films
Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999), with Marcus Giamatti as Kottke: In an interview with Slashdot, Kottke stated that Pirates of Silicon Valley was "a great movie. Noah Wyle was just uncannily close to Jobs. Just unbelievable. I found myself thinking it was actually Steve on the screen." He also stated that in the film there were "all these scenes of the garage where it's like half a dozen people working, busily carrying things back and forth, and oscilloscopes" when he [Kottke] "was really the only person who worked in the garage. Woz would show up once a week with his latest to test it out, and Steve Jobs was on the phone a lot in the kitchen."