I met Andy Grove on a sunny day in New York City in 1987. He was dashing to press interviews for his just-off-the-presses management book, “One on One with Andy Grove.” I was a freshly badged member of the press working for IEEE Spectrum, a year or so out of college, still toting my college backpack. Little did I know that that would be … Read More
Last week, Intel announced its second-quarter financial results which easily beat the analysts’ consensus expectations by a handsome margin. Yet the stock price plummeted by over 16% right after the earnings call with management. Seven analysts downgraded the stock to a sell and the common theme on all the downgrades was that… Read More
The foundry problem continued to plague us at Actel. We had a really complex process! But —- we needed state of the art feature sizes if we were to compete with Xilinx. TI and Matsushita had been doing a good job for us, but not in fabs with state of the art technology. We were two process generations behind! At two generations… Read More
Wikipedia … “In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a non-linear system can result in large differences in a later state”. In other words, a butterfly bats its wings in Argentina and the path of an immense tornado in Oklahoma is changed some… Read More
The “20 Questions with John East” series continues
Intel was founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore who had left Fairchild earlier that year. They immediately hired Andy Grove. Noyce, Moore and Grove were a study in contrasts. I had various dealings over the years with Noyce and Grove, but have met Moore only twice. They… Read More
The “20 Questions with John East” series continues
Noyce and the rest of the traitorous eight left Shockley without a clue as to what they would do next. They believed in semiconductors and knew that they were the very best semiconductor guys in the world. Their hope was to find a company who would hire them en masse. After some false… Read More
Silicon Valley sadly lost a respected and revered leader with the death of Andrew Grove in March. The co-founder and former CEO of Intel was an inspiration to generations of technologists and business leaders, including me. Andy had a profound influence on me throughout my career. And while I only met him once, I feel as though I’ve… Read More
I worked briefly at Intel in 1991-2. At the time, the corporate culture was based on the theory of ‘constructive confrontation.’ For most, that meant that in the clash of good ideas, the best one would prevail. For some at Intel, however, constructive confrontation was a blood sport. (I trust things have improved in the past quarter… Read More
In my nearly thirty year career at FORTUNE magazine, I got to know a host of larger than life characters. But few loom larger in memory than the diminutive dynamo who sadly passed away last night, Andy Grove.
Amid the stream of obits and reminiscences rightly hailing Andy’s extraordinary career as CEO of Intel, his major contributions… Read More
The following paragraphs present another one of those articles that I wrote for a Cyber Media publication, probably in the year 2000. It’s been almost fifteen years since then. When I read Sunit Rikhi’s glowing tribute to Andy Grove, a few grey cells stirred in my brain and I recalled that I had written something about the Intel that… Read More
