11 CEOs who had weird jobs before they became successful (+Photos)

7. Steve Jobs

Position: Late CEO, Apple

Weird Job: Selling Illegal Telephone Hacking Equipment

Phone systems in the 1970s were way different than what we have today. For example, for long distance dialing, they used tone signals.

Steve Jobs and his pal, Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple), created their first business venture together selling blue boxes. These blue boxes allowed people to break into the phone systems and make free calls.

In an interview, Jobs said that if he hadn’t thought about the whole Blue Boxes idea, he wouldn’t have invented Apple. In fact, he said that’s when and how he learned how to work with Wozniak and believed that together, they would come up with a great idea.