Intel Company Quotes

While the story is unique to Intel, the lessons, I believe, are universal

But like the best empire builders, he was both very determined and very skeptical. It’s like [former Intel CEO] Andy Grove says, ‘only the paranoid survive.

If Lenin walked around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he’d think communism had won. Everyone would be wearing the same clothes, have the same kind of office (or rather, cubicle) with the same furnishings, and address one another by their first names instead of by honorifics. Everything would seem exactly as he’d predicted, until he looked at their bank accounts. Oops.

Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, outlined when he described what happens to businesses in tumultuous times: “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.

It almost doesn’t matter what you know. It’s what you can do with whatever you know or can acquire and actually accomplish [that] tends to be valued here.” Hence the company’s slogan: “Intel delivers.

The greatness of Intel is not that it is smarter than other companies (though it may well be) or that it is too clever and competent to make a false move (we’ve just seen a stunning example of the very opposite) but that it has consistently done better than any company, perhaps ever, at recovering from its mistakes.

They were transformed along the lines that Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, outlined when he described what happens to businesses in tumultuous times: “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.

I hate it when people call themselves “entrepreneurs” when what they’re really trying to do is launch a startup and then sell or go public, so they can cash in and move on. They’re unwilling to do the work it takes to build a real company, which is the hardest work in business. That’s how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before. You build a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now. That’s what Walt Disney did, and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That’s what I want Apple to be.

Subjected to those pressures, these individuals were transformed. They were transformed along the lines that Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, outlined when he described what happens to businesses in tumultuous times: “Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.

Art Levinson, who was on Apple’s board, was chairing the board meeting of his own company, Genentech, when his cell phone rang and Jobs’s name appeared on the screen. As soon as there was a break, Levinson called him back and heard the news of the tumor. He had a background in cancer biology, and his firm made cancer treatment drugs, so he became an advisor. So did Andy Grove of Intel, who had fought and beaten prostate cancer. Jobs called him that Sunday, and he drove

many ExOs are adopting the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method. Invented at Intel by CEO Andy Grove and brought to Google by venture capitalist John Doerr in 1999, OKR tracks individual, team and company goals and outcomes in an open and transparent way. In High Output Management, Grove’s highly regarded manual, he introduced OKRs as the answer to two simple questions: Where do I want to go? (Objectives) How will I know I’m getting there? (Key Results to ensure progress is made)

When it came time to renegotiate the price, Hoff made a critical recommendation to Noyce, one that helped create a huge market for general-purpose chips and assured that Intel would remain a driver of the digital age. It was a deal point that Bill Gates and Microsoft would emulate with IBM a decade later. In return for giving Busicom a good price, Noyce insisted that Intel retain the rights to the new chip and be allowed to license it to other companies for purposes other than making a calculator.

All the recent marketing successes have been PR successes, not advertising successes. To name a few: Starbucks, The Body Shop, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, eBay, Palm, Google, Linus, PlayStation, Harry Potter, Botox, Red Bull, Microsoft, Intel, and BlackBerry. A closer look at the history of most major brands shows this to be true. As a matter of fact, an astonishing number of well-known brands have been built with virtually no advertising at all. Anita Roddick built The Body Shop into a worldwide brand without any advertising. Instead she traveled the world looking for ingredients for her natural cosmetics, a quest that resulted in endless publicity. Until recently Starbucks didn’t spend a hill of beans on advertising either. In its first ten years, the company spent less that $10 million (total) on advertising in the United States, a trivial amount for a brand that delivers annual sales of $1.3 billion today. Wal-Mart became the world’s largest retailer, ringing up sales approaching $200 billion, with little advertising. Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart sibling, averages $56 million per store with almost no advertising. In the pharmaceutical field, Viagra, Prozac, and Vioxx became worldwide brands with almost no advertising. In the toy field, Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo, and Pokémon became highly successful brands with almost no advertising. In the high-technology field, Oracle, Cisco, and SAP became multibillion-dollar companies (and multibillion-dollar brands) with almost no advertising.

Ei exista, simultan, in doua lumi – lumea aparentelor si lumea adevarului. Firele care conecteaza aceste lumi pot lua multe forme. Atunci cand am ajuns prima oara aici, nu am inteles anumite lucruri. Spre exemplu, nu intelegeam de ce hainele sunt atat de importante. Sau de ce o vaca moarta devenea carne de vita, sau de ce iarba taiata intr-un anumit fel pretinde sa nu se calce pe ea, sau de ce animalele de companie ale unei gospodarii erau atat de importante pentru ei. Umanii se tem de natura si ii linisteste intr-o mare masura atunci cand pot sa isi demonstreze lor inisisi ca detin stapanirea asupra ei. De aceea exista peluzele, si de aceea lupii au evoluat devenind caini, si de aceea arhitectura lor se bazeaza pe forme care nu sunt naturale. Dar, cu adevarat, natura natura pura e doar un simbol pentru ei.

One of those was Gary Bradski, an expert in machine vision at Intel Labs in Santa Clara. The company was the world’s largest chipmaker and had developed a manufacturing strategy called “copy exact,” a way of developing next-generation manufacturing techniques to make ever-smaller chips. Intel would develop a new technology at a prototype facility and then export that process to wherever it planned to produce the denser chips in volume. It was a system that required discipline, and Bradski was a bit of a “Wild Duck”—a term that IBM originally used to describe employees who refused to fly in formation—compared to typical engineers in Intel’s regimented semiconductor manufacturing culture. A refugee from the high-flying finance world of “quants” on the East Coast, Bradski arrived at Intel in 1996 and was forced to spend a year doing boring grunt work, like developing an image-processing software library for factory automation applications. After paying his dues, he was moved to the chipmaker’s research laboratory and started researching interesting projects. Bradski had grown up in Palo Alto before leaving to study physics and artificial intelligence at Berkeley and Boston University. He returned because he had been bitten by the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial bug.

