Arthur Rock | |
|---|---|
 Rock in January 2003 | |
| Born | August 19, 1926 Rochester, New York, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Syracuse University (BA, 1948) Harvard University (MBA, 1951) |
| Occupation | Venture capitalist |
| Known for | Early investor in Intel and Apple Computer |
| Spouse | Toni Rembe |
Arthur Rock (born August 19, 1926) is an American businessman and investor. Based in Silicon Valley, California, he was an early investor in major firms including Intel, Apple, Scientific Data Systems and Teledyne. [1]
Rock was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Jewish family. [2] [3] [4] He was an only child and his father owned a small candy store where Rock worked in his youth. [4] He joined the U.S. Army during World War II but the war ended before he was deployed. [4] He then went to college on the G.I. Bill. [4] He graduated with a bachelor's degree in business administration from Syracuse University in 1948 and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1951. [5]
Rock started his career in 1951 as a securities analyst in New York City, and then joined the corporate finance department of Hayden, Stone & Company in New York, where he focused on raising money for small high-technology companies. [6] In 1957, when the "traitorous eight" left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, Rock was the one who helped them find a place to go: he convinced Sherman Fairchild to start Fairchild Semiconductor. [7]
In 1961, he moved to California. Along with Thomas J. Davis Jr., he formed the San Francisco venture capital firm Davis & Rock. [8]
In 1968, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and another Fairchild employee named Andy Grove, were ready to start a new company, Intel. Noyce contacted his good friend Rock, with whom he used to hike and camp. Rock described how Intel started.
"Bob (Noyce) just called me on the phone. We'd been friends for a long time.… Documents? There was practically nothing. Noyce's reputation was good enough. We put out a page-and-a-half little circular, but I'd raised the money even before people saw it." [9]
Intel was incorporated in Mountain View, California, on July 18, 1968, by chemist Gordon E. Moore (known for "Moore's law"), Robert Noyce, a physicist and co-inventor of the integrated circuit. Of the original 500,000 shares, Noyce held 245,000, Moore 245,000, and Rock 10,000; all at $1 per share. Rock raised $2.5 million of convertible debentures from a limited group of private investors in one day. [10] Rock became Intel's first chairman. [11]
In 1978, Mike Markkula of Apple Computer hooked up Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak with Rock. Rock bought 640,000 shares of Apple Computer and became a long-time director of the company. [10]
Rock's investments and personal guidance helped launch and govern a roster of corporate firms including Intel, Apple, Scientific Data Systems, Teledyne, Xerox, Argonaut Insurance, AirTouch, the Nasdaq Stock Market, and Echelon Corporation. [12]
During the 1950s, putting a venture capital deal together may have required the help of two or three other organizations to complete the transaction. It was a business that was growing very rapidly, and as the business grew, the transactions grew exponentially. Rock, one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley during his venturing the Fairchild Semiconductor is often credited with the introduction of the term "venture capitalist" that has since become widely accepted. [10] [12]
Rock's law or Moore's second law, named for Arthur Rock and Gordon Moore, respectively, says that the cost of a semiconductor chip fabrication plant doubles every four years.[ citation needed ] As of 2023, the price had already reached about US$20 billion. [13]
Rock's law can be seen as the economic flip side to Moore's (first) law – that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles every two years. The latter is a direct consequence of the ongoing growth of the capital-intensive semiconductor industry— innovative and popular products mean more profits, meaning more capital available to invest in ever higher levels of large-scale integration, which in turn leads to the creation of even more innovative products.
In 2003, Rock donated $25 million to the Harvard Business School to establish the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. [6] He and his wife Toni founded the Arthur & Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University. Mr. Rock was co-founder and past president of The Basic Fund which gives scholarships to inner city children to attend K-8 private schools. He is also on the board of Teach for America and Children's Scholarship Fund and an active funder of KIPP [14]
Rock has donated to many political causes, especially in the area of education. He has donated to more than 30 school board elections across the country. In 2021, he donated over $500,000 to the 2022 San Francisco Board of Education recall elections. [15]
He is married to lawyer Toni Rembe. [19] Together with his wife, Rock has been a supporter of Teach For America. The organization's annual Social Innovation Award is named in their honor. [20]
Rock was portrayed by actor J. K. Simmons in the 2013 biographical drama Jobs .
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer components and related products for business and consumer markets. It is considered one of the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturers by revenue and ranked in the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by revenue for nearly a decade, from 2007 to 2016 fiscal years, until it was removed from the ranking in 2018. In 2020, it was reinstated and ranked 45th, being the 7th-largest technology company in the ranking.
