TY - JOUR
AU - Berlin, Leslie
AB - What makes for success in the fast-paced world of high-technology business? History offers important guidance. A look at the career of one of the most charismatic and important inventors and entrepreneurs of the twentieth century—Robert Noyce— makes it clear that in order to succeed as an inventor or as a business leader, it is essential to collaborate with others and to understand that an important part of any invention is the business of selling it. In 1959, Noyce co-invented the integrated circuit, a device that lies at the heart of modern electronics. Noyce also cofounded two extremely successful companies: Fairchild Semiconductor, the first successful silicon firm in Silicon Valley, and Intel, today the largest semiconductor company in the world (1). Right up until his death in 1990 at the age of sixty-two, Noyce was a daredevil. His jacket bore a patch that read, “No guts, no glory.” It was a fitting motto for a man who flew his own jets and skied mountains so remote that they were accessible only by helicopter. It is no wonder, then, that for many, Noyce's life represented the high-fying, high-risk, high-reward world of high technology. Noyce's life and career offer many lessons, but this essay will focus on just two: the importance of collaboration in high-technology invention and entrepreneurship, and the connections between invention and entrepreneurship. We often hear that a single person is the inventor of an essential technology or the force behind a successful company. Noyce's story makes it clear that in the modern world of high technology, invention and entrepreneurship are team endeavors. The Child Is Father to the Man Robert Noyce's core was shaped by his Depression-era boyhood in the small town of Grinnell, Iowa. Though he tinkered with machines from the time he was very small, the childhood invention that foreshadowed his later successes as an adult took shape in the summer of 1940, when twelve-year-old Noyce and his beloved fourteen-year-old brother, Gaylord, inspired all eighteen children in their neighborhood to work together to build a boy-powered glider. After a few experiments jumping off low hills and towing the glider like a kite behind a moving car, Noyce decided to try “to jump off the roof of a barn and live.” He clambered up to a barn's roof, grabbed the glider from a few neighbor boys, took a deep breath, thrust his sturdy body against the glider's frame, and jumped. Then, forone, two, three seconds,young Bob Noyce was flying. He hit the groundalmost immediately butnonetheless proudly announced, “We did [it]!” This story revealsthree attributes in Noyce that would defne his future success as a high-tech entrepreneur. First, hisability with his hands is evident. Throughout hislife, Noyce was respected by engineers as well as scientists because he was not simply a thinker—he wasalso a builder. Second, in the boy who reached theedge of the roof and kept on running, we see thesoul of the man who lived without limits and whobelieved that every idea could be taken farther. Third, the adolescentNoyce pulled together and motivated a diverse group of collaborators, each member tapped for his or her ability to contribute something unique to the project. Noyce would do this for the rest of his life, and in many ways, it was the secret to his success. It is to this third attribute that we now turn. Collaboration in Invention Noyce attended Grinnell College, where he was a singer, an actor, and a champion diver. He was also a joker and an excellent student—a Phi Beta Kappa double major in Math and Physics—who always said that his favorite award was the one he received from his classmates recognizing him as “the senior man who earned the best grades with the least amount of work.” He went on to receive a PhD in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953. By June 1959, Noyce was working as head of research and development for Fairchild Semiconductor, a tiny startup company in the region today called Silicon Valley (so named for the silicon used in building microchips). In that month, he fled for a patent for a “semiconductor device and lead structure.” The invention described in thepatent application soon came to be called an integrated circuit; by the 1980 s we called it a microchip. Nearly every electronic device today—from the brakes in our cars, to the microwaves in our kitchens, to theiPods in our pockets—contains descendants of the integrated circuit in Noyce's patent application. Before the integrated circuit, vacuum tubes powered radios and other electronic appliances in American homes and offces. The tube had worked by moving electrons through a vacuum. The integrated circuit moved them through differently charged regions on a chip of silicon small enough to be carried off by an ant. The integrated circuit was an interconnected series of discrete components that served specifc functions—resistors to control current, diodes to block it, and transistors to amplify it. When these discrete components were strung together, the resulting circuit could do anything from adding millions of numbers to sensing when coffee is done brewing. Three months before Robert Noyce began jotting down ideas about integrated circuits in his lab notebook, Jack Kilby, a Texas Instruments engineer, independently demonstrated a rough-but-functional integrated circuit of a different design. Because Kilby was first,and Noyce's integrated circuit was easier to build in large quantities than Kilby's, the two men are offcially designated as co-inventors of the integrated circuit. But the story is more complicated. Noyce only had his ideas about integrated circuits because, as head of research and development, he followed the progress of scientists in research labs around the world and, especially, in his own frm's laboratory. There Jean Hoerni, a Swiss with two doctorates, developed the “planar process” that made it possible to build silicon chips in large quantities while simultaneously protecting them from contamination. Without the planar process, Noyce never could have imagined an integrated circuit in the way he did. Even after Noyce fled his patent application, he leaned heavily on the scientists around him. Jay Last—another co-founder of Fairchild with Noyce, Hoerni, and fve others—transformed the intriguing ideas in Noyce's patent into the reality of a functional device. This painstaking effort took Last and his microcircuits team approximately a year and required so much innovation that several additional key patents for Fairchild Semiconductor emerged from the work. The collaboration on the integrated circuit illustrates that innovation is rarely the product of a single mind. It is not at all unusual for a technical idea to emerge in two different places nearly simultaneously, as happened with Noyce and Kilby. Moreover, as the multiperson efforts at Fairchild make clear, invention is best understood as a team effort, with the person ultimately called “inventor” occupyingmuch the same space as the pitcher who has just pitched a perfect game. The outfelders might have caught a dozen fy balls, the frst baseman might have nearly broken his neck to step on the bag an instant before the runner, the catcher might have called for pitches perfectly calibrated to each batter's weakness, but the record booksnote only that the pitcher threw a perfect game. To his credit, Noycenever hesitated to admit that his ideas about integrated circuits reliedheavily on ideas that were “in the air” in the late 1950 s. Without thescientists at Fairchild and around the world, Noyce's ideas would nothave become marketable products, much less the heart of the modernelectronics revolution. Invention and Entrepreneurship The U.S. military bought 100 percent of Fairchild Semiconductor's earliest integrated circuits, using them in everything from sophisticated computers to missiles. But it was diffcult to fnd othercustomers. Although integrated circuits were much smaller and morereliable than available alternatives, they cost up to fifty times more. In 1963, most manufacturers still believed that integrated circuits would not be commercially viable for some time. By this time, Noyce had left the laboratory to run the business end of Fairchild Semiconductor. “The selling of new ideas is really an engineering problem,” he once said, and he was determined to solve this one and fnd non-military customers for Fairchild. Accordingly, in the spring of 1964, Noyce decided that Fairchild would sell its lowend (fip-fop) integrated circuits for less than it would cost a customer to buy and connect the individual components and less than it cost Fairchild to build the device. In effect, Noyce was betting Fairchild's future on two hunches.He suspected that if integrated circuits could make their way into the market, customers would prefer them and would begin designing their products around the new devices. He also calculated that as Fairchild built more and more circuits, experience and economies of scale would enable them to build the circuits so effciently that they could make a proft even on the ridiculously low price. Noyce used a book-printing analogy to explain why his business move could make the technological innovation succeed. The first copy of a book, taken by itself, is extremely expensive because the printer must buy equipment, typeset, proofread, and otherwise prepare a manuscript. Once the process is in place, however, every additional copy is relatively cheap, and gets cheaper the more copies made. Noyce bet that once Fairchild artifcially lowered the price for integrated circuits, the resulting demand would be so high that his “per-copy cost”would allow for a proft. This brazen business move to develop the market and reduce costs by brute force leapfrogged Fairchild to the top position in circuits sold each year. Moreover, the entire market for integrated circuits took off, as Noyce expected. Within a year, Fairchild received a single order (for half a million circuits) equal to 20 percent of the entire industry's output the previous year. Drastically reducing the price of the integrated circuit was an essential part of the invention's success. Collaboration in Entrepreneurship Noyce was trained as a scientist, but he loved to build companies as much as he loved to experiment in the lab. In September 1957, when he was thirty years old, Noyce was one of eight founders of Fairchild Semiconductor, the company that spawned the West Coast microchip industry. The eight founders—Julius Blank, Vic Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts—were all young (the oldest was thirty-two). They had met a year earlier when Nobel Prize-winning physicist William Shockley hired them to work at his transistor company in Mountain View, near Stanford University. Most members of the group of eight had arrived in California planning to work for William Shockley forever. Noyce and the others soon discovered, however, that Shockley, an indisputably brilliant scientist, was a terrible manager. When his micromanaging and indecisiveness about products began to overwhelm his employees, the group of eight launched Fairchild Semiconductor with a loan from Fairchild Camera and Instrument, a New York-based firm that would, two years later, acquire the young semiconductor company. The talents of the eight men complemented each other beautifully. Among them they had a theoretical physicist, empirical physicists, engineers of various types, a chemist, and an expert tool builder. The eight founders were close. They worked together for ten or twelve hours each day, not counting the trips to Rupert's Bar, where they liked to go for drinks in the evening. They often found themselves standing in a circle when they were together, their shoulders nearly touching, each man holding one conversation with the man on his left and a different one with the man on his right (and perhaps a third with someone across the circle). None of the eight had any business experience, so they hired a sea soned manager from an established semiconductor company. When the manager left scarcely a year later to launch a competitor firm, Noyce was the unanimous choice to become the new general manager. Yet Noyce's move to management disrupted the egalitarianism that had held the founding team together. Within two years, Jay Last and Jean Hoerni left to launch a new semiconductor division of a successful company; they were soon joined by a third founder. A year later, a fourth member of the founding group, Eugene Kleiner, left. He would go on to launch one of the world's premier venture capital companies: Kleiner Perkins Caufeld & Byers. Under Noyce, Fairchild grew to 11,000 employees and $12 million in profts in 1967. For a while, its parent company (essentially all of whose proft came from the semiconductor division) was the best-performing stock on Wall Street. By late 1967, however, the company began to decline. There were many reasons for the change, but the breakup of the founding group and departure of other key employees, which shifted too much responsibility for the company onto Noyce's shoulders alone, certainly played a part. Noyce himself later recognized this. “One thing I learned at Fairchild,” he admitted, “is that I don't run large organizations well. I don't have the discipline to do that, have the follow through ” In other words, he might be able to inspire on his own, but he needed a team to turn his inspirational ideas into viable businesses. In July of 1968, Noyce left Fairchild to start a small company that built memory chips. In 2009, that company is the 84,000-employee, $86.7-billion Intel ($123 billion in 2008). Once again, Noyce did not start this new effort alone. Joining him was his Fairchild co-founder, Gordon Moore. Noyce and Moore had worked together productively for more than a decade. Where Noyce saw the big picture, Moore could discern detail. Where Noyce had honed his abilities to construct strong connections between Fairchild and various outside constituencies (the press, the board, customers, and suppliers), Moore had become an expert leader within the company itself, particularly in the laboratory. The two co-founders decided to split power between them equally. In short order, they brought on a third man who would, ten years later, become Intel's third president. This was Andy Grove, a chemical engineer from Hungary who had graduated first in his engineering class at City College of New York despite having begun his coursework without knowing how to say “horizontal” or “vertical” in English. Unlike Noyce and Moore, who managed employees with a light touch, Grove was fanatical about follow-up, meticulously detail-oriented, and unsparing of any opportunity to enforce his high standards with strong words. (Noyce, with great admiration, nicknamed Grove “The Whip.”) The three men found a way to run Intel that built on each of their strengths. Noyce turned his attention outward, calling on important customers, meeting with the board, and providing Intel's public face. Meanwhile, Grove focused on the inner workings of In tel, the essential minutiae of day-to-day operations. Moore bridged the gap between the two, weighing Noyce's signals from the outside against research in the field and Grove's reports from the inside. One person familiar with the trio described their roles this way: “Noyce would say, ‘Some day we will use semiconductors to perform [some outrageous job].’ Then Moore would say, ‘To do that, we would need to transcend technical problems Y and Z.’ And Grove would say, ‘That means we'll need to get however-many-more engineers and increase yields by X percent and plant space by Y feet.’ Their strengths just balanced each other so well.” Their roles, in many peoples' opinions, could be described even more succinctly: Mr. Outside (Noyce), Mr. Inside (Moore), and Mr. Implementation (Grove). Conclusion In the successes of Intel, Fairchild, and the integrated circuit, we see the value of collaboration and the interplay between invention and entrepreneurship. A successful company or invention combines the capacity for innovation with good management by bringing together different talents, ambitions, experiences, and connections. This is as true today as in Noyce's day, for as Apple Computer and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs—who calls Noyce his “hero”—has said, “You cannot understand what is happening today without understanding what came before.” Endnotes 1. Noyce Robert. ,  The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley ,  2005 New York Organization of American Historians  The material in this article is drawn from my biography of For more on Noyce, see also Tom Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley,” Esquire (December 1983): 346-74. For more on the invention of the integrated circuit, see T. R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution (New York: Random House, 2001). Two good online sources on the history of semiconductors and computing are Computer History Museum, “Timeline of Semiconductors in Computers,”http://www.computerhistory.org/semiconductor/; and Intel Museum,http://www.intel.com/museum/. Figures and Tables View largeDownload slide In the summer of 1940, Robert Noyce, who was then twelve, built a boy-sized aircraft with his fourteen-year-old brother, Gaylord. (Courtesy of Silicon Valley Archives, Stanford University and Ann Bowers) View largeDownload slide In the summer of 1940, Robert Noyce, who was then twelve, built a boy-sized aircraft with his fourteen-year-old brother, Gaylord. (Courtesy of Silicon Valley Archives, Stanford University and Ann Bowers) View largeDownload slide Diagrams for the Semiconductor Device patent for which Noyce filed in 1959 and that he received in 1961. By the 1980 s, Noyce's invention was commonly known as the microchip. Nearly every electronic device today—from the brakes in our cars, to the microwaves in our kitchens, to the iPods in our pockets— contains descendants of the integrated circuit in Noyce's patent application. (Courtesy ofhttp://www.freepatentsonline.com) View largeDownload slide Diagrams for the Semiconductor Device patent for which Noyce filed in 1959 and that he received in 1961. By the 1980 s, Noyce's invention was commonly known as the microchip. Nearly every electronic device today—from the brakes in our cars, to the microwaves in our kitchens, to the iPods in our pockets— contains descendants of the integrated circuit in Noyce's patent application. (Courtesy ofhttp://www.freepatentsonline.com) View largeDownload slide The founders of Fairchild Semiconductor pose for their company Christmas card shortly after the firm's founding in 1957. Noyce is in the center front. Moving clock wise from him: Jean Hoerni, Julius Blank, Vic Grinich, Eugene Kleiner, Gordon Moore, Sheldon Roberts, and Jay Last. (Courtesy of Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos) View largeDownload slide The founders of Fairchild Semiconductor pose for their company Christmas card shortly after the firm's founding in 1957. Noyce is in the center front. Moving clock wise from him: Jean Hoerni, Julius Blank, Vic Grinich, Eugene Kleiner, Gordon Moore, Sheldon Roberts, and Jay Last. (Courtesy of Wayne Miller/Magnum Photos) View largeDownload slide Andy Grove, Robert Noyce, and Gordon Moore, left to right, led Intel through the 1970 s. They pose here with the 8080 Rubylith, c. 1979. (Courtesy of Intel) View largeDownload slide Andy Grove, Robert Noyce, and Gordon Moore, left to right, led Intel through the 1970 s. They pose here with the 8080 Rubylith, c. 1979. (Courtesy of Intel) Copyright © Organization of American Historians
TI - Robert Noyce, Silicon Valley, and the Teamwork Behind the High-Technology Revolution
JF - OAH Magazine of History
DO - 10.1093/maghis/24.1.33
DA - 2010-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/robert-noyce-silicon-valley-and-the-teamwork-behind-the-high-TDP9MCazoq
SP - 33
EP - 36
VL - 24
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -