Life is broadly defined by a few strokes of good luck when you meet someone and get that spark to achieve greatness. Here’s a collection of fortuitous alliances that bent the arc of history.
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
Jobs and Woz (that's Steve Wozniak) were introduced in 1971 by a mutual friend, Bill Fernandez, who went on to become one of Apple's earliest employees. The two Steves got along thanks to their shared love of technology and pranks.
Jobs and Wozniak joined forces, initially coming up with pranks such as rigging up a painting of a hand showing the middle-finger to be displayed during a graduaction ceremony at Jobs' school, and a call to the Vatican that nearly got them access to the Pope.
The two friends were also using their technology know-how to build 'blue boxes' that made it possible to make long distance phone calls for free.
Jobs and Wozniak worked together on the Atari arcade game Breakout while Jobs was working at Atari and Wozniak was working at HP - Jobs had roped Woz into helping him reduce the number of logic chips required. Jobs managed to get a good bonus for the work on Breakout, of which he gave a small amount to Woz.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen
Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen first met as teenagers in the late 1960s at Lakeside School in Seattle, when Gates was in eighth grade and Allen was in tenth grade.
It was a computer terminal that first “brought us together,” Gates said of his late friend at the Forbes Philanthropy Summit in New York, where Allen was posthumously awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award for Philanthropy. “Our school, Lakeside, held a rummage sale and used the proceeds to buy a teletype terminal. We were obsessed with it.”
Despite the name, this ‘outfit’ is an entirely legit group of tech entrepreneurs - the founders and former employees of PayPal. The ‘Mafia’ have continued to work and invest together since the company’s 2002 sale to eBay. Between them, they’ve founded, funded or led some of the world’s biggest tech firms.
Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp
Mayahoshi San and Jack Ma
Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West
"I met him I think in 2002 or 2003. He was recording a song with Brandy, and I was her friend. I vividly remember hanging out with him and then they did a video together, so I'd see him a few times. He was asking his friends: 'Who is this Kim Kardajan?' He didn't know what my name was," she said during the "KUWTK" 10-year anniversary
Kim was still married to Damon Thomas at the time, but she remained friends with Kanye, who later revealed that he was drawn to Kim from the moment he saw her.
"I just knew I wanted her to be my girl for a long time," he told Ryan Seacrest in 2013. "I remember I saw a picture of her and Paris Hilton, and I remember telling my boy, 'Have you seen that girl Kim Kardijon?'"
Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine