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While dealing with the Venrock partners, Markkula had also been talking to Andrew Grove, executive vice-president of Intel. Grove, a wiry Hungarian refugee with an expressive face and curly hair, had earned a reputation for being as noisy and remorseless as a steam hammer. (At Intel he had insisted that all late arrivals enter their names in a sign-up book and was notorious for dispatching “Grove-Grams”—bullet-sized reprimands.) Markkula hoped that Grove would lend Apple some of the experience he had acquired building Intel’s factories. Grove swallowed the bait and bought fifteen thousand of the twenty-five thousand shares that Markkula offered but decided not to become a director, feeling that he had enough to worry about at Intel without becoming involved with another young company. In later months Scott recalled, “Grove kept calling. He’d say, ‘I’d like you to stop stealing my people,’ and then he’d say, ‘Do you want to sell some Apple stock?”

Another member of Intel’s board of directors, Arthur Rock, happened to see a demonstration of the Apple II given by Markkula. As a result, a few days before Apple was due to sign its agreement with Venrock, Rock telephoned Hank Smith at Venrock and Mike Scott at Apple expressing his interest in the offering. In the mid-seventies a telephone call from Arthur Rock was viewed by other venture capitalists, underwriters, commercial bankers, and stockbrokers as the financial equivalent of white smoke emerging from a Vatican chimney. Rock, who was in his early fifties, had made investments in companies that bridged the years between the disappearance of the vacuum tube and the arrival of the integrated circuit. As a New York financier, he had helped arrange the financing for the start of Fairchild Semiconductor. Along with a partner, he participated in the rise of the minicomputer industry by investing in Scientific Data Systems which was sold to Xerox Corporation in a 1969 exchange of stock for $918 million. Rock’s stake was worth $60 million. In 1968 when a couple of senior managers left Fairchild to form Intel, they turned to Arthur Rock for advice and money. Rock invested $300,000 of his own money, arranged for another $2.2 million and became the company’s first chairman. He had offered critical advice at several points, and when Intel’s management was dithering about whether to try to develop markets for its first microprocessor, Rock’s advice proved decisive.

Rock shunned publicity, had never been the subject of a long newspaper or magazine profile, hardly ever appeared at meetings of venture-capital associations, was formidably discreet about his investments, and conducted most of his business either from an office on San Francisco’s Montgomery Street or from a $450,000 three-story condominium in Aspen. He had an austere look and the neat physique of a man who spent an hour exercising every morning. He was an avid baseball fan and frequently braved the winds of San Francisco’s Candlestick Park where he had a front-row seat seventy feet from home plate. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of San Francisco’s ballet and opera and a collector of works by, among others, the modernists Robert Motherwell and Hans Hoffman. He was quite old-fashioned, believing that television was the curse of modern society, that marijuana addled the mind, and that there had been no significant developments in literature or art for a couple of decades. A fellow venture capitalist said, “He can be charming and endearing and a cold sonuvabitch.”

Provided they could lure Rock away from his office in San Francisco or his ski lodge in Aspen, the managers of young companies took great pains with their presentations to him. Like most experienced venture capitalists, Arthur Rock was not a gambler. He usually made only three or four investments a year and generally supplied only a small amount of money until he was convinced that the company would succeed or that he would get along with the management. He had a reputation for being easily bored, had little patience with corporate contributions