Tuesday, March 22, 2016

R.I.P. Andy Grove




















Yesterday Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel and one of the creators of Silicon Valley, died. If the news cycle were less frenetic today his passing would have gotten more notice. Grove was famous for demanding clear communication. 

You can read his obituaries from USA Today, the New York Times, and Fortune.

He was born in Hungary, emigrated to the U.S. at age 20, and earned a degree in Chemical Engineering from the City College of New York. Then he headed west to the University of California at Berkeley and earned a Ph.D. He worked at Fairchild Semiconductor, and then left in 1968 just when Intel was formed. (While working at Fairchild he taught a course at Berkeley and published a book on Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices [1967]). He also wrote a management book with the obviously Hungarian-inspired title Only the Paranoid Survive, and Swimming Across: A Memoir.

An image of Andy in his office way back in the 1970s came from Wikimedia Commons.

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