Transcript
Introduction
“’Bob Noyce took me under his wing,’ Steve Jobs said, ‘I was young, in my 20s, and he was in his early 50s. He tried to give me the lay of the land. To give me a perspective that I could only partially understand. You can't really understand what is going on now unless you understand what came before,’ Jobs said. Before Intel and Google, before Microsoft and Apple and Pixar and stock option millionaires and billionaire venture capitalists. There was a group of 8 young men, 6 of them with PhDs, none of them over 32 who disliked their boss and decided to start their own transistor company. It was 1957. Leading the group of 8 was an Iowa born physicist named Robert Noyce, a Minister’s son and former champion diver with a doctorate from MIT and a mind so quick that his friends called him Rapid Robert. Over the next decade, Noyce managed that company called Fairchild Semiconductor by teaching himself business skills as we went along. In 1968, Noyce and his Fairchild co-founder, Gordon Moore, launched their own new venture, a tiny company, they called Intel. Noyce believed that big was bad or if not downright bad, at least not as much fun as small companies in which everyone works much harder and cooperates more.
When he left daily management at Intel in 1975, he turned his attention to the next generation of high-tech entrepreneurs. That's how he met Jobs. And that's how he came to serve on the Boards of a half a dozen start-up companies and informally provide seed money to many more. He strongly believed he was doing his part, as he put it, to restock the stream I fish from. He always threw himself entirely into the activity at hand. And whatever he did, he tried to excel. His powers of persuasion were legendary. He inspired in nearly everyone whom he encountered a sense that the future had no limits. And that together, they could, as he liked to say, go off and do something wonderful. He was like the Pied Piper. If Bob wanted you to do something, you did it. His was not a simple personality. He was a small-town boy, suspicious of large bureaucracies, yet he built two companies that between them employed tens of thousands of people. He was a preacher’s son who rejected organized religion, an outstanding athlete who chain smoked and an intensely competitive man who was greatly concerned that people like him.
His favorite ski jacket featured a patch that declared no guts, no glory. And it was a fitting motto for a man who flew his own airplanes and chartered helicopters to drop him off on mountain tops so he could ski down through the trees. He was worth tens of millions and owned several planes and houses, but nonetheless, somehow maintained a just-folks sort of charm. Warren Buffett, who served on the college Board with Noyce for several years said, ‘Everybody liked Bob.’ He was an extraordinary smart guy who didn't need to let you know he was that smart. He could be your neighbor, but he had lots of machinery in his head. His mother described him best when she said that he liked to do a lot of things and do them well.”
That was an excerpt from the book that I’m going to talk to you about today, which is The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, and it was written by Leslie, Berlin. Okay. So all the way back on Founders #8, I read the book the Intel Trinity and -- focused mainly on Bob Noyce. And I discovered Bob Noyce by reading a biography of Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs talked about at length, how important and -- how important Bob Noyce was as a mentor and how much you he learned from him. So that's how I found that book. Now I think is another great time to dedicate an entire podcast to Bob Noyce because of last week, and I consider this part two from last week's podcast, okay? And William Shockley and Bob Noyce both worked in the same industry, Bob Noyce used to work for William Shockley.