Former Intel CEO Andy Grove has passed away

Andy Grove, the third man to join Intel after its founding and longtime CEO of the company, has died aged 79. Grove is seen as the man who is largely responsible for Intel’s growth into a chip giant.

Andrew, or Andy Grove, died Monday at his home in Los Altos, California. The Hungarian-born businessman laid the foundation for his career when he graduated in chemical engineering in 1963 and started working as a researcher at Fairchild Semiconductor. There he became acquainted with integrated circuits and wrote a book about it: Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices.

In 1968 he left Fairchild Semiconductor along with Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. The two founded Intel in that year, where Grove started working as head of the technology department immediately after its founding. Initially, Intel focused on dram production, but Grove made the decision to shift focus to microprocessors in the mid-1970s because there was more money to be made from them.

Grove then played a prominent role in the negotiations to get IBM to use Intel processors for the personal computer. He became Intel’s president in 1979, CEO in 1987 and chairman and CEO again in 1997. According to those involved, the CEO was extremely driven and his management style and the way he organized Intel’s organization had a major influence on Silicon Valley.

Andy Grove introduced a non-hierarchical organization and said goodbye to the boring cubicle office layout found in many other American companies. He was also known as a fanatical manager, as witnessed by his book and slogan ‘Only the paranoid survive’ and his earlier management book from 1983 ‘High Output Management’. Steve Jobs, among others, stated several times that he was inspired by Grove.