

Gordon Moore: The Accidental Entrepreneur - hendler
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/articles/moore/index.html

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akamaka
Thanks for posting this!

If any of you want to know more about Intel's early days, I strongly suggest
reading Tedlow's biography of Andy Grove. He goes into great detail about the
early culture of Silicon Valley, more than any of the articles I've seen
posted online.

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10ren
_It was excellent on-the-job training, but there probably is a more efficient
way of training entrepreneurs than by letting them make all the mistakes._

If the strongest Moore can say is that there's "probably" a more efficient
way, with all his experience, it makes me doubt there is one. I think it is
possible to train people for spin-off companies, because they are in the same
kind of business; but for founding a new type of industry, I don't think it's
possible to train entrepreneurs, because there's no one who knows how to do it
to train them. The only way to learn the unknown is by making "mistakes",
a.k.a experiments.

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10ren
_This has minimized spin-offs, because we design our development specifically
to transfer into the factory; so we don't have the problem of developing
technology and ideas that we have no place for. Technology transfer is always
difficult. We have tried to minimize the need to transfer it._

Xerox PARC didn't solve that one.

The Intel guys fully experienced terribly frustrating problems, and then came
up with ways of solving them. I think both aspects contribute to their
incredible success.

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troystribling
I recently read "Crystal Fire", [http://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Fire-Birth-
Information-Technol...](http://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Fire-Birth-Information-
Technology/dp/0393041247), an account of the invention an commercialization of
the transistor. Prominent in the book are Shockley and how the companies that
spun off from his original start up founded the semiconductor industry in
Silicon Valley.

