took pigs seriously in the Iowa farm belt. But it was a sign of the charmed life that Noyce seemed to lead that not even an offence of this gravity could spoil his career. An admiring physics teacher talked the college authorities out of expelling him. Instead, he was sent off to work at an insurance company for a few months, and then after his graduation to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his PhD.
More than two decades later Bob Noyce had become general manager at Fairchild and chairman of the board of trustees of his old college in Iowa – but he was still everybody’s best friend. He had a way of looking at you that made it clear that he took what you said very, very seriously, and a way of talking in his gravelly, deep voice, usually waiting until everyone else had weighed in first, that made you take what he said more seriously still. He had what Wolfe described as the ‘halo effect’. (‘People who have it seem to know just what they are doing; they make you see their halo.’) He was not only a born leader; he was also an inspiration.
Gordon Moore, reporting to Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor as head of research and development, was a very different personality. While Noyce was five foot eight and dark-haired, Moore was over six feet and balding. While Noyce was the life and soul of every party – drinking, singing, playing tricks and accepting every dare offered to him – Moore would sit with a few close friends, quietly talking around a table. His temper was a model of equanimity, and his two great passions were fishing and messing around in boats. He was born in the small coastal town of Pescadero, just thirty miles south of San Francisco, where his father was deputy sheriff of the county. If you bumped into him walking out of his local hardware store on a Saturday morning, which people often did, you’d find him in a pair of worn overalls, peering down at his solid work boots through his wire-framed glasses. You might easily have mistaken him for a modestly prosperous orchard farmer, out in his pick-up to buy something he needed to fix a leaking pipe or to put up a swing for the kids on the apple tree in the back yard.
But Moore was every bit as great an engineer as Noyce. His PhD, in chemical engineering, was from Caltech, the prestigious California Institute of Technology near Pasadena. He was the winner of a number of important patents. And he had an uncanny knack for solving technical problems. If you took a problem that looked as though it had five or six routes to a possible solution, most engineers would waste a lot of time exploring and then ruling out the ones that didn’t work. Not Moore: for some reason that neither he nor anyone else could explain, the one avenue of enquiry that he chose would often be the one that yielded the best results.
Moore was legendary for sitting down at the lunch table in the company cafeteria with a group of engineers who had been battling with a problem for several months, and suggesting, very quietly, that they might like to take a look at this or try that. More often than you would expect, they would go away and take his advice – and discover that fifteen minutes of Gordon Moore had brought them closer to a solution than months of unaided work. Moore was also a gifted listener and judge of character. Slow to anger, he would hear everyone out. Only in the presence of people who went on for too long, repeating an unnecessary point far beyond the point of boredom among others, would Moore’s self-control finally slip and his anger become visible.
When a local paper asked Moore in 1968 why he and Noyce had decided to set up a new company, his answer was that they wanted to experience once again the thrill of working in a small, fast-growing company. Not for the first time, he might have added. Noyce and he had been involved in startups twice already. In 1956 they had helped William Shockley, the leader of the team at Bell Laboratories that developed the transistor, to set up his own laboratory. A year later the pair had been among a group of eight who walked out on Shockley to start their own transistor company under the banner of Fairchild.
The mass defection from Shockley Laboratories had been provoked by the old man’s irascibility and paranoia, and his insistence on ignoring their advice in a technical dispute over which area of research they should concentrate on. To raise funding for the new company, the ‘Traitorous Eight’ struck a deal with Sherman Fairchild, an inventor on the East Coast whose father had been one of IBM’s earliest investors. Fairchild had advanced $1.5m to them in 1957, on the understanding that they would create a subsidiary of his Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation specializing in the manufacture of semiconductors. If the venture failed, Fairchild would pick up the tab. If it was a success, the company would have the right to buy them out for $300,000 apiece.
It was a success. Two years later Fairchild’s company exercised its option, and made them all rich men. The eight founders were left in place at Fairchild Semiconductor – but they no longer had any real control over the business, nor any great stake in its success. Noyce was promoted from general manager to group vice-president of the parent company, and was held in the highest respect by its owner; but everyone knew that the big decisions were always made by the accountants back in Syosset, New York.
For a while the problems remained invisible. As the 1960s wore on, however, members of the original team became bored and drifted out of the company to set up on their own. Fairchild Semiconductor became the electronics industry’s equivalent of a sycamore tree with its winged seeds: every season, seeds from Fairchild would spin away gently in the wind, land somewhere nearby and burst into growth as new saplings. Meanwhile, as Fairchild’s growth began to slow, the money men from New York began to come up with strange compensation schemes, in which the general manager of each part of the division was paid a bonus linked to the current profits of the business he was responsible for. This turned cooperation into rivalry, and made the managers reluctant to put into effect the technologies developed by Moore and his team. New technologies might make money in the long term, but not in the short – and in the fast-moving environment of Silicon Valley, who could tell where you’d be working by the time the payoff came?
The bell tolled for Fairchild Semiconductor in 1967, when Charlie Sporck, the company’s famed manufacturing genius, set up in competition at National Semiconductor, and hired away busloads of his former colleagues. It required no great insight to tell that Fairchild was irreparably injured, and that the best Noyce and Moore could do would be to slow, rather than staunch, the flow of blood. A year later the two men were the last of the eight founders left.
The decisive moment was a conversation between the two men on a sunny weekend afternoon, while Noyce was mowing his front lawn. Once the partnership was established, the next step was clear. Moore, as head of Fairchild Semiconductor’s research and development (R&D) department, would start work on the products the new business would develop. Noyce, who eleven years earlier had led the negotiations with Sherman Fairchild that created the company they were now planning to leave, would raise the money.
It took Noyce just one phone call. The deal with Fairchild a decade earlier had been brokered by an investment banker from New York called Arthur Rock. Rock had come out to California to see the Traitorous Eight; he had helped them to draw up a list of potential backers, and he had shopped their idea to thirty-five different companies before getting a yes from Sherman Fairchild. Since then, Rock’s life had become intertwined with the Fairchild founders. He had moved to California and set up a new investment bank of his own in San Francisco, specializing in the financing of new companies. (Today, this business is known as ‘venture capital’; the phrase was invented by Rock himself.) Rock felt bound by loyalty to Fairchild to avoid taking any active steps that would hasten the break-up of Fairchild Semiconductor. But he had already helped two of the founders of the business to set up on their own, and Bob Noyce was his best friend among the remaining six. The two men used to take hiking and camping holidays together.
‘Bob just called me on the phone,’ said Rock afterwards. ‘We’d been friends for a long time … Documents? There was practically nothing. Noyce’s reputation was good enough. We put out a page-and-a-half little circular, but I’d raised the money even before people saw it. If you tried to do it today, it would probably be a two-inch stack of papers. The lawyers wouldn’t let you raise money without telling people what the risks are.’
Rock made fifteen phone
