Andrew Grove - WikiHQ

Andrew "Andy" Stephen Grove (born Gróf András István; 2 September 1936 – 21 March 2016) was a Hungarian-American businessman and engineer who served as the third CEO of Intel Corporation. He left Hungary 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.

Personal life and education

Grove was born as Gróf András István to a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, the son of Mária and György Gróf. At the age of four he contracted scarlet fever, which was nearly fatal and caused partial hearing loss. and forced to do slave labor. The father was reunited with his family only after the war.

During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when he was 20, he left his home and family and escaped across the border into Austria. Penniless and barely able to speak English, in 1957 he eventually made his way to the United States. He later changed his name to the anglicized Andrew S. Grove. Grove summarized his first twenty years of life in Hungary in his memoirs:

Shortly after arriving in the United States, Grove worked summer jobs as a busboy at a resort in New Hampshire, where he met Eva Kastan, an Austrian refugee, who was working as a waitress while studying at Hunter College. The two met in 1957 and married in Queens, New York, in June 1958. They remained married until Grove's death and had two daughters, Karen Grove and Robie Livingstone, and eight grandchildren.

Even though he arrived in the United States with little money, Grove retained a "passion for learning." The New York Times stated that "a refugee became a senior in engineering."

Grove attended and graduated with his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963.

In 2000, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease; he became a contributor to several foundations that sponsor research towards a cure. He died at his home on March 21, 2016, at the age of 79; the cause of death was not publicly disclosed.

Career

Starting Intel

After completing his Ph.D. in 1963, Grove worked at Fairchild Semiconductor as a researcher, and by 1967 had become its assistant director of development. His work there made him familiar with the early development of integrated circuits, which would lead to the "microcomputer revolution" in the 1970s. In 1967, he wrote a college textbook on the subject, Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices.

thumb|left|Left to right: Andy Grove, [[Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore (1978)]]

In 1968, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore co-founded Intel, after they and Grove left Fairchild Semiconductor. Grove joined on the day of its incorporation, although he was not a founder. Fellow Hungarian émigré Leslie L. Vadász was Intel's fourth employee. Grove worked initially as the company's director of engineering, and helped get its early manufacturing operations started. In 1983, he wrote a book, High Output Management, in which he described many of his methods and manufacturing concepts. As a result, he chose to discontinue producing DRAMs and focus instead on manufacturing microprocessors. Grove, along with Intel's sales manager to IBM, Earl Whetstone, played a key role in negotiating with IBM to use only Intel microprocessors in all of their new personal computers.

The company's revenue increased from $2,672 in its first year (1968) to $20.8 billion in 1997. Grove was appointed Intel's president in 1979, CEO in 1987, and then chairman of the board in 1997. In May 1998 Grove relinquished the post of CEO to Craig Barrett, as Grove had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a few years earlier, though he remained chairman until November 2004. Since then Grove remained at Intel as a senior advisor, and has also been a lecturer at Stanford University. He reflected back upon Intel's growth through the years: