Venture or vulture?

Are venture capitalists vultures? A couple of days ago, WBUR aired a segment debating whether venture capitalists are good or bad for the economy and for employees. Listening made me think with pride of both my parents.

First, said the commentators, it's important to distinguish between venture capital and private equity. Venture capitalists fund start-ups. Private equity funds (like Bain Capital) buy existing companies, often struggling ones, and try to turn them around. Usually, private equity funds borrow a large portion of the money they use to buy the company. The company shoulders that new debt, which means that it must immediately cut costs or start making more money. Debt means the company has to tighten operations, which often means trimming the payroll. On some occasions, the "vultures" buy the company for its tangible assets and not because they expect the company to become profitable. In this case, the buyers may split the company, putting property and equipment in one half of the company which they then sell off, repaying themselves handsomely for their investment. The shell remainder of the company can then be left to fail, and its employees lose their jobs.

Venture capital grew up in the United States between 1957, when my father Robert Noyce and seven colleagues started Fairchild Semiconductor, and 1968, when he and Gordon Moore started Intel. Fairchild Semiconductor had to be started within, and be funded by, another company. By the time Intel started, potential investors beat on the doors asking to be let in on the deal. Venture capital allowed the electronics industry to burst forth as a major employer and engine for national growth in the sixties.

When he had the chance, my father sought to "restock the stream" that had nurtured him. Rather than joining a traditional venture capital firm, he became what's now called an "angel" investor, putting money into very early-stage startups that were often little more than a couple of bright young people with a great technical idea. He was devoted to the companies he invested in. In The Man Behind the Microchip, Leslie Berlin details how when one such company, Caere, came near to closing its doors, my father protested against a shutdown. "We have people," he said. "We need to keep it open. We have a responsibility to the employees and their families." To back up his words, he wrote a blank check and gave it to the CEO. "Don't make it out for more than a million dollars," he said. "That's all I have in that account." CAERE, a maker of barcode readers and later text readers, survived and eventually thrived.

That's good venture capital. But can you imagine the number-crunchers at Bain uttering sentimental words about responsibility to employees and their families? It's not that my father never laid people off to save a company, including Intel. He did. But first he stopped taking a salary himself. Laying people off was always an acutely painful last resort.

After my parents' divorce, my mother suddenly realized that she, too, had money to invest. She didn't become a venture capitalist, because she never shared my father's love of novelty and risk. But she did develop a philosophy that creating or preserving someone's job was the most effective form of philanthropy. At one point, Maine-based Nissen Bakery came up for sale. A decent family-owned business, Nissen badly needed major investment to upgrade its factory in order to stay competitive. Perhaps a private equity firm could have swooped in, borrowing enough to build a new Nissen factory, but such a firm might well have moved the company to some location with cheaper personnel or lower heating or transportation costs. My mother, instead, used her considerable wealth to buy the company outright with no outside financing. She invested enough that Nissen could build a state-of-the-art new factory right in Maine. After my mother died and the bulk of her estate went into the Libra Foundation, Nissen had to be sold. (A charitable corporation can't keep owning a business like that.) But by that time Nissen was thriving enough that the buyer moved more business into, rather than out of, Maine.

It's possible to invest money, take risks, and keep the interests of employees and the community in mind even when working to make a business efficient and profitable. The people who do so are real contributors to our society, and building for the future is what motivates them and makes their work fun. Maybe we should call them "adventure capitalists."

Chinese article on Robert Noyce

Just for fun, I thought I'd share the literal Google-translated version of the Chinese language Google article on Robert Noyce. I've inserted paragraph breaks to make it more readable, but other than that, this is straight from the mouth of Google.

Robert Noyce was born in December 1927, Intel co-founder, on June 3, 1990 death.

Robert Noyce - Overview
Name (in English) RobertNoyce institutions and functions of Intel co-founder
Date of birth December 12, 1927 was born
June 3, 1990 death of
country of birth, place of Burlington, Iowa, United States
Education in 1953, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) PhD
in 1949, by Greenwich School of Arts degree.

Professional background was founded in 1968, Intel Corporation was founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, Silicon Valley heroes get together, but also a person in order to gain wealth, prestige and success, it is prohibitively difficult. Everywhere the distance, only about Robert Noyce is the trinity of saints. As the inventor of integrated circuit, Noyce has go down in history in the history of science. And he also co-founded with two other people in Silicon Valley, one of the greatest, the first is the cradle of the semiconductor industry - Fairchild (Fairchild) company, has become history; the second is still among the largest companies in the U.S. This is Intel Corporation.

Of course, Noyce is also a contradictory unity, this contradiction can only come from a Midwest pastor's son. Noyce's childhood seems to summarize the range of crazy ambition and entrepreneurial spirit of the time split between the conservative state.

Robert Noyce - experience
December 12, 1927, Noyes was born in Iowa, southeast of denmark (Durlington) town. Father was pastor of the church justice, but also takes him around the family migration. 12 years old, he and brother had a self-made hang glider, this huge kite almost given away the life of the brothers.

University life, versatile Noyce themselves, and reap the limelight. One bedroom party, open a South Pacific flavor banquet. The only drawback is the lack of a whole roasted pig. Noyce and another student were entrusted with the task: to steal the pig farm nearby. They do not live up, come up with a 25 pounds of pork, heroically triumph, banquet a great success. But next morning the case exposed, in Iowa, stealing pigs and stealing horses, on the gallows 50 years ago, is sin. Noyce saved his life, also escaped criminal charges, but schools can not escape punishment. After some transactions, penalties for non-weight: one semester suspension, made with fair Life Insurance Company of New York City to do the statistical work. Noyce stole the infamous pig face disgrace, but also about New York's fast-paced world.

In 1956, technical report at the meeting in Washington, Shockley was impressed by his report. "After one month, Shockley called and said he intends to open a West Coast company, to join with me to discuss matters of the company." Noyce without any hesitation, follow. Because Shockley's patriarchal style, tossing two years did not come up with any excuse, Noyce and seven other people with the collective resignation is "treason eight people to help." Noyce is the only 8 people who look a little leadership. So he picked first as managing director.

Noyce has no doubt was a charismatic figure, a man born to lead others, but he was not a great manager. He was too is true, even when there is no crisis in the company's ability to dismiss or demote people. He will maintain Fairchild nearly 10 years, the final because he lost control of the company leaving the company in crisis. Since then, the rebellion became the basic characteristics and the development of Silicon Valley an important way. In 1969, Senna Wa semiconductor industry bigwigs held a meeting with Nosey made calculations and found that among 400 participants, only 24 had not worked at Fairchild.

August 1968, Noyce and Gordon Moore of R & D and process development experts with the resignation of Andy Grove. The first three went to visit King Arthur Rock, venture capitalists. A total of only five minutes to raise enough venture capital 2.5 million U.S. dollars. Later, Rock recalls: "We already are very good friends ... ... ... official documents? Fact that it is. Noyce's reputation alone is enough, we sent only one half of a simple notification, But people see it before I go there early to raise money enough, if you try to finish this today, perhaps 5 cm thick file to write. "opened a new company, initially named the company" Moore - Noyce Electronics ", but always feel awkward, because in the English language, MooreNoyce sounds like morenoise (noisy), it is indecent tame. The new company will be renamed Intel (Intel).

The first product shipment, the company gathering congratulated 18 employees, three feet tied together on the plaster of the wounded, including Noyce, when he broke his leg skiing, another employee was ejected in the ankle or broken . From these injuries can be reflected in the company at that time vigor and vitality. Intel created the beginning of the Noyce played a key role in laying the corporate culture, creating a wall of the compartment is not a new pattern of office, the abolition of the management hierarchy.

The late 1970s, Noyce began separated from the company's daily operations, he became active in domestic and foreign stage. Moore and Grove began to dominate the company's management. Noyce nature free and easy, open-minded is true. His most adventurous, it seems dangerous and stimulation in order to alleviate some of the inner contradictions and pressures of life: skiing, paragliding, surfing, driving a Peugeot brand car or driving his amphibious aircraft. Whenever I hear the technical backbone of the new ideas, he was always bright eyes, full of curiosity, makes much infection and encouraged.