At different times in the past, there were companies that exemplified Silicon Valley. It was Hewlett-Packard for a long time. Then, in the semiconductor era, it was Fairchild and Intel. I think that it was Apple for a while, and then that faded. And then today, I think it’s Apple and Google—and a little more so Apple. I think Apple has stood the test of time. It’s been around for a while, but it’s still at the cutting edge of what’s going on. It’s easy to throw stones at Microsoft. They’ve clearly fallen from their dominance. They’ve become mostly irrelevant. And yet I appreciate what they did and how hard it was. They were very good at the business side of things. They were never as ambitious product-wise as they should have been. Bill likes to portray himself as a man of the product, but he’s really not. He’s a businessperson. Winning business was more important than making great products. He ended up the wealthiest guy around, and if that was his goal, then he achieved it. But it’s never been my goal, and I wonder, in the end, if it was his goal. I admire him for the company he built—it’s impressive—and I enjoyed working with him. He’s bright and actually has a good sense of humor. But Microsoft never had the humanities and liberal arts in its DNA. Even when they saw the Mac, they couldn’t

The collapse, for example, of IBM’s legendary 80-year-old hardware business in the 1990s sounds like a classic P-type story. New technology (personal computers) displaces old (mainframes) and wipes out incumbent (IBM). But it wasn’t. IBM, unlike all its mainframe competitors, mastered the new technology. Within three years of launching its first PC, in 1981, IBM achieved $5 billion in sales and the #1 position, with everyone else either far behind or out of the business entirely (Apple, Tandy, Commodore, DEC, Honeywell, Sperry, etc.). For decades, IBM dominated computers like Pan Am dominated international travel. Its $13 billion in sales in 1981 was more than its next seven competitors combined (the computer industry was referred to as “IBM and the Seven Dwarfs”). IBM jumped on the new PC like Trippe jumped on the new jet engines. IBM owned the computer world, so it outsourced two of the PC components, software and microprocessors, to two tiny companies: Microsoft and Intel. Microsoft had all of 32 employees. Intel desperately needed a cash infusion to survive. IBM soon discovered, however, that individual buyers care more about exchanging files with friends than the brand of their box. And to exchange files easily, what matters is the software and the microprocessor inside that box, not the logo of the company that assembled the box. IBM missed an S-type shift—a change in what customers care about. PC clones using Intel chips and Microsoft software drained IBM’s market share. In 1993, IBM lost $8.1 billion, its largest-ever loss. That year it let go over 100,000 employees, the largest layoff in corporate history. Ten years later, IBM sold what was left of its PC business to Lenovo. Today, the combined market value of Microsoft and Intel, the two tiny vendors IBM hired, is close to $1.5 trillion, more than ten times the value of IBM. IBM correctly anticipated a P-type loonshot and won the battle. But it missed a critical S-type loonshot, a software standard, and lost the war.

Less is more. “A few extremely well-chosen objectives,” Grove wrote, “impart a clear message about what we say ‘yes’ to and what we say ‘no’ to.” A limit of three to five OKRs per cycle leads companies, teams, and individuals to choose what matters most. In general, each objective should be tied to five or fewer key results. (See chapter 4, “Superpower #1: Focus and Commit to Priorities.”) Set goals from the bottom up. To promote engagement, teams and individuals should be encouraged to create roughly half of their own OKRs, in consultation with managers. When all goals are set top-down, motivation is corroded. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) No dictating. OKRs are a cooperative social contract to establish priorities and define how progress will be measured. Even after company objectives are closed to debate, their key results continue to be negotiated. Collective agreement is essential to maximum goal achievement. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) Stay flexible. If the climate has changed and an objective no longer seems practical or relevant as written, key results can be modified or even discarded mid-cycle. (See chapter 10, “Superpower #3: Track for Accountability.”) Dare to fail. “Output will tend to be greater,” Grove wrote, “when everybody strives for a level of achievement beyond [their] immediate grasp. . . . Such goal-setting is extremely important if what you want is peak performance from yourself and your subordinates.” While certain operational objectives must be met in full, aspirational OKRs should be uncomfortable and possibly unattainable. “Stretched goals,” as Grove called them, push organizations to new heights. (See chapter 12, “Superpower #4: Stretch for Amazing.”) A tool, not a weapon. The OKR system, Grove wrote, “is meant to pace a person—to put a stopwatch in his own hand so he can gauge his own performance. It is not a legal document upon which to base a performance review.” To encourage risk taking and prevent sandbagging, OKRs and bonuses are best kept separate. (See chapter 15, “Continuous Performance Management: OKRs and CFRs.”) Be patient; be resolute. Every process requires trial and error. As Grove told his iOPEC students, Intel “stumbled a lot of times” after adopting OKRs: “We didn’t fully understand the principal purpose of it. And we are kind of doing better with it as time goes on.” An organization may need up to four or five quarterly cycles to fully embrace the system, and even more than that to build mature goal muscle.

How Google Works (Schmidt, Eric) - Your Highlight on Location 3124-3150 | Added on Sunday, April 5, 2015 10:35:40 AM In late 1999, John Doerr gave a presentation at Google that changed the company, because it created a simple tool that let the founders institutionalize their “think big” ethos. John sat on our board, and his firm, Kleiner Perkins, had recently invested in the company. The topic was a form of management by objectives called OKRs (to which we referred in the previous chapter), which John had learned from former Intel CEO Andy Grove.173 There are several characteristics that set OKRs apart from their typical underpromise-and-overdeliver corporate-objective brethren. First, a good OKR marries the big-picture objective with a highly measurable key result. It’s easy to set some amorphous strategic goal (make usability better … improve team morale … get in better shape) as an objective and then, at quarter end, declare victory. But when the strategic goal is measured against a concrete goal (increase usage of features by X percent … raise employee satisfaction scores by Y percent … run a half marathon in under two hours), then things get interesting. For example, one of our platform team’s recent OKRs was to have “new WW systems serving significant traffic for XX large services with latency < YY microseconds @ ZZ% on Jupiter.”174 (Jupiter is a code name, not the location of Google’s newest data center.) There is no ambiguity with this OKR; it is very easy to measure whether or not it is accomplished. Other OKRs will call for rolling out a product across a specific number of countries, or set objectives for usage (e.g., one of the Google+ team’s recent OKRs was about the daily number of messages users would post in hangouts) or performance (e.g., median watch latency on YouTube videos). Second—and here is where thinking big comes in—a good OKR should be a stretch to achieve, and hitting 100 percent on all OKRs should be practically unattainable. If your OKRs are all green, you aren’t setting them high enough. The best OKRs are aggressive, but realistic. Under this strange arithmetic, a score of 70 percent on a well-constructed OKR is often better than 100 percent on a lesser one. Third, most everyone does them. Remember, you need everyone thinking in your venture, regardless of their position. Fourth, they are scored, but this scoring isn’t used for anything and isn’t even tracked. This lets people judge their performance honestly. Fifth, OKRs are not comprehensive; they are reserved for areas that need special focus and objectives that won’t be reached without some extra oomph. Business-as-usual stuff doesn’t need OKRs. As your venture grows, the most important OKRs shift from individuals to teams. In a small company, an individual can achieve incredible things on her own, but as the company grows it becomes harder to accomplish stretch goals without teammates. This doesn’t mean that individuals should stop doing OKRs, but rather that team OKRs become the more important means to maintain focus on the big tasks. And there’s one final benefit of an OKR-driven culture: It helps keep people from chasing competitors. Competitors are everywhere in the Internet Century, and chasing them (as we noted earlier) is the fastest path to mediocrity. If employees are focused on a well-conceived set of OKRs, then this isn’t a problem. They know where they need to go and don’t have time to worry about the competition. ==========