Robert Norton Noyce, nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", was an American physicist and entrepreneur who co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel Corporation in 1968. He was also credited with the realization of the first monolithic integrated circuit or microchip made with silicon, which fueled the personal computer revolution and gave Silicon Valley its name.
National Semiconductor Corporation was an American semiconductor manufacturer, which specialized in analog devices and subsystems, formerly headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company produced power management integrated circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers, communication interface products and data conversion solutions. National's key markets included wireless handsets, displays and a variety of broad electronics markets, including medical, automotive, industrial and test and measurement applications.
Andrew Stephen Grove was a Hungarian-American businessman and engineer who served as the third CEO of Intel Corporation. He escaped from the Hungarian People's Republic during the 1956 revolution at the age of 20 and moved to the United States, where he finished his education. He was the third employee and eventual third CEO of Intel, transforming the company into the world's largest semiconductor company.
Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. was an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. It was founded in 1957 as a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument by the "traitorous eight" who defected from Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. It became a pioneer in the manufacturing of transistors and of integrated circuits. Schlumberger bought the firm in 1979 and sold it to National Semiconductor in 1987; Fairchild was spun off as an independent company again in 1997. In September 2016, Fairchild was acquired by ON Semiconductor.
Gordon Earle Moore was an American businessman, engineer, and the co-founder and emeritus chairman of Intel Corporation. He proposed Moore's law which makes the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years.
Vinod Khosla is an Indian-American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas such as networking, software, and alternative energy technologies. He is considered one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists. Khosla was named the top venture capitalist on the Forbes Midas List in 2001 and has been listed multiple times since that time. As of August 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at US$7.2 billion.
Eugene Kleiner was an Austrian-American engineer and venture capitalist. He is considered a pioneer of Silicon Valley. He was one of the original founders of Fairchild Semiconductor, part of the Traitorous Eight, and Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm which later became Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The company was an early investor in more than 300 information technology and biotech firms, including Amazon.com, AOL, Brio Technology, Electronic Arts, Flextronics, Genentech, Google, Hybritech, Intuit, Lotus Development, LSI Logic, Macromedia, Netscape, Quantum, Segway, Sun Microsystems and Tandem Computers.
The traitorous eight was a group of eight employees who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor. William Shockley had in 1956 recruited a group of young Ph.D. graduates with the goal to develop and produce new semiconductor devices. While Shockley had received a Nobel Prize in Physics and was an experienced researcher and teacher, his management of the group was authoritarian and unpopular. This was accentuated by Shockley's research focus not proving fruitful. After the demand for Shockley to be replaced was rebuffed, the eight left to form their own company.
Jean Amédée Hoerni was a Swiss-born American engineer. He was a silicon transistor pioneer, and a member of the "traitorous eight". He developed the planar process, an important technology for reliably fabricating and manufacturing semiconductor devices, such as transistors and integrated circuits.
Jay Taylor Last was an American physicist, silicon pioneer, and member of the so-called "traitorous eight" that founded Silicon Valley.
Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation was a company founded by Sherman Fairchild. It was based on the East Coast of the United States, and provided research and development for flash photography equipment. The technology was primarily used for DOD spy satellites. The firm was later known for its manufacture of semiconductors.
L. John Doerr is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the President and his administration with advice and counsel in trying to fix America's economic downturn. Forbes ranked Doerr as the 40th richest person in tech in 2017, and as of August 1, 2023, as the 146th richest person in the world, with a net worth of US$11.9 billion. Doerr is the author of Measure What Matters, a book about goal-setting, and Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now.
Dov Frohman is an Israeli electrical engineer and business executive. A former vice president of Intel Corporation, he is the inventor of the erasable programmable read only memory (EPROM) and the founder and first general manager of Intel Israel. He is also the author of Leadership the Hard Way.
Rich Karlgaard is an American journalist and author. He was named publisher of Forbes magazine in 1998 and has written three books, Life 2.0: How People Across America Are Transforming Their Lives by Finding the Where of Their Happiness (2004), which made The Wall Street Journal business bestseller list, The Soft Edge: Where Great Companies Find Lasting Success (2014), and Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement (2019).
Leslie L. Vadász is a Hungarian-American engineer and manager, one of the founding members of Intel Corporation.
Aart J. de Geus is a co-founder and executive chair of Synopsys Inc., where he was CEO until January 2024.
Alan H. MacPherson was an American patent attorney who pioneered the "clean room" defense.
Elizabeth Noyce was an American philanthropist, and former wife of Fairchild Semiconductor general manager and a founder of Intel Corporation, Robert Noyce.
Raymond Stuart Stata is an American entrepreneur, engineer, and investor.
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