In June 1990, at a business meeting before the Noyce go swimming. The greatest figure in the semiconductor industry, died suddenly of a heart attack, at the age of 62 years. As a pastor's grandson and son, family background shaped his pure and honest soul. But came to California, he stopped going to church, and began to smoke, drink alcohol and sometimes also (which is most important to teach the rules, the evil one). And he and the wife married and divorced, and with a much younger woman than he remarried. However, in view of his achievements, God will forgive him. Semiconductor industry pioneer, from 1967 to 1991 led the National Semiconductor, a chip industry's most important manufacturers, and leading Silicon Valley companies with fierce Japanese progress, won the semiconductor war.

What more can I say about my father? This article says it all.

Birthday Google Doodle for Robert Noyce

For December 12, Robert Noyce's birthday, Google decided to honor the inventor of the integrated circuit with a Google doodle of his own. Since it's already December 12 in China, it's already showing there, and my friend Barnas sent me a sneak peek:

As Barnas points out, this is a pretty advanced integrated circuit. I like it, and I like the subtlety of the Google logo.

I wish my father were here to see it, but even without that, this is a tribute that means a lot to me.

Addendum: Here is a very sweet note that came to the Noyce Foundation from Turkey:

(first my english is not good but ı think god thiks about
Robert Noyce
)

good night..


I from Turkey.. I like elektronic machines .. Micro is very succesfull object for every elektronic machines..

ı thinks if microprocessor doesnot live our life, we will use nothing in ours life, about cars, computers, tv,music players and etc..

because every electronic machine use microprocessor ... thank you Robers NOYSE ... you find microprocessor..


good sleep Mr. Noyce in your garden of Eden...

Noyce Scholars in South Carolina

The Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program, funded by the National Science Foundation, provides grants to universities to help them prepare promising math, science, and engineering graduates as teachers for high-need school districts. Noyce Scholars receive financial support and stipends as they earn their master's degree and become math or science teachers.

I'm just home from a visit to the Southeast Regional Noyce Scholars conference held in Greenville, South Carolina, hosted by Clemson University and Newberry College. In attendance were about 150 Noyce Scholars and faculty from 20 colleges and universities in eight states. I enjoyed three days of South Carolina warmth--people and weather-- rubbing shoulders with enthusiastic, dedicated students. Where else can you find people like my new friend Cindy, who makes "yam" into a two-syllable word? I accompanied a brilliant young student teacher named Katie to Beck Academy, where she's preparing as a middle school teacher of both math and English.

I've learned from visiting a couple of Noyce Scholarship programs that many people involved in the program, especially early on when they're first applying, have no idea who Robert Noyce was. Many of them scratch their head trying to decipher NOYCE as an acronoym. National Organization of Young Company Entrepreneurs? New Opportunities for Youth Contemplating Education? Once they do figure it out, many wrongly assume that the Noyce Scholarship Program is funded by the Noyce Foundation. All over the country people come up to me and thank me for the program. I reply graciously but tell them it was conceived by a congressman and has been funded annually since 2002 by a Congress rightly concerned about preparing math and science teachers to inspire tomorrow's innovators.

I gave three talks at the conference. The first was a breakout session on integrating math and literature at the middle school, using Lost in Lexicon as a case study. Since the conference organizers had bought copies of the book for the first 120 attendees, people were intrigued and we had a lively interchange. The second was a talk I've given once before, called "Lighting the Fire in the Next Generation: Grand Challenges in Math and Science." Once again, the audience came up with good ideas. The third, and the most fun for me, was a dinner address called "Go Out and Do Something Wonderful," in which I draw lessons from anecdotes about my father's life and offer eight bits of advice he might have given to new and aspiring teachers.