Berkshire Hathaway Public Holdings April 4, 2012 Company Holding Value Stake The Coca-Cola Company (KO) $14.69 billion 8.8% International Business Machines (IBM) $13.17 billion 5.4% Wells Fargo (WFC) $12.99 billion 13.0% American Express (AXP) $8.69 billion 2.8% Proctor & Gamble $5.16 billion 2.8% Kraft Foods $3.32 billion 4.9% Wal-Mart Stores $2.36 billion 1.1% ConocoPhillips $2.22 billion 2.3% U.S. Bancorp $2.16 billion 2.3% Johnson & Johnson $1.90 billion 1.1% Moody’s Corp $1.20 billion 12.8% DIRECTV $995 million 2.9% Washington Post Co. $645 million 22.4% M&T Bank Corp $465 million 4.3% Costco Wholesale Corp $386 million 1.0% Visa Inc. $341 million 0.35% Intel Corp. $321 million 0.23% CVS Caremark $315 million 0.55% USG Corp $283 million 16.2% General Dynamics $281 million 1.1% DaVita Inc. $233 million 2.9% Dollar General $210 million 1.3% Torchmark $208 million 4.2% MasterCard Inc. $174 million 0.3% Verisk Analytics $162 million 1.9% General Electric $153 million 0.07% Sanofi SA $153 million 0.15% Liberty Media $149 million 1.4% United Parcel Service $114 million 0.15% GlaxoSmithKline $68 million 0.06% Bank of New York Mellon $43 million 0.15% Ingersoll Rand $26 million 0.2% Gannett $26 million 0.73% Source: CNBC, Warren Buffet Watch.

While Steve’s gadgets and computers drew the most attention, the software that made them go was every bit as important. Steve always said that Apple’s primary competitive advantage was that it created the whole widget: the finely tuned symbiosis between the hardware and the software together defined a superior user experience. In the PC world, hardware and software technologies came from different companies that didn’t always even get along, including IBM and the PC-clone manufacturers, Microsoft, and Intel.

your best interests and the company’s best interests in mind.” Grant adds: “The hardest thing that I struggle to explain to people is that being a giver is not the same as being nice.” When I thought back to some of the most compelling people I’ve interviewed in business, Grant’s words rang true. Intel’s Andy Grove immediately came to mind. Ask Grove a dumb question, I once learned, and he’ll tell you it’s not the right question. He’s the one who largely built Intel’s culture of what the company calls “constructive confrontation,” in which you challenge ideas, but not the people who expound them. It’s not personal. He just wants his point to be understood. The result is that you do your homework. You come prepared. The distinction that needs to be made is this: Jerks, narcissists, and takers engage in behaviors to satisfy their own ego, not to benefit the group. Disagreeable givers aren’t getting off on being tough; they’re doing it to further a purpose. So here’s what we know works. Photograph by Peter Yang Smile at the customer. Take the initiative. Tweak a few rules. Steal cookies for your colleagues. Don’t puncture the impression that you know what you’re doing. Let the other person fill the silence. Get comfortable with discomfort. Don’t privilege your own feelings. Ask who you’re really protecting. Be tough and humane. Challenge ideas, not the people who hold them. Don’t be a slave to type. And above all, don’t affix nasty, scatological labels to people. It’s a jerk move. Jerry Useem has covered business

Take another example. An Intel development engineer who has uniquely detailed knowledge of a particular manufacturing process effectively controls how it is used. Since the process will eventually provide the foundation for the work of many product designers all over the company, the leverage the development engineer exerts is enormous. The same is true for a geologist in an oil company or an actuary in an insurance firm. All are specialists whose work is important for the work of their organization at large. The person who comprehends the critical facts or has the critical insights—the “knowledge specialist” or the “know-how manager”—has tremendous authority and influence on the work of others, and therefore very high leverage. The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them. For me, paying close attention to customer complaints constitutes a high-leverage activity. Aside from making a customer happy, the pursuit tends to produce important insights into the workings of my own operation. Such complaints may be numerous, and though all of them need to be followed up by someone, they don’t all require or wouldn’t all benefit from my personal attention. Which one out of ten or twenty complaints to dig into, analyze, and follow up is where art comes into the work of a manager. The basis of that art is an intuition that behind this complaint and not the other lurk many deeper problems.

Consider, for example, IBM’s decision to outsource the microprocessor for its PC business to Intel, and its operating system to Microsoft. IBM made these decisions in the early 1980s in order to focus on what it did best—designing, assembling, and marketing computer systems. Given its history, these choices made perfect sense. Component suppliers to IBM historically had lived a miserable, profit-free existence, and the business press widely praised IBM’s decision to out-source these components of its PC. It dramatically reduced the cost and time required for development and launch. And yet in the process of outsourcing what it did not perceive to be core to the new business, IBM put into business the two companies that subsequently captured most of the profit in the industry. How could IBM have known in advance that such a sensible decision would prove so costly? More broadly, how can any executive who is launching a new-growth business, as IBM was doing with its PC division in the early 1980s, know which value-added activities are those in which future competence needs to be mastered and kept inside? 2

have to pause and give great recognition to my employer, Intel. How many companies are truly merit based in their decisions on promotions and assignments? How many employers would take the risk of putting a twenty-five-year-old kid in charge of the crown jewels of the corporation’s future? Over and over, Intel has given me opportunities, challenges, and rewards of tremendous degree.

Having so much of Intel organized in functional units also has its disadvantages. The most important is the information overload hitting a functional group when it must respond to the demands made on it by diverse and numerous business units. Even conveying needs and demands often becomes very difficult—a business unit has to go through a number of management layers to influence decision-making in a functional group. Nowhere is this more evident than in the negotiations that go on to secure a portion of centralized—and limited—resources of the corporation, be it production capacity, computer time, or space in a shared building. Indeed, things often move beyond negotiation to intense and open competition among business units for the resources controlled by the functional groups. The bottom line here is that both the negotiation and competition waste time and energy because neither contributes to the output or the general good of the company.

