Advice Starting Small Businesses
The Man Behind the Microchip

Advice starting small businesses today is found in great supply in the new book from Leslie Berlin. This is the story of Robert Noyce, The Man Behind the Microchip.

Good advice starting small businesses is hard to come by, but Robert Noyce was always a generous man in this regard.

Before Intel and Google, before Microsoft and dot-coms and Apple and Cisco and Sun and Pixar and stock-option millionaires and startup widows and billionaire venture capitalists, there was a group of eight young men -- six of them with PhDs, none of them over 32.

They all disliked their boss and decided to start their own transistor company. It was 1957 and they took all the free advice starting small businesses possible.

Leading the group of eight was an Iowa-born physicist named Robert Noyce. Noyce was the son of a minister and former champion diver, with a doctorate from MIT and a mind so quick (and a way with the ladies so effortless) that his graduate-school friends called him "Rapid Robert."

Over the next decade, Noyce managed the company, called Fairchild Semiconductor, by teaching himself business skills as he went along. By 1967, Fairchild had 11,000 employees and $12 million in profits.

Before the Internet, the World Wide Web, cell phones, personal digital assistants, laptop computers, desktop computers, pocket calculators, digital watches, pacemakers, ATMs, cruise control, digital cameras, motion detectors and video games -- before all these, and the electronic heart of all these, is a tiny device called an integrated circuit.

The inventor of the first practical integrated circuit, in 1959, was Robert Noyce. It was one of 17 patents awarded to him.

In 1968, Noyce and his Fairchild co-founder Gordon Moore launched their own new venture, a tiny memory company they called Intel.

Noyce's leadership of Intel -- six years as president, five as board chair, and nine as a director -- helped create a company that was roughly twice as profitable as its competitors and that today stands as the largest producer of semiconductor chips in the world.

When he left daily management at Intel in 1975, he turned his attention to the next generation of high-tech entrepreneurs. This is how he met Jobs and others, and began offering his own words of wisdom, giving advice starting small businesses.

Noyce came to serve on the boards of a half dozen startup companies and informally provide seed money to many more. He did not think that all these companies would succeed.

He filed his paperwork for several of these companies in shoeboxes that he kept in his closet. Noyce strongly believed that by investing and giving advice starting small businesses to the new crop of entrepreneurs, he was doing his part, as he put it, to "restock the stream I've fished from."

He inspired in nearly everyone whom he encountered a sense that the future had no limits, and that together they could, as he liked to say, "Go off and do something wonderful." Recalls Intel's former chiefs counsel, "He was like the pied piper. If Bob wanted you to do something, you did it."

Recalls Warren Buffett, who served on a College Board with Noyce for several years, "Everybody liked Bob. He was an extraordinarily smart guy who didn't need to let you know he was that smart. He could be your neighbor, but with lots of machinery in his head."

At the heart of his advice starting small businesses, Noyce was forever pushing people to take their own ideas beyond where they believed they could go. "That's all you've got?" he'd ask. "Have you thought about . . . " An exchange of this sort left Noyce's colleagues and employees feeling as though his blue eyes had bored right through their skulls to discover some potential buried inside themselves or their ideas that they had not known existed.

Little more than a dozen years ago, the San Jose Mercury News declared Noyce the Thomas Edison and the Henry Ford of Silicon Valley. He received the National Medal of Science from President Carter and the National Medal of Technology from President Reagan.

Noyce was featured in hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. Peter Jennings profiled him as "the person of the week" on ABC. CBS anchor Charles Osgood called Noyce "the man who changed the world." Tom Wolfe, who knew a hero when he saw one, wrote about Noyce in a 1983 Esquire article that ran next to pieces on other "American Originals," including Jackie Robinson, John F. Kennedy, Betty Friedan, Walt Disney, and Elvis Presley.

For more information on Robert Noyce and advice starting small businesses, please visit Leslie Berlin’s Web site, www.themanbehindthemicrochip.com.

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