Robert Noyce

Robert Noyce (1927–1990) was called "the Mayor of Silicon Valley" — co-inventor of the practical integrated circuit, co-founder of Fairchild and Intel, and the man who invented not just the chip but the culture that makes chips: no corner offices, first names only, stock options for everyone, and the radical idea that the smartest thing a boss can do is get out of the way.

The preacher's son and the pig

Noyce grew up in Grinnell, Iowa, a congregational minister's son with a taste for mischief — as a boy he built a glider and flew it off a barn roof. At Grinnell College the mischief nearly ended him: he and a friend stole a pig from a local farm for a campus luau. In 1940s Iowa, pig theft was genuinely serious business — expulsion-and-worse serious — and only a physics professor's passionate intervention got the sentence bargained down to one semester's suspension. The professor knew what he was saving: that same teacher had shown Noyce one of the very first transistors, and the preacher's son was hooked for life.

The traitorous eight

Noyce went to work for William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and, by universal agreement, one of the worst managers who ever lived (highlights: public firings, posted salary lists, demanding lie-detector tests). In 1957 Noyce and seven colleagues — forever after "the traitorous eight" — walked out together and did something that barely had a name yet: they found an investor and started their own company, Fairchild Semiconductor. In doing so they more or less invented the venture-funded startup, the career-making defection, and Silicon Valley's favourite org chart: a garage with ambitions.

Jack Kilby built the first integrated circuit — a germanium sliver with hand-attached gold wires arcing over it. Brilliant, but try making a million. Noyce's 1959 version was planar: everything flat, the connections printed onto the chip as a layer of metal, like ink on a page. Flat and printable means photographable, repeatable, manufacturable in bulk with decent yield — and shrinkable, all the way down to today's chips and their exotic packaging. Kilby proved a chip was possible; Noyce made it an industry. The two shared the credit with notable grace — their companies' lawyers, less so.

Intel, and the culture everyone copies

In 1968 Noyce and Gordon Moore left Fairchild to found Intel. Noyce ran it like Iowa: no reserved parking, no executive suites, everyone on first names, engineers holding stock in the thing they were building. It sounded folksy; it was actually a machine for moving fast, and every startup that's ever bragged about its flat hierarchy and free snacks is — knowingly or not — cosplaying Bob Noyce. His greatest product may have been confidence itself. As one protégé put it: "Bob would give you the confidence to do things you didn't know you could do." A generation of founders, including a young Steve Jobs who adopted him as a mentor, ran on exactly that fuel.