One question is in the mind of every fledgling entrepreneur in the high-tech startups of Beijing’s Zhongguancun neighborhood, the fabrication hubs of Wenzhou, the industrial region of Dalian, and dozens of other Chinese business centers: “Why not me?” Success is all around them…. Young Chinese businesspeople are driven by materialistic desires, eager to “catch up” with the rest of the world, and almost giddy with a sense of multiplying opportunity. They have read Internet chronicles of the triumphs of Yahoo, Silicon Graphics, and Google. They see themselves as the creators of the world’s future Intels, Apples, and Microsofts, and some of them probably will be.

As we thought about what would make us both better and different, two core ideas greatly influenced our thinking: First, technical founders are the best people to run technology companies. All of the long-lasting technology companies that we admired—Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook—had been run by their founders. More specifically, the innovator was running the company. Second, it was incredibly difficult for technical founders to learn to become CEOs while building their companies. I was a testament to that. But, most venture capital firms were better designed to replace the founder than to help the founder grow and succeed.

Then Grove posed an interesting question to his partner: If we were kicked out of the company, what do you think the new CEO would do? Grove and Moore reasoned that a new leader would feel no emotional attachment to the declining memory-chip business and would probably leave it behind. So they did likewise, shifting Intel’s focus to microprocessors—which set the stage for remarkable growth in the years to follow.

Noah Kagan went to UC Berkeley and graduated with degrees in Business and Economics. He worked at Intel for a short stint, and then found himself at Facebook, as employee #30. You’d think this is where the story would get really good: Noah went on to become the head of product and is now worth 10 billion dollars! That’s not what happened. Instead, he was fired after eight months. Noah has been very public about this, and it’s well documented. He even wrote about why it happened, which mostly comes down to the fact that he was young and inexperienced. Here’s where the real story gets interesting. After being fired, Noah spent ten months at Mint, another successful startup. For Noah, that was a side-hustle. After Mint, he founded KickFlip, a payment provider for social games. He also started an ad company called Gambit. Both of those companies fluttered around for a while and then fizzled out. Next came AppSumo, a daily deals website for tech software. AppSumo has done very well, and it’s still in business as of this writing, but Noah eventually turned his attention to another opportunity. While building up his other businesses, he had become an expert at email marketing, and realized there was a huge need for effective marketing tools. So he created SumoMe, a software company that helps people and companies build their email lists. SumoMe has exploded since its launch. Over 200,000 sites now use it in some capacity, and that number is growing every day. It’s easy to imagine SumoMe becoming a $100 million dollar company in a matter of years, and it’s completely bootstrapped. The company has taken zero funding from venture capitalists. That means Noah can run the business exactly how he wants. I’ve known Noah for almost ten years. I met him when my first company was getting off the ground. Several months ago, we were emailing back and forth about promoting my first book. He ended one of the emails with, “Keep the hustle strong.” I smiled when I read that. Noah is, and always will be, a hustler. He’s been hustling for his entire career―for over a decade. And he deserves everything that’s coming his way. Hustle never comes without defeat. It never comes without detours and side-projects. But the best hustlers all know this simple truth: All that matters is that you keep on hustling.

Now, I’m sure that at various times you will take exception to what you read in this book. “This may be fine at Intel,” you will say, “but it would never fly at PDQ, where I work. Nothing does until the Old Man himself decrees it. Short of a palace revolution, I can’t use anything you recommend.” Let me assure you that you will be able to use most of what I say. As a middle manager, of any sort, you are in effect a chief executive of an organization yourself. Don’t wait for the principles and practices you find appealing to be imposed from the top. As a micro CEO, you can improve your own and your group’s performance and productivity, whether or not the rest of the company follows suit.

It’s difficult to remember now, but when Apple made that move back then, most people figured the company was wrong; that Apple was a company lurching toward irrelevance; and that by opening fancy stores it was positioning itself for luxury with the equivalent of a walker. How dumb was that, they thought. Couldn’t Apple see that the tech market now revolved around commodity boxes powered by Microsoft and Intel? That the boom was in e-commerce? Gap Inc., Form 10-K for the Period Ending January 31, 1998 (filed March 13, 1998), from Gap, Inc. website.

As we thought about what would make us both better and different, two core ideas greatly influenced our thinking: First, technical founders are the best people to run technology companies. All of the long-lasting technology companies that we admired—Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook—had been run by their founders. More specifically, the innovator was running the company. Second, it was incredibly difficult for technical founders to learn to become CEOs while building their companies. I was a testament to that. But, most venture capital firms were better designed to replace the founder than to help the founder grow and succeed. Marc and I thought that if we created a firm specifically designed to help technical founders run their own companies, we could develop a reputation and a brand that might vault us into the top tier of venture capital firms despite having no track record. We identified two key deficits that a founder CEO had when compared with a professional CEO: 1. The CEO skill set Managing executives, organizational design, running sales organizations and the like were all important skills that technical founders lacked. 2. The CEO network Professional CEOs knew lots of executives, potential customers and partners, people in the press, investors, and other important business connections. Technical founders, on the other hand, knew some good engineers and how to program.

Like many successful Chinese firms, it is caught at the bottom of what Taiwanese technology baron Stan Shih famously called the “smile.” Shih observed that in the tech industry, high profits are earned at one end by companies that control the design of core technologies (such as Intel), and at the other by companies that control the design and distribution of products to consumers (such as Apple). In between are commodity firms that manufacture and assemble the products, in high volumes but for low profit margins. Taiwan is filled with such low-margin bottom-of-the-smile firms, such as Shih’s own Acer, TSMC (the world’s biggest contract maker of integrated circuits), and Foxconn (the world’s biggest contract assembler of consumer electronics). For the most part, China’s technology companies seem to be heading in the same direction.

The endowment would make a second serendipitous investment when Robert Noyce, a Grinnell trustee and alumnus, offered Grinnell stock in his then-private start-up, NM Electronics.22 Noyce had almost been expelled from Grinnell for stealing a pig and roasting it at a campus luau.23 He would have been expelled but for the intervention of his physics professor who felt that Noyce was the best student he’d ever taught. 24 The professor managed to persuade the school to reduce the expulsion to a one-semester suspension.25 Noyce never forgot the favor, and made the stock available to the school if it wanted it.26 Rosenfield told Noyce that the endowment would take all the stock he’d let it have.27 Grinnell’s endowment took 10 percent of the $3 million private placement (Grinnell put up $100,000, and Rosenfield and another trustee put up $100,000 each).28 Shortly thereafter the company, then renamed Intel, went public in 1971. Grinnell started selling the stake in 1974, at which time it was worth $14 million, more than half the value of the $27 million endowment. Noyce was concerned that Grinnell should have so much exposure to a single name associated with him, and cajoled Rosenfield to sell. He recalls, “Bob [Noyce] was trembling about it. He’d say, ‘I don’t want the college to lose any money on account of me.’ But I’d say, “We’ll worry about that, Bob. We’ll take the risk.”29 Noyce eventually wore Rosenfield down, however, and Grinnell fully exited the stake by 1980. On its sale, the Intel investment had generated a profit of 4,583 percent. Rosenfield told Zweig, “I wish we’d kept it. That was the biggest mistake we ever made. Selling must have cost us $50 million, maybe more.”30 Zweig didn’t have the heart to tell the then 96-year-old Rosenfield that the shares he sold would have been worth several billion dollars in 2000. Perhaps this is why Rosenfield “considers selling to be indistinguishable from error.

Noyce recalled that the group had some slight qualms about running their own business, but these doubts were easily overcome by “the realization, for the first time, that you had a chance at making more money than you ever dreamed of.” The dream, as it happened, came true. Even by high-tech standards, that $500 turned out to be a spectacular investment. In 1968 the founders sold their share of Fairchild Semiconductor back to the parent company; Noyce’s proceeds—the return on his initial $500 investment—came to $250,000. Noyce and his friend Gordon Moore had by then found another financial backer and started a new firm, Intel Corporation (the name is a play on both Intelligence and Integrated Electronics). Intel started out making chips for computer memories, a business that took off like a rocket. Intel’s shares were traded publicly for the first time in 1971—on the same day, coincidentally, that Playboy Enterprises went public.

Noyce recalled that the group had some slight qualms about running their own business, but these doubts were easily overcome by “the realization, for the first time, that you had a chance at making more money than you ever dreamed of.” The dream, as it happened, came true. Even by high-tech standards, that $500 turned out to be a spectacular investment. In 1968 the founders sold their share of Fairchild Semiconductor back to the parent company; Noyce’s proceeds—the return on his initial $500 investment—came to $250,000. Noyce and his friend Gordon Moore had by then found another financial backer and started a new firm, Intel Corporation (the name is a play on both Intelligence and Integrated Electronics). Intel started out making chips for computer memories, a business that took off like a rocket. Intel’s shares were traded publicly for the first time in 1971—on the same day, coincidentally, that Playboy Enterprises went public. On that first day, stock in the two firms was about equally priced; a year later, Intel’s shares were worth more than twice as much as Playboy’s. “Wall Street has spoken,” an investment analyst observed. “It’s memories over mammaries.” Today, Intel is a multibillion-dollar company, and anybody who held on to the founding group’s stake in the company is a billionaire several times over.

the phrase “as measured by,” or a.m.b.—into Intel’s company OKRs. For example, “We will achieve a certain OBJECTIVE as measured by the following KEY RESULTS. . . .” Bill’s a.m.b made the implicit explicit to all.

Thus FDR, being a shrewd, smart sonofabitch now in his third term as President, knew that despite the cries of the isolationists who wanted Amer ica to have nothing to do with another world war it was only a matter of time before the country would be forced to shed its neutral status. And the best way to be prepared for that moment was to have the finest intelligence he could. And the best way to get that information, to get the facts that he trusted because he trusted the messenger, was to put another shrewd, smart sonofabitch in charge-his pal Wild Bill Donovan. The problem was not that intelligence wasn't being collected. The United States of America had vast organizations actively engaged in it-the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Military Intelligence Division chief among them. The problem was that the intelligence these organizations collected was, in the word of the old-school British spymasters, "coloured." That was to say, the intel tended first to serve to promote the respective branches. If, for example, ONI overstated the number of, say, German submarines, then the Navy brass could use that intelligence to justify its demands for more funds for sailors and ships to hunt down those U-boats. (Which, of course, played to everyone's natural fears as the U-boats were damn effec tive killing machines.) Likewise, if MID stated that it had found significantly more Axis troop amassing toward an Allied border than was previously thought, Army brass could argue that ground and/or air forces needed the money more than did the swabbies. Then there was the turf-fighting FBI. J. Edgar Hoover and Company didn't want any Allied spies snooping around in their backyard. It followed then that if the agencies had their own agendas, they were not prone to share with others the information that they collected. The argument, as might be expected, was that intelligence shared was intelli gence compromised. There was also the interagency fear, unspoken but there, as sure as God made little green apples, that some shared intel would be found to be want ing. If that should happen, it would make the particular agency that had de veloped it look bad. And that, fear of all fears, would result in the reduction of funds, of men, of weapons, et cetera, et cetera. In short, the loss of im portance of the agency in the eyes of the grand political scheme. Thus among the various agencies there continued the endless turf bat tles, the duplications of effort-even the instances, say, of undercover FB agents arresting undercover ONI agents snooping around Washington D.C., and New York City.

Applying a value lens to stakeholder capitalism, two ideas strike me as particularly important. First, business creates substantial value for customers, employees, and suppliers even if its only goal is to maximize financial returns. Think of all the stories in this book—Best Buy, Apple, Michelin, Quest, Intel, Tommy Hilfiger, and many more. Every one of them is testament to the ability of business to create significant customer delight, employee satisfaction, and supplier surplus. Competition is our best assurance that companies continue to innovate in service to these stakeholders. Second,

One peculiar idea concerning CPUs is that only 2 well-known companies worldwide fabricate desktop CPUs- AMD and Intel.

My journey through Magee’s Disease was difficult and brought an understanding about what is wrong with the USA. Any company that is hiring workers into known toxic jobs that require them to use company supplied medications and oxygen to treat their “Summit Brain” needs to be shut down by the USA government. Instead, we see the USA government facilitating their toxic corporate culture for the foreseeable future with their construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. This is being done with the full support of USA government law enforcement, even though working on the very high altitude Mauna Kea makes some of them sick! To build it, they need to arrest the native Hawaiians that regard Mauna Kea as their sacred temple that is being desecrated by corporate science. The main finance to start the TMT project has come from Gordon Moore, the founder of the USA based semiconductor manufacturer Intel.

