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By Root 402 0

connections like General Dynamics, Hughes Aircraft, and Raytheon. He had run the marketing department at National, was frustrated by the growth of a corporate bureaucracy, and left to start a venture-capital firm which he named Sequoia Capital. He specialized in maintaining an impassive, impenetrable exterior, leaving even his friend Regis McKenna with the impression, “He can be a hard-nosed rug merchant if he’s trying to buy or sell from you.” All in all, Valentine wasn’t likely to be softened by sentimental appeals. He frequently took refuge in one of his favorite aphorisms: “If a man comes into my office and says he wants to be a millionaire, I’m bored to death. If he says he wants a net worth of fifty to a hundred million dollars, I’m interested. If he says he wants to make a billion dollars, I say, ‘Tell me about it,’ because if he comes close we’re all going to clean up.”

Valentine had brushed up against Jobs while he was considering investing in Atari and also knew that the McKenna Agency, where he was a member of the board, was dallying with Apple. Valentine wore button-down shirts and regimental ties and thought Jobs looked like “a renegade from the human race” and his meeting with the Apple duo was not a success. The younger pair explained, in a stumbling manner, that if the market for single-board computers was going to be as large as some people were predicting, they would be more than content to nibble at the edges and make a couple of thousand boards a year. That was not a line guaranteed to win Valentine’s heart; he thought, “Neither one knew anything about marketing. Neither one had any sense of the size of the potential market. They weren’t thinking anywhere near big enough.” Valentine resorted to yet another of his pet sayings: “Big thinkers often do big things. Small thinkers never do big things,” and told the younger pair that he was not prepared to invest since nobody connected with Apple had any marketing experience. Jobs immediately asked Valentine to suggest some candidates who might fill the bill. Valentine returned to his office, riffled through his Rolodex, selected three names he knew from his days in the semiconductor industry, and checked their progress with people he trusted. One, Mike Markkula (who became irritated when addressed by either of his given names, Armas or Clifford), had worked for Valentine in the mid-sixties at Fairchild.

On Valentine’s urging, Markkula (whose last name was Finnish) arranged to meet Wozniak and Jobs. Markkula was thirty-three years old and lived in youthful retirement in Cupertino. He was one of dozens of men who had made money from a young company’s public stock issue only to decide that there was more to life than becoming a corporate vice-president. In Markkula’s case the company had been Intel where he had worked for four years after leaving Fairchild. He had made no secret of the fact that one of his goals in life was to become a millionaire by the time he was thirty, and when he managed to do so, he also didn’t bother to conceal his satisfaction. Markkula was, in the words of one of his wealthier Intel colleagues, “a multimillionaire but a small multimillionaire”. He had been raised in Southern California, had earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, and after graduating, had joined Hughes Aircraft Company where he worked in a research and development laboratory.

After leaving Fairchild and joining Intel Markkula was buried deep in the ritual of the semiconductor industry. He worked on the pricing strategy for new chips, composed data sheets, helped solve customers’ problems, and was considered steady and reliable but not a rising star. His main claim to fame was guiding the development of Intel’s computer system for processing customer orders, where he immersed himself in the nitty-gritty details of the programming. He watched the growth of Intel’s line of memory chips and realized the importance of good financial contacts and the need for reliable distributors and dealers.