Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Encourages HPU Students to Pursue Innovative Ideas
HIGH POINT, N.C., Feb. 17, 2026 – Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak, who serves as High Point University’s Innovator in Residence, encouraged students to think differently than inventors who have come before them during his latest visit to HPU’s campus on Feb. 13.
Wozniak’s visit came less than two months before Apple celebrates the 50th anniversary of him launching the tech giant with his high school friend, Steve Jobs, on April 1, 1976. It also came as HPU welcomed nearly 2,000 guests, including future students and their parents, for its third Presidential Scholarship weekend of the year.
Wozniak shared stories and life lessons that he learned while revolutionizing the personal computer during a sit-down conversation with Lou Anne Flanders-Stec, the founding dean of HPU’s David S. Congdon School of Entrepreneurship, in the Hayworth Fine Arts Center. He also spoke to a software engineering class and took part in a brainstorming session with HPU Minds, a group of students who are using a headset to read brainwaves and control devices.
“What you love is very important,” Wozniak told the hundreds of students who filled the Hayworth Fine Arts Center. “That’s what you’ll put the time in to be one of the very best.”
Wozniak said he loved math and building computers when he was younger. He wanted to improve the world with his inventions. He was working as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard when he circulated his design for a personal computer to every division at the technology company, but it got rejected five times.
Years later, after Wozniak’s design helped make Apple one of the world’s largest companies, he ran into one of the co-founders of Hewlett-Packard, his former employer.
“I saw Bill Hewlett one day, and I said, ‘I believed in Hewlett-Packard. I wanted you to have the personal computer,’” Wozniak said. “And he said, ‘You win some, and you lose some.’”
Wozniak encouraged students to look at existing products and services and think of ways to do them more efficiently, less costly and with fewer parts. He said there are different types of people, including those who stand out as kids because they want to create things that are unusual and different.
“And those are the inventors,” Wozniak said. “The inventor will usually get an idea like ‘Here is something that I could consider doing,’ and they want to run into some kind of laboratory, somewhere where they can work and validate that their idea has some purpose and might be onto something good. Those are the inventors.”
Jonathan Lazaridis, a junior majoring in sales with a minor in economics, serves as vice president of membership for HPU’s Professional Selling Program. He appreciated hearing Wozniak share stories about the ways he found innovative solutions to difficult problems, such as the time when he quickly developed a floppy disk for Apple despite having no previous knowledge of how to do it.
“This made him stand out over everyone else in the development process,” said Lazaridis, who is from South Hamilton, Massachusetts. “This mindset can be crucial, as it will help students not only be distinctive once they enter the professional world but also continue having consistent growth and success by being innovative solution-finders.”
Wozniak said he and Jobs did not have any money in their savings accounts when they started Apple, and his salary at Hewlett-Packard was only $25,000 at the time. He told students that it is OK to accept a 9-5 job after graduating from college to pay the bills while they pursue their passions during their free time.
“You’re still young,” Wozniak said. “If you’re young, you have more time, more mental energy and more physical energy to stay up late and work on your own projects and work out your own ideas and get them to a point where you can talk to other people and convince other people that you’re onto something good. That’s exactly how it went for me.”
As a budding entrepreneur, Evan Taylor, a freshman finance major from Atlanta, Georgia, said he appreciated Wozniak’s message to students to look for ways to solve real problems with their ideas.
“He reminded us that innovation starts with curiosity and the willingness to experiment,” Taylor said. “Hearing him speak reinforced that meaningful change begins with taking action and staying committed to your ideas.”
