Before Intel and Google, before Microsoft and dot-coms and Apple and
Cisco and Sun and Pixar and stock-option millionaires and startup widows and
billionaire venture capitalists, there was a group of eight young men -- six
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 eight 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
(and a way with the ladies so effortless) that his graduate-school friends
called him "Rapid Robert." Over the next decade, Noyce managed the company,
called Fairchild Semiconductor, by teaching himself business skills as he
went along. By 1967, Fairchild had 11,000 employees and $12 million in
profits.
Before the Internet and the World Wide Web and cell phones and personal
digital assistants and laptop computers and desktop computers and pocket
calculators and digital watches and pacemakers and ATMs and cruise control
and digital cameras and motion detectors and video games -- before all
these, and the electronic heart of all these, is a tiny device called an
integrated circuit. The inventor of the first practical integrated circuit,
in 1959, was Robert Noyce. It was one of 17 patents awarded to him.
In 1968, Noyce and his Fairchild co-founder Gordon Moore launched their
own new venture, a tiny memory company they called Intel. Noyce's leadership
of Intel -- six years as president, five as board chair, and nine as a
director -- helped create a company that was roughly twice as profitable as
its competitors and that today stands as the largest producer of
semiconductor chips in the world.
But Noyce believed "big is 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. This is how
he met Jobs. This is how he came to serve on the boards of a half dozen
startup companies and informally provide seed money to many more. He did not
think that all these companies would succeed -- he filed his paperwork for
several of them in shoe boxes that he kept in his closet -- but he strongly
believed that by investing, he was doing his part, as he put it, to "restock
the stream I've fished from."
Noyce was constitutionally unable to sit on the sidelines of any
operation with which he was involved. He once called his invention of the
integrated circuit "a challenge to the future," and turning away from the
television interviewer, he stared straight into the camera to speak directly
to the viewers: "Now let's see if you can top that one," he said, flashing a
smile. At a father-son baseball game, which the dads traditionally allowed
the boys to win, Noyce hit the very first pitch out of the park. "My poor
father couldn't help himself," recalls his daughter Penny, who was in the
stands that day. "He always threw himself entirely into the activity at hand
-- in whatever he did, he tried to excel."
Robert Noyce's favorite ski jacket featured a patch that declared "no
guts, no glory." It was a fitting motto for a man who flew his own planes,
chartered a helicopter to drop him on mountaintops so he could ski down
through the trees, rode a motorcycle through the streets of Bali in the
middle of a thunderstorm, and once leapt with his skis off a 25-foot ledge
into deep powder, exultant because he "had never jumped off a cliff into
that much snow." His powers of persuasion were legendary. In 1963, he
convinced the notoriously conservative board of one of his companies to
start the semiconductor industry's first offshore manufacturing facility --
at a site that was then completely under water, soon to be reclaimed from
the bay by the government of Hong Kong. He talked a carload of traveling
companions into joining him for a dip in a brackish Tibetan river, murky
and, just a bit upstream, filled with crocodiles. 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." Recalls Intel's former chief counsel, "He was like the pied
piper. If Bob wanted you to do something, you did it."
Like so many others who spend their lives in the limelight, Noyce was an
intensely private man. "He was the only person I can think of who was both
aloof and charming," says Intel chairman Andy Grove. "I don't know how Bob
kept you away, but you just didn't know anything about him. And this is the
guy who would go down on one knee to adjust my skis, put my chains on, when
I was a nobody."
To be sure, Noyce's was not a simple personality. A small-town boy
suspicious of large bureaucracies, he built two companies that between them
employed tens of thousands of people, and he spent many years working
through the maze of federal politics after he helped launch the
Semiconductor Industry Association, today one of the nation's most effective
lobbying organizations. He was a preacher's son who rejected organized
religion, an outstanding athlete who chainsmoked, and an intensely
competitive man who was greatly concerned that people like him. He was worth
tens of millions and owned several planes and houses but nonetheless somehow
maintained a "just folks" sort of charm: you half expected him to kick the
ground and mutter "aw shucks, you guys," when his hometown declared "Bob
Noyce Day" or an elite engineering group named him the first recipient of an
award many called the Nobel Prize for Engineering. Recalls Warren Buffett,
who served on a college board with Noyce for several years, "Everybody liked
Bob. He was an extraordinarily smart guy who didn't need to let you know he
was that smart. He could be your neighbor, but with lots of machinery in his
head."
It is easy to imagine Noyce, tuxedoed, smiling shyly, and desperately
wanting a cigarette, in October 2000, when, had he lived, he undoubtedly
would have shared the Nobel Prize for Physics awarded to his integrated
circuit co-inventor, Jack Kilby. Amazingly, this is the second Nobel Prize
that Noyce might rightfully have won. The first was in 1973, when a Japanese
physicist named Leo Esaki was one of three recipients of the physics prize.
Esaki was cited for his pathbreaking work on the tunnel diode, a device that
provided the first physical evidence that tunneling, a foundational
postulate of quantum mechanics, was more than an intriguing theoretical
concept. Noyce had written a complete description of the tunnel diode nearly
a year and a half before Esaki published his work in 1958. The two men's
research was thus happening almost simultaneously on opposite sides of the
Pacific. Noyce had not published his ideas, however, because his boss, the
Nobel laureate William Shockley, discouraged him from pursuing them.
Beginnings fascinated Noyce. He could imagine things few others could
see. In 1965, when push-button telephones were brand new and
state-of-the-art computers still filled entire rooms, Noyce predicted that
the integrated circuit would lead to "portable telephones, personal paging
systems, and palm-sized TVs." His sense of near-limitless possibility led
Noyce to pursue technical hunches that his colleagues believed were dead
ends. (Often his peers were right, but occasionally, spectacularly, they
were wrong.) Ideas fell from Noyce like leaves from a tree. For his work to
be successful, he had to be surrounded by people who could follow up on his
thoughts, filter them, and attend to the detail-work of running a company,
because almost as soon as Noyce mentioned an idea, he had left it behind in
order to explore another one. Noyce's peripatetic mental style could be
maddening at times. Andy Grove likens it to "a butterfly hopping from
thought to thought. Unfinished sentences, unfinished thoughts: you really
had to be on your toes to follow him."
Noyce was forever pushing people to take their own ideas beyond where
they believed they could go. "That's all you've got?" he'd ask. "Have you
thought about . . . " An exchange of this sort left Noyce's colleagues and
employees feeling as though his blue eyes had bored right through their
skulls to discover some potential buried inside themselves or their ideas
that they had not known existed. It was exhilarating and a bit frightening.
"If you weren't intimidated by Bob Noyce, you'd never be intimidated by
anybody," recalls Jim Lafferty, Noyce's friend and fellow pilot. "Here is
this guy who is so capable in everything he does, and here you are trying to
stumble through life and make it look respectable, and now you're trying to
keep up with him. And nobody can keep up with him."
Indeed, Noyce can sound too good to be true. He was a brilliant, wealthy,
generous, greatly beloved man gifted with enormous vision. But to leave a
description of Noyce here would be to sell him short. He was not a
superhero. He could be indecisive and would do almost anything to avoid
confrontation, a trait that kept him from making difficult decisions and
taking tough actions. His resolute focus on the future, his persistent gaze
beyond the horizon, left him blind to many details and uninterested in the
mundane minutiae of corporate management. This lack of attention had real
consequences. He recoiled from strong emotions and would rather pretend a
problem did not exist than address it head on. For many years, his personal
life was difficult, and he was not entirely without fault in this area.
But these elements of Noyce's character make him more of a man, not less.
And to watch him come to recognize -- and then devise means of working
around -- his own shortcomings, particularly as a manager, is to observe an
exceptionally creative mind in action.
Noyce's inner circle included the best-known players in Silicon Valley --
Andy Grove and Gordon Moore of Intel, Arthur Rock and Eugene Kleiner of
venture capital fame, Steve Jobs of Apple, William Shockley, co-inventor of
the transistor -- as well as the inventors of the planar process (which made
it possible to mass produce complex microelectronic devices) and the
microprocessor. Some of the lesser-known Silicon Valley pioneers who worked
with Noyce hold their own interest: among them are a monomaniacal genius, a
Swiss with two doctorates, an aristocratic refugee from Nazi terror, and the
son of a New York cabbie who really wanted to run a bed-and-breakfast. Most
of the people who worked with Noyce admired him -- some loved him -- but a
few resented his notoriety, which they felt obscured their own
contributions. "Credit floats up" was the only comment one would offer about
his former boss.
Together these men built a network of specialized equipment providers,
high-caliber technical trade schools and engineering programs, and
tech-savvy financial, public relations, and legal support services that
helped to transform the once rural Santa Clara Valley into a high-tech
business machine called Silicon Valley. When Noyce arrived in the San
Francisco Bay Area in April 1956, electronics was the fastest growing
industry in the region, with government defense contracts and sales to the
military accounting for well over half the business. But the plum, cherry,
and apricot trees that had once anchored the valley's economy still dotted
the landscape. Twenty years later, the orchards were gone, government
purchases accounted for less than a quarter of integrated circuit sales, and
the electronics industry that had been suckled on government work was now
sustained by a complex private network founded on a culture of high-stakes
risk. Noyce's career offers an ideal window into how this happened.
That Noyce and his contemporaries changed their world is only half the
story. Their lives bear the marks of the monumental social, political,
technical, and economic shifts that reshaped America in the second half of
the twentieth century. When Noyce went west, he joined the massive post-war
migration to California. His industry, launched in the torrent of defense
spending and creative panic triggered by a tiny beeping satellite that the
Soviets had lofted into orbit in 1957, placed itself at the center of the
debate over industrial policy in the 1980s. Semiconductors also catalyzed
the high-tech bubble in the 1990s.
Little more than a dozen years ago, the San Jose Mercury News declared
Noyce the Thomas Edison and the Henry Ford of Silicon Valley. He received
the National Medal of Science from President Carter and the National Medal
of Technology from President Reagan. Noyce was featured in hundreds of
newspaper and magazine articles. Peter Jennings profiled him as "the person
of the week" on ABC. CBS anchor Charles Osgood called Noyce "the man who
changed the world." Tom Wolfe, who knew a hero when he saw one, wrote about
Noyce in a 1983 Esquire article that ran next to pieces on other "American
Originals," including Jackie Robinson, John F. Kennedy, Betty Friedan, Walt
Disney, and Elvis Presley. Futurist George Gilder called Robert Noyce
"undoubtedly the most important American of the postwar era," while Isaac
Asimov went even further by hailing the invention of the integrated circuit
as "the most important moment since man emerged as a life form."