I remember having to do a monthly progress report when I worked under Andy. I used the word ‘corroborate’ and he sent me a note, saying there’s no such word. ‘You mean “collaborate,” ’ he wrote. I responded with my own note and told him, ‘ “Corroborate” is a legitimate word.’ “He sent back one final note that said, ‘ “Bastard” is a legitimate word, too.

Noyce himself, who teamed up in 1968 with another Fairchild cofounder, Gordon Moore of Moore’s law, to found a company they called Intel, short for “integrated electronics

At the same time, many of the pioneering venture capitalists were not moneymen but graduates of the semiconductor industry. One of the eight men who had formed Fairchild Semiconductor, Eugene Kleiner, would found the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 1972, not coincidentally the year after the Intel IPO. In the same year, Don Valentine, a former Fairchild sales executive, founded Sequoia Capital. Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia would become as intrinsic to Silicon Valley as the entrepreneurs themselves—the equivalent of the grand Hollywood studios, with the entrepreneurs analogous to actors, directors, and producers. Over the next forty-five years, several of America’s most valuable corporations, including three of the top four, would be funded early on by Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia or both. This birth of venture capital—a rebirth, really—was a return to the most American of roots, older than its founders’ democracy. The organizers of the Virginia Company had called upon “adventurers” to risk capital. A few years later, the Merchant Adventurers in London coffeehouses had agreed to finance the voyage of a large molasses ship known as the Mayflower. Three hundred fifty years later, an improved concept of venture capital was being applied to the next era of American discovery.

But data are about the past, and strategic inflection points are about the future.

Third, the idea that venture capitalists get into deals on the strength of their brands can be exaggerated. A deal seen by a partner at Sequoia will also be seen by rivals at other firms: in a fragmented cottage industry, there is no lack of competition. Often, winning the deal depends on skill as much as brand: it’s about understanding the business model well enough to impress the entrepreneur; it’s about judging what valuation might be reasonable. One careful tally concluded that new or emerging venture partnerships capture around half the gains in the top deals, and there are myriad examples of famous VCs having a chance to invest and then flubbing it.[6] Andreessen Horowitz passed on Uber. Its brand could not save it. Peter Thiel was an early investor in Stripe. He lacked the conviction to invest as much as Sequoia. As to the idea that branded venture partnerships have the “privilege” of participating in supposedly less risky late-stage investment rounds, this depends from deal to deal. A unicorn’s momentum usually translates into an extremely high price for its shares. In the cases of Uber and especially WeWork, some late-stage investors lost millions. Fourth, the anti-skill thesis underplays venture capitalists’ contributions to portfolio companies. Admittedly, these contributions can be difficult to pin down. Starting with Arthur Rock, who chaired the board of Intel for thirty-three years, most venture capitalists have avoided the limelight. They are the coaches, not the athletes. But this book has excavated multiple cases in which VC coaching made all the difference. Don Valentine rescued Atari and then Cisco from chaos. Peter Barris of NEA saw how UUNET could become the new GE Information Services. John Doerr persuaded the Googlers to work with Eric Schmidt. Ben Horowitz steered Nicira and Okta through their formative moments. To be sure, stories of venture capitalists guiding portfolio companies may exaggerate VCs’ importance: in at least some of these cases, the founders might have solved their own problems without advice from their investors. But quantitative research suggests that venture capitalists do make a positive impact: studies repeatedly find that startups backed by high-quality VCs are more likely to succeed than others.[7] A quirky contribution to this literature looks at what happens when airline routes make it easier for a venture capitalist to visit a startup. When the trip becomes simpler, the startup performs better.[8]

The prevailing narrative about Silicon Valley’s culture lionizes company founders, and Tom Wolfe’s exquisite storytelling has played up Noyce’s roots in small-town Iowa as the genesis of the egalitarian, stock-for-everyone business culture of the West Coast.[66] But, as we have seen, it was Arthur Rock who provided the impetus for Fairchild’s creation and who opened the founders’ eyes to the possibility of owning the fruits of their research. It was Rock who demonstrated the potential of the limited partnership that developed the Valley’s equity culture, and Rock who helped to catalyze the failure of the corporate venture model at Fairchild by prying away Jean Hoerni and Jay Last. When it came to the creation of Intel’s employee stock plan, moreover, it was probably Rock who proposed access for everyone, and it was certainly Rock who devised the plan’s details.[67] In a letter laying out his thinking in August 1968, Rock described a way of balancing the interests of investors and workers: Intel should avoid equity grants to short-term employees but extend them to everyone who made a long-term commitment. “There are too many millionaires who did nothing for their company except leave after a short period,” he observed wisely.[68] Without Rock’s judicious counsel, Intel’s employee stock program would not have set the standard in the Valley, because it would not have been sustainable.

Mosaic also marked a new stage in the evolution of the power law. Venture-capital returns are dominated by grand slams partly because of the dynamics of startups: most young businesses fail, but the ones that gain traction can grow exponentially. This is true of fashion brands or hotel chains as well as technology companies. But tech-focused venture portfolios are dominated by the power law for an additional reason: tech startups are founded upon technologies that may themselves progress exponentially. Because of his experience and temperament, Doerr was especially attuned to this phenomenon. As a young engineer at Intel, he had seen how Moore’s law transformed the value of companies that used semiconductors: the power of chips was doubling every two years, so startups that put them to good use could make better, cheaper products. For any given modem, digital watch, or personal computer, the cost of the semiconductors inside the engine would fall by 50 percent in two years, 75 percent in four years, and 87.5 percent in eight. With that sort of wind at a tech startup’s back, no wonder profits could grow exponentially. Mosaic, and the internet more generally, turbocharged this phenomenon. Again, Doerr grasped this better than most others. As well as working at Intel, he had known Bob Metcalfe, so he understood that Metcalfe’s law was even more explosive than Moore’s law. Rather than merely doubling in power every two years, as semiconductors did, the value of a network would rise as the square of the number of users.[70] Progress would thus be quadratic rather than merely exponential; something that keeps on squaring will soon grow a lot faster than something that keeps on doubling. Moreover, progress would not be tethered to the passage of time; it would be a function of the number of users. At the moment when Doerr met Clark, the number of internet users was about to triple over the next two years, meaning that the value of the network would jump ninefold, an effect massively more powerful than the mere doubling in the power of semiconductors over that same period. What’s more, Metcalfe’s law was not supplanting Moore’s law, which would have been dramatic enough. Rather, it was compounding it. The explosion of internet traffic would be fueled both by its rapid growth in usefulness (Metcalfe’s law) and by the falling cost of modems and computers (Moore’s law).[71] After listening to Clark’s pitch, Doerr was determined to invest. A magical browser that attracted millions to the internet had almost limitless potential. The price Doerr had to pay was secondary.

Most Mondays, their visit to Ive would be followed by one to Avie and the team working on Apple’s new operating system, which would eventually be called OS X. The radical new operating system would be the flywheel of all the extraordinary developments that would follow over the next decade, from Apple’s suite of iLife applications, to iOS—the slimmed-down operating system that would give life to the iPhone and iPad—to the entirely new software industry that emerged to produce the millions of apps written for those devices. While Steve’s gadgets and computers drew the most attention, the software that made them go was every bit as important. Steve always said that Apple’s primary competitive advantage was that it created the whole widget: the finely tuned symbiosis between the hardware and the software together defined a superior user experience. In the PC world, hardware and software technologies came from different companies that didn’t always even get along, including IBM and the PC-clone manufacturers, Microsoft, and Intel.

entrenched companies are often unexpectedly dethroned by start-ups that begin with cheap offerings at the low end of the market, but then, over time, improve their cheap products just enough to begin to steal high-end market share. Grove recognized that Intel faced this threat from low-end processors produced by upstart companies like AMD and Cyrix.

Otellini, Intel’s CEO from 2005 to 2013, admitted he turned down the contract to build iPhone chips because he worried about the financial implications. A fixation on profit margins seeped deep into the firm—its hiring decisions, its product road maps, and its R&D processes. The company’s leaders were simply more focused on engineering the company’s balance sheet than its transistors. “It had the technology, it had the people,” one former finance executive at Intel reminisced. “It just

Here, in the thick of the Baby Boom, the best Valley companies understood the importance of family.

2. Parent CEOs push the company to grow and evolve. They take big risks for larger rewards. Innovative founders—like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—are always parent CEOs. But it’s also possible to be a parent CEO even if you didn’t start the business yourself—like Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase or Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Pat Gelsinger, who recently took over the Intel CEO position, seems to be Intel’s first parent CEO since Andy Grove.

A miserable Noyce told a friend, “For a few goddamned points on Wall Street, we have to ruin people’s lives.

Fairchild Parent rewarded Fairchild Child’s success the way all East Coast companies of the era did: it kept a sizable chunk of the profits to fund other company operations, and it promoted the people at the top of the division to a fancier position and a better salary for a job well done. Back in New Jersey, it didn’t cross anyone’s mind that this was exactly the wrong response to an egalitarian company that shared both risk and reward among all of its employees, whose executives had moved to California precisely to get away from the Old World of business, and which needed to plow most of its profits back into product development to stay ahead of the competition in a fast-moving take-no-prisoners industry.

Companies such as Intel, IBM, General Electric, Apple, and Microsoft have also expanded their research operations abroad to countries including India, China, Singapore, and Israel in order to be nearer customers and technological talent. In fact, PricewaterhouseCoopers has estimated that 94 percent of all global companies now do some research and development outside their home countries.

When we become an autonomous organization, we will be one of the largest unadulterated digital security organizations on the planet,” he told the annual Intel Security Focus meeting in Las Vegas. “Not only will we be one of the greatest, however, we will not rest until we achieve our goal of being the best,” said Young. This is the main focus since Intel reported on agreements to deactivate its security business as a free organization in association with the venture company TPG, five years after the acquisition of McAfee. Young focused on his vision of the new company, his roadmap to achieve that, the need for rapid innovation and the importance of collaboration between industries. “One of the things I love about this conference is that we all come together to find ways to win, to work together,” he said. First, Young highlighted the publication of the book The Second Economy: the race for trust, treasure and time in the war of cybersecurity. The main objective of the book is to help the information security officers (CISO) to communicate the battles that everyone faces in front of others in the c-suite. “So we can recruit them into our fight, we need to recruit others on our journey if we want to be successful,” he said. Challenging assumptions The book is also aimed at encouraging information security professionals to challenge their own assumptions. “I plan to send two copies of this book to the winner of the US presidential election, because cybersecurity is going to be one of the most important issues they could face,” said Young. “The book is about giving more people a vision of the dynamism of what we face in cybersecurity, which is why we have to continually challenge our assumptions,” he said. “That’s why we challenge our assumptions in the book, as well as our assumptions about what we do every day.” Young said Intel Security had asked thousands of customers to challenge the company’s assumptions in the last 18 months so that it could improve. “This week, we are going to bring many of those comments to life in delivering a lot of innovation throughout our portfolio,” he said. Then, Young used a video to underscore the message that the McAfee brand is based on the belief that there is power to work together, and that no person, product or organization can provide total security. By allowing protection, detection and correction to work together, the company believes it can react to cyber threats more quickly. By linking products from different suppliers to work together, the company believes that network security improves. By bringing together companies to share intelligence on threats, you can find better ways to protect each other. The company said that cyber crime is the biggest challenge of the digital era, and this can only be overcome by working together. Revealed a new slogan: “Together is power”. The video also revealed the logo of the new independent company, which Young called a symbol of its new beginning and a visual representation of what is essential to the company’s strategy. “The shield means defense, and the two intertwined components are a symbol of the union that we are in the industry,” he said. “The color red is a callback to our legacy in the industry.” Three main reasons for independence According to Young, there are three main reasons behind the decision to become an independent company. First of all, it should focus entirely on enterprise-level cybersecurity, solve customers ‘cybersecurity problems and address clients’ cybersecurity challenges. The second is innovation. “Because we are committed and dedicated to cybersecurity only at the company level, our innovation is focused on that,” said Young. Third is growth. “Our industry is moving faster than any other IT sub-segment, we have t

The practice that molded me at Intel and saved me at Sun—that still inspires me today—is called OKRs. Short for Objectives and Key Results. It is a collaborative goal-setting protocol for companies, teams, and individuals. Now, OKRs are not a silver bullet. They cannot substitute for sound judgment, strong leadership, or a creative workplace culture. But if those fundamentals are in place, OKRs can guide you to the mountaintop.

seminar on Intel strategy and operations. Resident professor: Dr. Andy Grove. In the space of an hour, Grove traced the company’s history, year by year. He summarized Intel’s core pursuits: a profit margin twice the industry norm, market leadership in any product line it entered, the creation of “challenging jobs” and “growth opportunities” for employees.* Fair enough, I thought, though I’d heard similar things at business school. Then he said something that left a lasting impression on me. He referenced his previous company, Fairchild, where he’d first met Noyce and Moore and went on to blaze a trail in silicon wafer research. Fairchild was the industry’s gold standard, but it had one great flaw: a lack of “achievement orientation.” “Expertise was very much valued there,” Andy explained. “That is why people got hired. That’s why people got promoted. Their effectiveness at translating that knowledge into actual results was kind of shrugged off.” At Intel, he went on, “we tend to be exactly the opposite. It almost doesn’t matter what you know. It’s what you can do with whatever you know or can acquire and actually accomplish [that] tends to be valued here.” Hence the company’s slogan: “Intel delivers.

