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Brian Howell
Mar 22, 2016, 11:24:32 AM3/22/16
to Ipse Dixit
In this history of Silicon Valley, a few names are routinely mentioned: Shockley, Noyce, Moore, Packard, and Hewlett. But Grove really should be in that list.
Andy Grove, a Jewish Hungarian refugee, arrived in the United States having survived the Nazi Holocaust and fleeing Soviet suppression. He didn't speak one word of English. Within a few years, he'd learned English idiomatically, and earned a degree in chemical engineering from CUNY, and a Ph.D. in the same subject from Berkeley. He was then hired by Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce as a junior staffer at their start-up Fairchild Semiconductor. He rose to be their top lieutenant and followed them, effectively as a co-founder, when they launched Intel a few years later. Subsequently, in one of the smartest moves by any Silicon Valley company ever, it was Grove who suggested that Intel exit the DRAM market, as Asian manufacturers ramped production and dumped product on global markets, and focus instead on microprocessors.
Grove became president of Intel in 1979, and its CEO in 1987. He stepped down in 1998 but remained as chairman until 2004. On his watch, Intel grew from $1.9B to over $26B and other major microprocessor manufacturers Motorola, AMD, and National Semiconductor withered. (The company's 2015 revenues were $55B.) Grove's name became so inextricably linked with the company that if you ask any Silicon Valley engineer older than 35 to name an Intel CEO, it's almost guaranteed he or she will say "Grove," overlooking both of Grove's legendary predecessors, Noyce and Moore, and his Grove's three successors since.
Both the Bloomberg and Venture Beat articles linked below are worth reading, for different reasons.
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