Andrew Grove is a Hungarian immigrant who had achieved the American Dream after his arrival in New York City with only US $20 in his pocket. At age 20, he already has some extraordinary experiences — a nonobservant Jewish boy growing up in Hungary through a fascist regime, a Nazi invasion and a Soviet occupation. He told his story in his memoir “Swimming Across”. He fled the country after Russian invades Budapest to put down the revolution in October 1956.
Andrew Grove led Intel Corporation through the high growth period and was credited for driving the Digital Revolution via the semiconductor industry. Grove set another example for those who want to achieve their dreams in this land of opportunity.
Grove was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. He is the only surviving son of the family. At the age of four he contracted scarlet fever, which was nearly fatal and caused partial hearing loss. The father was a partner of diary Product Company. He traveled a lot to visit local customers. His outgoing personality drew many friends, and relatives used to visit and hang out in their house.
During WWII, the family suffered from Nazi rules of Jewish persecution. The father was sent to Russian front as forced labor and did not return until long after the war ended. Under communist rules after the war, the business was nationalized and the father worked at government owned enterprise. Unfortunately, the father was fired due to association to one of his colleague by political reason. The father had to find another job with a long commute outside of Budapest. However, the father never complained with all the ordeals. He just coped and lived with them. Grove wrote in his memoir about one thing he thanked his father that the father wanted him to learn English. Even with tight family budget constraints, his father found him a private teacher and encouraged him to learn English.
The mother has a strong influence on Grove. He dedicated the memoir to his mother, “who gave me the gift of life more than once.” There was a picture showing his mother reviewing with young Grove’s study in the book. During his father’s absence in WWII, it was his mother who ran the family and the diary business in addition to avoiding arrests by the Nazi. The mother had an instinct that knows what was going on with young Grove. She kept Grove straight. The mother was a pianist but not in practice. Grove was interested in singing and she accompanied once when he sang. Grove said that he felt close to his mother.
The parents paid attentions to Grove’s school study and he was a good student. Young Grove showed his quality of characterizes in school. His teacher in Physics told the parents in parent-teacher conference, “Life is like a big lake, All the boys get in the water at one end and start swimming. Not all of them will swim across. But one of them, I am sure, will. That one is Grove.” The teacher in Hungarian Literature also spoke highly of Grove. He said, “Someday we will be sitting in Grove’s waiting room, waiting for him to see us.”
Grove got attracted to Chemistry and pursued chemical experiments in a youth book. He had to find materials that were scarce and difficult to find under communist rule. He tried persistently to make the experiments and learn the formula. He enjoyed demonstrating experiments to his friends after school. One of the highlight was to make nitroglycerin which was used to make dynamite. The chemistry teacher asked him to demonstrate the process in front of a class of girls. The successful demonstration gave him the courage to ask a girl for a date.
Grove had talent in literature and published a few articles in high school; however, one of his highly rated articles fell to the victim of political censorship and did not get published in paper. The episode steers him away from journalism as a career but he put his interests in good use by writing management books afterwards. Grove was blessed to make prodigy friends in school and became a spokesman for the class. He has demonstrated his skills of organization and leadership by orchestrating a performance by his freshman class for a university graduation ceremony.
Grove revealed his talent of creative problem solving skills in the chemical compound test at the end of university freshman year. Each of the students in the class was given a bottle of different kind of chemical sample to analyze in four weeks. He used time consuming preordained steps initially and then took intuitive leap and made up a sequence of guess experiments. He was the first and only one in class who made the completely correct results. He became well known in the university.
Grove exhibited the quality of discipline, perseverance, and integrity early in life. The parents set good examples for him in dealing with difficulties. He found ways to work around his hearing loss in the classroom and learned to cope with it. He learned swimming by himself in the summer. He studied hard and received good grades. It took extra efforts to get materials and required special care for his chemical experiments. In his memoir, he documented his failure in City College of New York. He was flunked in Physics, but he studied hard to make it up at the end. Eventually, he graduated in first place from CCNY and New York Times wrote an article about it.
When Russians put down the Budapest Revolution in 1956, many people escaped to be refugees. Grove’s parents urged him to leave and he did by land. He took the train to the border and then walked over to Austria. He came to the US by ship. He sharpened his English on board with sailors. Grove has a good sense to ask the right people for help at the right time. With advises from those people, he made an important choice to enter City College of New York to study Chemical Engineering. The college is free of tuition and he could graduate in three years. He went on to University of California, Berkeley for his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering. After graduation, he was hired to work at Fairchild Semiconductor by the Intel Founder, Gordon Moore. He went on with Moore to Intel as the third employee in 1968.
His career in Intel is now legend in history. The original product of Intel was Memory for computers. By the early 1980s, its business was dominated by dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips. However, increased competition from Japanese semiconductor manufacturers had, by 1983, dramatically reduced the profitability of this market. The growing success of the IBM personal computer, based on an Intel microprocessor, was among factors that convinced Gordon Moore (CEO since 1975) to shift the company’s focus to microprocessors and to change fundamental aspects of that business model. Grove led Intel Company through a difficult transition from a commodity computer memory business to a high margin processor business. The revenue was grown from $1.9 Billion to more than $26 billion under his management. Intel’s market capitalization had also grown by more than 40% a year to $197.6bn (a total 4,500% capitalization increase in this period), making it one of the world’s most valuable companies.
The famous Moore’s Law (number of transistors in a silicon chip will be doubled in every two years, though the cost of computers is halved) is realized by Intel’s work. The only product that is cheaper and better as time goes by is semiconductor chips. If automobile goes through the same rate of price and function improvements like semiconductor chips, a Volkswagen could be less than a dollar by now (since Moore’s Law published from 1965 to 2005, there were 20 periods. I bought a new Volkswagen Beetle for around $2,500 in 1974, and you can do the math.)
The personal computer revolution is propelled by Microsoft Windows and Intel Processors as so called WinTel architecture. Intel was the forerunner in the semiconductor boom and City of Santa Clara where Intel Headquarter resides is the heart of Silicon Valley. In 1997, Andrew Grove was named Man of the Year by Time Magazine for being “the person most responsible for the amazing growth in the power and the innovative potential of microchips.” Today, we live on the foundation laid by Andrew Grove and many others. Inc. Magazine praised him as one of the greatest strategic technology thinkers.
Grove received numerous Honors and Awards. He wrote several management books and taught in universities. Grove took part in Philanthropy. He died in 2016 after suffering from cancers for many years.
In 2005, Grove made the largest donation that the City College of New York (CUNY) has ever received. His grant of $26 million transformed the CCNY School of Engineering into the Grove School of Engineering.
For Further Reading:
1. Swimming Across – A Memoir by Andrew Grove. Warner Books, Inc. 2001
3. Time Magazine. Man of the Year 1997
4. New York Times: REFUGEE HEADING ENGINEERS’ CLASS
5. Moore’s Law (1965)
7. Leading Intel Transformation
8. Market capitalization more than 40% a year