Andrew Grove

Scarlet fever at four nearly killed him and took part of his hearing. At eight he was András István Gróf, living in Budapest under a false name in a friend's apartment with his mother, while the Germans deported close to half a million Hungarian Jews and his father was in an eastern labor camp being tortured. The father came back after the war. In 1956, at 20, Grove left his family and walked across the Austrian border, one of about 200,000 Hungarians who got out. He reached the United States in 1957 with no money and almost no English, bussed dishes at a New Hampshire resort, met an Austrian refugee named Eva Kastan there and married her in 1958, and took a doctorate from Berkeley in 1963.

He came out of Fairchild Semiconductor and joined Intel on the day it was incorporated in 1968, the third man there after Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, running engineering. President in 1979, chief executive in 1987. In 1985, with Japanese manufacturers selling memory chips below cost, he walked Intel out of the DRAM business it had largely invented and put the company on microprocessors instead. Revenue went from 2,672 dollars in Intel's first year to 20.8 billion in 1997, and while he was chief executive the market value went from 4 billion to 197 billion. He wrote High Output Management in 1983 and Only the Paranoid Survive in 1996, gave managers the phrase strategic inflection point, and taught the objectives-and-key-results method that later organized Google. He worked from a cubicle eight feet by nine.

The thing he was famous for got past him in 1994. A mathematics professor at Lynchburg College named Thomas Nicely found that the new Pentium divided certain numbers wrong and told Intel on October 24. Intel already knew, had calculated that almost nobody would notice, and offered replacement chips only to customers who could demonstrate they were affected. The story moved from newsgroups to CNN inside a month, IBM stopped shipping Pentium machines, and on December 20 Intel reversed and replaced any chip on request. The write-off came to 475 million dollars. Grove's own reading afterward was that the company had presumed to tell people what they ought to worry about. Inside Intel the method he called constructive confrontation had a blunter description among staff, which one business writer summarized as buy into it or collect your walking papers.

Time made him its Man of the Year in 1997, calling him the person most responsible for what microchips had become. He gave up the chief executive job in May 1998 because of prostate cancer, kept the chairmanship until November 2004, and in 2000 was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, after which he became one of the larger private funders of research into it. In 2005 he gave City College of New York 26 million dollars, the biggest gift in its history, and its engineering school took his name. He died at his home in Los Altos on March 21, 2016. The family did not disclose a cause. His memoir stops at 20, before he had ever seen a transistor.

Andrew Grove's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices book
  Written at Fairchild, and a standard text for a generation of engineers 1967
• High Output Management book
  Still handed to new managers in Silicon Valley 1983
• The exit from memory other
  Ending Intel's DRAM business and betting the company on microprocessors 1985
• Only the Paranoid Survive book
  Where the strategic inflection point got its name 1996
• Swimming Across book
  A memoir that ends when he reaches America at 20 2001
• Grove School of Engineering, City College of New York company
  Endowed with 26 million dollars, the largest gift the college has received 2005

• 1944 aged ~8 Lives under a false identity in occupied Budapest at eight His father was taken to an eastern labor camp and returned only after the war.
• 1956 aged ~20 Crosses the Austrian border at 20 during the Hungarian uprising
• 1960 aged ~24 Graduates in chemical engineering from City College of New York He had bussed dishes at a New Hampshire resort to pay for it.
• 1963 aged ~27 Takes a doctorate at Berkeley and joins Fairchild Semiconductor
• 1968 aged ~32 Joins Intel on the day of its incorporation as the third employee
• 1985 aged ~49 Ends Intel's memory business under Japanese price pressure The company staked itself on microprocessors instead.
• December 20, 1994 aged 58 Reverses course and offers to replace every flawed Pentium The write-off was 475 million dollars.
• May 1998 aged 61 Steps down as chief executive after a prostate cancer diagnosis
• March 21, 2016 aged 79 Dies at home in Los Altos, California, at 79

• Robert Noyce 1927–1990
  Co-inventor of the integrated circuit and co-founder of Intel, earning him the title Mayor of Silicon Valley. brought him to Intel
• Gordon Moore 1929–2023
  Co-founder of Intel whose observation became Moore's Law, driving decades of semiconductor progress. partner and predecessor
• Federico Faggin b. 1941
  Led design of the Intel 4004 microprocessor and later co-founded Zilog. designed the first microprocessor at Intel
• Bill Gates b. 1955
  Co-founder of Microsoft who, through the Gates Foundation, has donated billions to global health and education. the other half of the personal computer
• Jack Welch 1935–2020
  Former CEO of General Electric who reshaped corporate management and became a business icon. rival theory of management
• Steve Jobs 1955–2011
  Co-founder of Apple who revolutionized personal computing, music, and mobile communications. built the machines around his chips