Institute For The Future

New Robert Noyce biography

Yet another review: this time, a review of the new Robert Noyce biography, forthcoming (probably in 2-3 weeks) in American Scientist.

One thing I didn't get into, largely for space reasons, is the whole argument about the degree to which any individual can be described as the "father of Silicon Valley." I'm very strongly of the opinion that the effort to find such a person is utter nonsense-- that complex historical phenomena operate at too many levels, and have too many dimensions, to be the responsibility of any single person. Of course, I'm always willing to hear counter-arguments-- and nominations for the title of Father of Silicon Valley.

 

Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley.

The 1957 picture is worth a thousand words: eight men, the co-founders of Fairchild Semiconductor, gathered around an outdoor table in northern California. At the center is Robert Noyce, handsome, charismatic, yet easygoing—the epitome of the entrepreneurial character that would help shape postwar, high-tech America. The son of a minister, Robert Noyce attended Grinnell College and MIT, and moved to California in 1955 to join William Shockley's new company in Palo Alto. Shockley's remarkable eye for talent was exceeded only by his talent for mismanagement; less than two years later, the "Traitorous Eight," as Shockley named them, struck off to found their own company. At Fairchild, Noyce invented the integrated circuit (Texas Instruments engineer Jack Kilby also produced an IC at the same time), and quickly become general manager. A decade later, Noyce and Gordon Moore left Fairchild Semiconductor to found a second company, Intel. In the 1970s and 1980s, Intel became a leader in the semiconductor industry, and Noyce was celebrated as the father of Silicon Valley.

The outlines of Noyce's life and work are fairly well-known. Still, Leslie Berlin's excellent study is a welcome addition to the historiography of recent technology. The Man Behind the Microchip is one of only a handful of scholarly biographies of the generation of inventors and entrepreneurs who were attracted to California in the 1950s and 1960s, built the semiconductor industry, and helped create the economic and cultural phenomenon now known as Silicon Valley. Berlin deals fluently with Noyce's technical accomplishments, but she also makes clear that he was as much a social and economic innovator as a technical one. The strategy he developed at Fairchild of regularly cutting the price of company products was seen as crazy at the time, but is now common among high-tech products. Noyce insisted on extending stock options to nearly everyone in his companies; the fact that Sherman Fairchild's criticism of the move as "socialism" sounds so strange today shows how much Noyce's innovation has changed business.

Berlin's attitude towards Noyce might be characterized as ironic hagiography. His achievements as co-inventor of the integrated circuit and serial entrepreneur deserve to be celebrated. But they came at a substantial human cost: his first wife filed for divorce after his children—several of whom struggled with their own problems as adults—caught him in flagrante delicto with a coworker. He was not the most effective executive, but the long-term consequences of his missteps were more good than bad. His decision to leave Shockley Semiconductor to set up a competing company was considered ungentlemanly at the time, but it helped set what is now a familiar pattern in Silicon Valley, and turned job mobility into a virtue. (AnnaLee Saxenian argues in her now-classic Regional Advantage that this helped vault Silicon Valley ahead of Boston's Route 128, where more emphasis was placed on company loyalty.) Under Noyce's leadership, Fairchild's fortunes were uneven, and at times the company hemorrhaged talent. This seemed bad at the time, but it meant that Fairchild alumni were founders or senior employees in every semiconductor industry in Silicon Valley in the 1960s—and that the industry developed a collective identity that transcended daily competition.

Berlin also notes that at several critical points in his career, Noyce received solo credit for what were in fact ensemble achievements. He became more famous than colleagues who contributed much to the integrated circuit's success, but not through his own self-promotion; Fairchild needed to put a public face on its legal claims to the integrated circuit. Fifteen years later, Intel capitalized on Noyce's telegenic personality to build the company's reputation, at the expense of his friend Gordon Moore and R&D head Andy Grove. He loved the spotlight, but the spotlight loved him more. (Indeed, Berlin's biography shows that while we tend to think of it as less important than engineering and management, marketing deserves more attention in histories of the region. It is no coincidence that Regis McKenna, the man most responsible for shaping the Valley's approach to high-tech marketing, started his career at Intel.) Noyce's modest, "aw-shucks" manner was the subject of much comment, but he could afford it.

Ironically, Noyce is now less well-known than the colleagues he once eclipsed. Eugene Kleiner, another of the Traitorous Eight, founded the world's leading venture capital firm. Gordon Moore's immortality is guaranteed by Moore's Law. Andy Grove led Intel through its explosive growth and the "Intel Inside" campaign that made the company a household name. The 1993 Nobel Prize for the invention of the integrated circuit was awarded to Jack Kilby; Noyce died in 1990, and the Nobel is not awarded posthumously. Integrated circuits are themselves so ubiquitous it's hard to imagine them having an inventor; it's like having someone claiming to have invented bricks or woven cloth. However, Berlin's biography will help preserve Noyce's reputation, and serve as an important resource for future studies of Silicon Valley.

 

"