Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [139]
Kleiner, who died in 2003, is often credited with both “starting Silicon Valley” and “virtually inventing venture capital.” The Kleiner, Perkins business model transformed American finance, fueling an explosion of venture capitalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century. It is no coincidence that the rise of venture capitalism owed so much to a refugee from Nazi Europe or that it played so large a role in America's world leadership in the computer age. Venture capitalism was nothing less than a late-twentieth-century incarnation of strategic tolerance. Just as in Rome or the Great Mongol Empire, America's global dominance has depended on its ability to bring in and mobilize the world's cutting-edge talents and intellectual capital. In the 1980s and 1990s, American venture capitalism was phenomenally successful in doing just that, offering enormous inducements to young scientists, inventors, and entrepreneurs of all backgrounds, rich or poor, white or minority, native or immigrant, to pursue their ideas in America.
Andrew Grove, born Andräs Gróf in Budapest, Hungary, was one of those entrepreneurs. In 1956, the twenty-year-old Grove and his family fled the turmoil of the Hungarian Revolution, arriving in New York City onboard a rusty ship the following year. Like Kleiner, Grove did not attend a fancy school. He graduated at the top of his class from the City College of New York, waiting tables to cover tuition. Hating the cold Northeast winters, Grove then made his way to the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1963.
For Grove, America was truly a land of tolerance and opportunity. As a boy in Hungary, he successfully hid from the Nazis with his family, only to be humiliated after the war by a childhood friend who told Grove that his father had forbidden him from playing with Jews. Later, when Hungary became a puppet state of the U.S.S.R. and the Soviet tanks rolled in, Grove's prospects seemed only bleaker.
Sunny California could not have been more different. After Berkeley, Grove got a job at Fairchild Semiconductor, the firm Eugene Kleiner had cofounded. There, Grove impressed everyone with not just his energy and brilliance but his extraordinary attention to detail. In 1968, when Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, two of Fairchild's other original founders, left the company to strike out on their own, they invited Grove to be their director of operations. The decision was a surprise to many: Grove's thick Hungarian accent and impaired hearing did not make him the likeliest of choices. But Noyce and Moore had only one employment criterion: they wanted the best talent available.
Noyce was one of the inventors of the integrated circuit. Moore was arguably the best pure engineer at Fairchild. Their plan in founding a new company was to turn the multiple-transistor integrated circuit into a memory device. In 1968, computer memory storage was still being handled through magnetic-core technology. Noyce and Moore believed they could pack more transistors onto their silicon chips and turn them into memory devices smaller, cheaper, and more powerful than magnetic-core memory. In short, Noyce and Moore set out to build what the world would soon call microprocessors, also known as microchips. They called their new company Integrated Electronics—later shortened to Intel.
Interestingly, the man who came to be widely regarded as the driving force behind Intel was neither Noyce nor Moore but Andy Grove. Before Intel could mass-produce its microprocessors, there were a thousand problems to overcome—technical, administrative, strategic, and commercial. It was Grove, more than anyone else, who solved these problems. Described in company pamphlets as one of Intel's three cofounders, Grove became Intel's president in 1979 and its CEO in 1987. When Time magazine named Grove as its 1997 Man of the Year, it described him as “the person most responsible