At the end of my dinner talk (I later learned two Scholars tweeted the eight pieces of advice out to their colleagues), Lienne Medford asked all the Scholars in the room to stand. They rose, a cohort of at least a hundred, ready to march into a life of service. "There, Penny" said Lienne. "Along with everything else he gave the world, there is your father's legacy." I couldn't stop smiling.

Intel Museum

The Intel Museum is located in the Robert Noyce Building at company headquarters in Santa Clara, California. Yesterday Intel vice president Stuart Pann took seven of Robert Noyce's grandchildren on a tour of the museum, and three of us adults and a friend came along. It had been many years since we last visited with the kids, so all of us learned something.

My father started Intel in 1968 because Fairchild Semiconductor was getting too big to be fun anymore, with more employees than his hometown of Grinnell, Iowa had residents. Today Intel does $43 billion of business annually and has 85,000 employees worldwide. Intel's first chip, the 4040, had 2300 transistors. Its current top line chip contains 1.8 billion transistors and costs $200.

A silicon chip is made with a layer of silicon doped with arsenic to make it a semiconductor, which means that it can act as an on-off switch, conducting electricity in one configuration and acting as an insulator in another. Microscopic circuits are photo-etched right onto the surface of the silicon, in layers that are currently as little as 10 atoms thick. The circuits are so tiny and precise that a stray hair or flake of skin could ruin a whole batch, which is why chips have to be manufactured by people in coverall "bunny suits" in "clean rooms" 100 times cleaner than a surgical operating room.

Each new manufacturing facility or "fab" costs $2 to $3.5 billion to build. Twenty-five percent of the cost is the building itself, with its hundreds of miles of wiring and piping, and 75% is equipment. On average a fab has a million square feet and consists of several four-story buildings separated by inches of padding to minimize vibration transfer from one part of the fab to another. Intel has standardized the construction of these buildings well enough that a new fab can be constructed, up, and running within a year of breaking ground.

The computer chip has revolutionized the world, especially in the worlds of communication and commerce, and it has done so by the efforts of thousands of engineers constantly chipping away at the physical barriers of what we can do. These efforts have allowed the fulfillment of "Moore's Law," Gordon Moore's prescient observation that electronic advances allow the number of transistors to be placed on an integrated circuit (and therefore computing power) to double every 18-24 months even as costs fall by one half in the same period. Stuart told us that Intel can see its way to the next 3 generations of this progress, but after that, physical limits seem insuperable without another major conceptual breakthrough.

My favorite spot in the museum was an electronic copy of my father's scrapbook from age 12. In it he collected articles from Popular Mechanics, and on the first page he wrote that these were notes about his hobby, building things, which allowed m\him to make useful things and Christmas presents. We also went up to visit the VP and Presidential offices, each of which is a simple cubicle the same size as everybody else's: Intel still retains the egalitarian, meritocratic culture that has been its hallmark since the beginning.

On our way down the elevator, Damian whispered to me that he'd like to work at Intel, so I asked Stuart Pann what educational path someone should follow to be hired at Intel. What's needed, he replied, is a degree in engineering or computer science from a top twenty school. So later, at lunch, we looked up the top twenty schools on our iPhones-specialized knowledge at the flick of a finger, thanks to fast, cheap, plentiful and complex integrated circuits.

The SciGirls Seven and Model Airplanes

I'm feeling a bit guilty about my last post. After all, I represent the Noyce Foundation, and we work to inspire girls, among others, to pursue science and technology. Yet here I am saying I hated radio-controlled model airplanes.

Last week, I attended the National Girls' Collaborative Program conference for after-school STEM science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Among the attendees were the staff of SciGirls, a PBS program about science for tween girls. The show builds on seven research-based strategies for engaging girls in STEM. Most of them would probably apply equally to boys. The seven principles, condensed somewhat, are:

1. Collaboration, especially when it feels fair
2. Personally relevant and meaningful projects
3. Hands-on, open-ended projects and investigations
4. A chance for girls to use their own approach, creativity, and talents
5. Specific positive feedback on aspects of their performance girls can control
6. Encouragement to think critically
7. Relationships with role models and mentors.