Intel has invested over $1 billion in AI companies over the past couple of years.

Now, as traditional computing programs are displaced by the operation of AI algorithms, requirements are once again shifting. Machine learning demands the rapid-fire execution of complex mathematical formulas, something for which neither Intel’s nor Qualcomm’s chips are built. Into the void stepped Nvidia, a chipmaker that had previously excelled at graphics processing for video games. The math behind graphics processing aligned well with the requirements for AI, and Nvidia became the go-to player in the chip market. Between 2016 and early 2018, the company’s stock price multiplied by a factor of ten.

At around this same time a new kind of corporation began to rival the traditional allAmerican manufacturers for market share; these were the Nikes and Microsoft’s, and later, the Tommy Hilfiger’s and Intel’s. These pioneers made the bold claim that producing goods was only an incidental part of their operations, and that thanks to recent victories in trade liberalization and labour-law reform; they were able to have their products made for them by contractors, many of them overseas. What these companies produced primarily were not things, they said, but images of their brands. Their real work lay not in manufacturing but in marketing. This formula, needless to say, has proved enormously profitable, and its success has companies competing in a race toward weightlessness: whoever owns the least has the fewest employees on the payroll and produces the most powerful images, as opposed to products, wins the race.

By 2008, storm clouds were gathering over Microsoft. PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business. The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud providers invested in enormous data ​centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution. Amazon was one of the first to cash in with AWS. They figured out early on that the same cloud infrastructure they used to sell books, movies, and other retail items could be rented, like a time-share, to other businesses and startups at a much lower price than it would take for each company to build its own cloud. By June 2008, Amazon already had 180,000 developers building applications and services for their cloud platform. Microsoft did not yet have a commercially viable cloud platform. All of this spelled trouble for Microsoft. Even before the Great Recession of 2008, our stock had begun a downward slide. In a long-planned move, Bill Gates left the company that year to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But others were leaving, too. Among them, Kevin Johnson, president of the Windows and online services business, announced he would leave to become CEO of Juniper Networks. In their letter to shareholders that year, Bill and Steve Ballmer noted that Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, had been named the company’s new Chief Software Architect (Bill’s old title), reflecting the fact that a new generation of leaders was stepping up in areas like online advertising and search. There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field.

The first 350 families agree to participate on the panel would each receive a Tandy personal computer, with 133 MHz Intel Pentium processor; a Hewlett-Packard combination printer, fax, and copier; the most advanced Nokia cellular phone; and an AT&T telephone that was not yet on the market and that offered so many features the company called it a "personal information center.

His order cited "credible evidence" that a takeover "threatens to impair the national security of the US".Qualcomm was already trying to fend off Broadcom's bid.The deal would have created the world's third-largest chipmaker behind Intel and Samsung.It would also have been the biggest takeover the technology koo50 sector had ever seen.The presidential order said: "The proposed takeover of Qualcomm by the Purchaser (Broadcom) is prohibited. and any substantially equivalent merger. acquisition. or takeover. whether effected directly or indirectly. is also prohibited."Crown jewelSome analysts said President Trump's decision was more about competitiveness and winning the race for 5G technology. than security concerns.The sector is in a race to develop chips for the latest 5G wireless technology. and Qualcomm was considered by Broadcom a significant asset in its bid to gain market share.Image captionQualcomm has already showcased 1Gbps mobile internet speeds using a 5G chip"Given the current political climate in the US and other regions around the world. everyone is taking a more conservative view on mergers and acquisitions and protecting their own domains." IDC's Mario Morales. vice president of enabling technologies and semiconductors told the BBC."We are all at the start of a race. and you have 5G as a crown jewel that everyone wants to participate in - and every region is racing towards that." he said."We don't want to hinder someone like Qualcomm so that they can't provide the technology to the vendors that are competing within that space."US investigates Broadcom's Qualcomm bidQualcomm rejects Broadcom takeover bidHuawei's US smartphone deal collapsesSingapore-based Broadcom had been pursuing San Diego-based Qualcomm for about four months.Last week however. Broadcom's hostile takeover bid was put under investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US. a multi-agency led by the US Treasury Department.The US company had rejected approaches from its rival on the grounds that the offer undervalued the business. and also that any takeover would face antitrust hurdles.Earlier this year. Chinese telecoms giant Huawei said it had not been able to strike a deal to sell its new smartphone via a US carrier. widely believed to be AT&T.The US also recently blocked the $1.2bn sale of money transfer firm Moneygram to China's Ant Financial. the digital payments arm of Alibaba.

When we think of foreign direct investment, most of us think about Intel building a new microchip factory in Costa Rica or Volkswagen laying down a new assembly line in China-this is known as 'green-field' investment. But a lot of foreign direct investment is made by foreigners buying into an existing local company- or 'brownfield' investment. Brownfield investment has accounted for over half of total world FDI since the 1990s, although the share is lower for developing countries, for the obvious reason that they have relatively fewer firms that foreigners want to take over. At its height in 2001, it accounted for as much as 80% of total world FDI.

David Kushner: Atari was the company that established Silicon Valley’s casual culture as we know it today. Just the idea of showing up to work in jeans and a T-shirt? Prior to Atari the Valley was the era of Intel and essentially men in suits. With Atari it became smelly hippies in jeans smoking weed. Atari was the counterculture come to Silicon Valley. And so it was no coincidence that one of the smelly hippies that walked into Atari was Steve Jobs.

In 1903, the president of a leading bank had certainly leaned out when he told Henry Ford – the founder of Ford Motor Company – ‘The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad.’ In 1992, Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, had clearly leaned out when he said: ‘The idea of a personal communicator in every pocket is a pipe dream driven by greed.’ And the former CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer had certainly leaned out when he laughed at Apple and said, ‘There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share.