Intel

Founders · Jul 18

How The Sun Rose On Silicon Valley: Bob Noyce (Founder of Intel)

Noyce and Moore founded it with $500,000 of their own money, went after backward computer memory, and built the 4,000-transistor 1103 chip within 2 years. Sales went from under $3,000 in year one to $66 million in year five, and staff from 42 to 2,500. It used stock options, few management layers and honest ratings, and ran seminars to teach the market about the microprocessor.

Tips

• Intel's Noyce and Moore avoided Fairchild's market and went after the most backward area of computing▶ 38:28Intel's first year brought under $3,000 in sales and 42 employees; by year five it had $66 million in sales and 2,500 employees.
• Noyce gave Intel employees stock options because profit sharing would pull them away from research▶ 40:33
• Noyce built Intel with few management layers so ideas beat hierarchy▶ 41:01
• Noyce told young Intel hires honestly how they were doing through performance ratings▶ 45:01
• Noyce and Moore backed Intel with $500,000 of their own money alongside Arthur Rock▶ 35:30Grinnell's $300,000 grew more than 30 times and doubled the college's endowment.
• Intel's founders ran seminars to educate the market about the microprocessor▶ 50:08Intel ran more seminars and workshops on using the microprocessor than the local junior college's whole catalog. Sony's Akio Morita made the same point with the Japanese gardening idea of nemawashi.
• Noyce believed innovation is a young person's game and backed young engineers like Ted Hoff▶ 47:06Intel's sales grew from $64 million in 1973 to almost a billion dollars a year in 1983.
• Noyce stepped back from running Intel in 1974 and handed it to Moore and Grove▶ 47:51
• Andy Grove taught Intel that the greater the freedom, the greater the obligation to exercise discipline▶ 44:29

Founders · Jun 3

Steve Jobs in Exile

Andy Grove asked each NeXT leader what business they were in, and after six years the team could not agree on an answer.

Tips

• Andy Grove showed NeXT's leaders could not say what business they were in▶ 35:56

Founders · Oct 19

How Jensen Works

Had 860 times Nvidia's revenue in 1997 when Jensen told staff to kill it. Its road show and seminars to teach the microprocessor were the model for how Nvidia taught CUDA.

Tips

• Jensen Huang taught the market so developers would adopt CUDA▶ 50:15The textbook sold tens of thousands of copies and was used by hundreds of schools.
• Jensen Huang treats complacency as Nvidia's worst enemy and fights it constantly▶ 6:26Intel was 860 times larger than Nvidia in revenue when he said this in 1997.

Lenny's Podcast · Jun 29

Naming expert shares process for creating billion-dollar brands: Vercel, Azure, Windsurf, Sonos

Engineers backed ProChip as professional and premium, but Andy Grove backed Pentium because the split showed energy behind it.

Tips

• Treat polarization inside your team as a sign you have a strong name▶ 1:08:47Andy Grove backed Pentium over the internal favorite ProChip precisely because the room was polarized.

Acquired · Jan 26

TSMC founder Morris Chang

Its CEO courted Apple in 2011, prompting a two-month pause in talks. Chang judged TSMC at least equal on technology, ahead on manufacturing and customer trust, and Tim Cook said Intel does not know how to be a foundry.

Tips

• Morris Chang judged Apple's Intel flirtation on technology, manufacturing and customer trust▶ 1:40:00Today TSMC makes all of Apple's chips and Intel makes none of the iPhone's.

Acquired · Jan 20

TSMC

It passed on Apple's iPhone chip over price and put over $4 billion into EUV in 2012 but stuck with older lithography. It still holds about 80% of PC processors, yet ASML is now worth more than Intel.

Tips

• Intel's CEO Otellini turned down Apple's iPhone chip deal over a lowball price▶ 2:08:01Intel was the sole chip supplier of the Mac at the time, and ASML is now worth more than Intel.
• Intel backed extreme ultraviolet early with $4 billion yet adopted it slower than rivals▶ 2:14:04EUV made the latest chips possible, and TSMC runs on it.

Lenny's Podcast · Jan 9

Behind the founder: Drew Houston (Dropbox)

Facing faster, cheaper Japanese rivals in memory while its numbers still grew, Grove and Moore chose microprocessors. That story convinced Houston to put everything on one bet.

Tips

• When a strategic inflection point hits, go all in on one market▶ 26:3680% of paying Dropbox subscribers used it at work, which made the productivity choice relatively easy.

Lenny's Podcast · May 5

Business strategy with Hamilton Helmer (author of 7 Powers)

Its move into CPUs is an example of an iconic second act, and it is Helmer's example of a company that is the technology itself.

Tips

• Expect AI's biggest impact on businesses that existed before it▶ 42:00He cites a claimed 50% improvement in programming efficacy as worth a great deal on its own.
• Learn your power source so you can plan the next act▶ 8:05

Acquired · Nov 15

Qualcomm

Its modems were in the iPhone XS and XR, but it fell behind and could not build a credible 5G chip. Apple then backed off its fight with Qualcomm and later bought Intel's modem division.

Acquired · Mar 28

Nvidia: The GPU Company (1993-2006)

It folded sound and networking into the motherboard, so Nvidia coined GPU to resist the same fate. Its 1999 discrete graphics cards were among the worst reviewed in history, and it later announced Larrabee.

Tips

• Nvidia called its 1999 GeForce 256 a GPU to block Intel from absorbing graphics▶ 1:05:19The GeForce 256 delivered about 5x the graphics performance of anything else on the market.