When I look back at the radio-controlled model airplanes in my life, it's easy to see why they didn't attract me. To be honest, there was no room for me in an extablished bonding activity my father and brother shared. I came in late, with no special skills to offer. There was no chance to collaborate on an even playing field. Any tasks given to me would be low-level closed tasks, with no room for my special interests or talents, such as writing or making things up. And once we went out to the flying field, it was a completely male environment. Women didn't fly model airplanes.

I liked science. I loved my science books, with their beautiful pictures and strange theories about things like how the earth was formed. I liked doing experiments. In sixth grade my father helped me with a long and complicated independent project on growing radish seeds hydroponically. He brought home from Fairchild white plastic bottles full of chemicals, and I selectively left one or another chemical out of the peat moss mix, with positive (all the chemicals) and negative (water only) controls. I loved it. Growing plants without soil - that caught my imagination. I thought about how to design the experiment, and I made my own choices. My data made sense and I wrote the project up beautifully. Most of all, I got to spend time with my beloved and approving father.

Somehow we have to help girls (and boys) share experiences that play the role that flying model airplanes did for my brother or that my hydroponics project did for me. Kids deserve the chance to be immersed in something that matters to them, where their skills and thoughts count, and where they can gain competence while interacting with an important adult. That's one of the things the Noyce Foundation is trying to do with our focus on out-of-school science, and it's something I'll be writing more about.

I Don't Love Model Airplanes

My father and brother used to build radio-controlled model airplanes in the basement. Sometimes I went down to try to join them. The steps down to the basement were painted maroon. The basement floor was a reddish cement, and fluorescent lights glimmered overhead. A smell of dry plaster lingered in the air. On the wall hung a large portrait of my father, and for some reason there was a stain of spray paint on it that looked like a bug sitting on his lapel.

My father and brother leaned over their intricate work of gluing balsa or soldering the electronics. There was no room for a casual dropper-by. They barely raised their heads to say hello.

On Sunday mornings, they took their airplanes out to the schoolyard to fly. I tagged along sometimes. I really wanted a chance to fly an airplane by remote control, but it turned out that he who built the plane got to fly it.

My brother splashed fuel as he poured it into the little engine, and I didn’t like the smell. My father spun the propeller until it snarled to life. The sound hurt my ears. The plane climbed, banked, covered some distance, and as it turned for home, went into a spin and crashed. We tromped through the brush searching for it, getting burrs stuck in our socks, and once we gathered up the pieces they took it home for another week of repairs and adjustments.

It was so boring. For weeks and weeks I tried to love any single thing about model airplanes, but I couldn’t.

One day our calico cat gave birth to kittens on the basement stairs. She wasn’t the brightest or most experienced of mothers. She just lay down on a step, fat and heavy, and one by one the kittens in their glistening gray packages plopped onto the next step down. It was fascinating. My sister and I caught the kittens as they dropped so they didn’t just keep on bouncing all the way to the bottom of the stairs. Then their mother licked them off.

I don’t know if this is true, but I imagine my father and brother still bent over their models, oblivious to the drama occurring behind them.

My brother became an engineer, my sister a farmer, and me a doctor. And I still don’t love model airplanes.

The Man Behind the Microchip

I just learned that Leslie Berlin, Stanford historian of technology and business, had a hand in designing the display I admired when I visited Grinnell ten days ago. Leslie is the author of The Man Behind the Microchip, a biography of my father. She's a great interviewer with broad interests and a fair-minded approach, and when I read it, I learned a lot about my father's business and scientific accomplishments that I had never known.

For anyone interested in learning more about the dawn of Silicon Valley and the spirit behind the electronics revolution--the optimism of the period after World War II when America was stepping into its role as the pre-eminent engine of innovation in the world--this is still a great read. It's well-researched and well-written, and it does justice to its subject, which is saying a lot.

The book had its painful aspects, too, for me as a reader. The story of the breakup of my parents' marriage, while handled lightly, made me put the book away for several weeks before I could read all the way through it. I think that just attests to the quality of the biography. It was very real to me, and it rang true.

So hats off to a great biographer, Leslie Berlin, and I highly recommend reading The Man Behind the Microchip.

Grinnell and Robert Noyce

My father, Robert Noyce, as most readers of this blog will know, attended and loved Grinnell College in Iowa. He offered Grinnell a chance to buy into Intel very early, and their decision to do so led directly to Grinnell's status as one of the colleges with the highest per-student endowment in the nation. The Robert Noyce Science Center on campus is named in honor of my father, Grinnell physics graduate, sometime chairman of the Grinnell board of trustees, co-inventor of the integrated circuit and founder, with Gordon Moore, of Intel.

The science center is a beautiful building with silver LEED certification (which means it's quite a green building). Each scientific discipline desinged its own classrooms. They've arranged the rooms to maximize group work and lab work, with the labs often communicating directly with the classroom, so students can move seamlessly between classroom and laboratory within a single time slot.

With the building renovation in 2008, Intel helped Grinnell set up a tasteful display and tribute to Robert Noyce at the foot of the main staircase. It gives an overview of his career at Grinnell, MIT, Fairchild, Intel, and beyond. I found a couple of quotations particularly meaningful. The first, about optimism, I know well. It typifies the spirit I'd been talking about in my speech to Iowas teacher educators, a spirit I'd like to see us instill in young students as they face the grand world challenges ahead of them. Here it is:

Optimism is an essential ingredient for innovation. How else can the individual welcome change over security, adventure over staying in safe places?

-Robert Noyce

I was surprised to find also a few lines I said at my father's memorial service twenty years ago. I remember saying them, but couldn't have reproduced them on my own:

What mattered most, he told us, was to do what we did best, and to have fun doing it. He taught us to be doers, not bystanders. He never watched sports on television or read about others' adventures. He was too busy pursuing adventures of his own.

This observation stills feels very true to me today. The spirit of "Don't just watch, do!" permeates the story I've just written, Lost in Lexicon. It is also what inspired me to write the book, picking up once again a long-treasured dream of writing.

Visiting Grinnell and grand challenges

I'm visiting Grinnell, Iowa, where my father grew up, and where my father, aunts and uncles, and many cousins attended college. Grinnell, a small college town with a lovely campus, is quiet and steamy in the summer. In the evening the cicadas are loud, and the last of the fireflies spark in the dusk. I'm staying in The Carriage House, a charming bed-and-breakfast on the English model.

I came for a summit of math and science teacher educators held by IMSEP, the Iowa Math and Science Education Partnership. I gave the opening address, entitled "Grand Challenges and Inspiration: Lighting the Fire in the Next Generation." In the speech, I argued that all our arguments about the need for more math and science education to preserve American competitiveness fail to inspire young people. I suggested that instead of haranguing them, we need to tap into their idealism and their desire to contribute as active agents in making a better world.

The National Academy of Engineering has articulated fourteen grand challenges (http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/) for the coming generation to meet, ranging from making solar energy economical to reverse engineering the brain and preventing nuclear terror. Not all of these are easily adaptable to the K-12 classroom, but some are--and probably more of them than I think.

I believe IMSEP will post the talk, and when they do I'll post a link to it.

I also ran a small breakout session asking whether it's feasible to mix math and literature at the middle school. The texts we looked at were Flatland, The Phantom Tollbooth, and my own upcoming book, Lost in Lexicon (See htttp://www.lostinlexicon.com). We discussed how Flatland investigates perspective, prejudice, and a limited viewpoint from both a social and mathematical perspective. We examined how an incorrect problem in The Phantom Tollbooth underlines the difference between reading a story and reading mathematics. Finally, I highlighted several examples from Lost in Lexicon of how mathematics and language intersect, as in a discussion of logic and irrationality, along with some interesting mathematical extensions in number systems, simple algebra, and plane geometry.

The session was an experiment for me, exploring how the mathematics of these books can be accessed at different levels of mathematical sophistication. It went well enough that I think I'll try to write up the talk to publish on my website or elsewhere.