The Accidental Entrepreneur

by Gordon E. Moore

Like many other scientists and engineers who
have ended up founding companies, I didn't leave
Caltech as an entrepreneur. I had no training inbusiness; after my sophomore year of college I
didn't take any courses outside of chemistry,math, and physics. My career as an entrepreneur
happened quite by accident.
And it ran counter to early predictions. WhenI was graduating from Cal tech with my PhD in
chemistry in 1954, I interviewed for jobs withseveral companies, one of which was Dow Chemical. Dow was interested in setting up a researchlaboratory in California, and they thought I
might be someone they could send to headquarters in Midland, Michigan, to train to come backhere in some kind of managerial role. So they
sent me to a psychologist to see how this would
fit. The psychologist said I was OK technicallybut I'd never manage anything. Dow did end up
offering me a job in Midland, but the transfer
back to California was no longer a part of it.
I didn't go to Midland after all, but went instead to the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns
Hopkins University, which has roughly the same
relationship to Johns Hopkins that JPL has toCaltech, and where I could continue to do basic
research in areas related to what I had done before. But I found myself calculating the cost per
word in the articles we published and wondering
if the taxpayers were really getting their money's
worth at $S per word. Just as I was starting toworry about the taxpayers, the group I was working in was, for various reasons, breaking apart.
So I decided to look for something that had a bit
more of a practical bent, and at the same time see

There is sucha thing as anatural-born
entrepreneur. .
But the accidental entrepreneur
like me has to fall
into the opportunity or be pushed
into it.

if I could get myself back to California.
Lawrence Livermore Laboratory interviewed
me and offered me a job, but I decided I didn't
want to take spectra of exploding nuclear bombs,
so I turned it down. Then one evening I got acall from Bill Shockley, who had gotten my namefrom Lawrence Livermore's list of people who hadturned them down. Now, Shockley is a namethat has a Cal tech association. After earning his
BS here in 1932 he went on to invent thetransistor. He had been working at Bell Laboratories, and now he wanted to set up a semiconductor company our on the West Coast (a lot of
Cal tech connections here-the operation was
financed by Arnold Beckman) with the idea ofmaking a cheap silicon transistor. Shockley knewthat a chemist was useful in the semiconductorbusiness; they had chemists at Bell Labs, where
they did useful things. And I was a chemist, so
Shockley caught up with me. Still not anentrepreneur, I decided to join this operation.
I was employee number 18. This was a startup operation. All of us except Shockley wereyoung scientists, in our late twenties. I had no
management experience or training. Unfortunately, neither did Shockley. He had run a research group at Bell Laboratories, but this was tobe an enterprise rather than a research group, andhe had no real experience in running a company.
I suppose maybe I should have been suspicious
when none of the people who had worked withhim at Bell Labs joined his new venture, but I
didn't even begin to think about that then.
Shockley was phenomenal from the pointof view of his physical intuition. One of myEngineering & Science/Summer 1994

23

William Shockley's
employees drink a
toast to him on the
day in 1956 when hewon the Nobel Prize
for inventing thetransistor. Eight ofthe crew shown here,
including Bob Noyce,
standing at centerwith raised glass, andGordon Moore, seatedat left and turned
toward Shockley,went off on their own
the next year andfounded Fairchild
Semiconductor
Corporation.

24

colleagues claimed Shockley could see electrons.
He had a tremendous feeling for what was goingon, say, in silicon, but he had some peculiar ideas
for motivating people. For example, the company had something we dubbed the PhD production line. One day he told a group of us: 'Tm notsure you're suited for this kind of a business.
We're going to find our. You're going to go out
there and set up a production line and run it.
You know, do the operation, not direct it." Thisdidn't go over especially well, because the group
dutifully tried to operate a production line ona product that was still in the early stages ofdevelopment.
He also set up a secret project. Those of us
who weren't involved couldn't know what it was,although Shockley did let us know that it waspotentially as important as the invention of thetransistor. In such a small entrepreneurial group,
having in-people and out-people created somedissension, the sort of thing that makes it hard to
keep everybody working together as a team. As
another illustration of his motivating skills, one
day Shockley asked a group of us what we would
like to do to make the job more interesting.
Would we like to publish some papers? We said,"OK," so as a way of satisfYing this demand hewent home that night and worked out the theoryof an effect in semiconductors. He came back thenext day and said, "Here. Flesh this out and put
your name on it and publish it." Finally, thebeginning of the end, as far as morale was concerned, occurred when we had a minor problem
in the company and Shockley decided that theentire staff was going to have to take lie detector

Engineering & Science/Summer 1994

tests to find out who was responsible for it.
Then he switched from his original idea ofbuilding a cheap silicon transistor to building arather obscure device known as a four-layer diode.
We viewed this with considerable concern,
because some of us didn't understand exactly
where the four-layer diode fit in. One day, when
Arnold Beckman came around to talk to thegroup, Shockley made some closing remarks, justout of the blue, indicating that he could take his
staff and go someplace else if Beckman wasn't
enthusiastic about what was happening there. So,
given all these problems, we decided that we had
to go around Shockley to solve them. A group of
us contacted Beckman and sat down with him
through a series of dinners to try to work out aposition for Shockley, in which he could give us
the benefit of his technical insights but not of his
management philosophy. We were thinking interms of a professorship at Stanford. By thattime, he had won a Nobel Prize, and Nobel Prizewinners can get a professorship almost anywhere.
What we didn't appreciate is that it's awfully
hard to push a Nobel Prize winner aside. Beckman decided (as the result of advice he hadreceived elsewhere) that he really couldn't dothis to Shockley. We were told essentially that
Shockley was in charge, and if we didn't like it
we probably ought to look at doing somethingelse. We felt we had burned our bridges so badly
by that time that we clearly had to leave, and we
started to look at alternatives. (Shockley's company held on for a few years, was acquired by
Clevite Corporation, and died eventually.)
And this is where I finally became an entrepreneur. One of our group had a friend at Hayden
Stone, a New York investment banking house.
He wrote the friend a letter saying that there wasa group of eight of us here that really enjoyedworking together, but that we were leaving ourcurrent employment, and did he think that somecompany might like to hire all of us. The investment bankers said, "Wait a minute," and sent
one of the partners, Bud Coyle, and a young
Harvard MBA named Arthur Rock out fromNew York to visit with us. They talked to us
and said: "You don't want to look for a company
to hire you; you want to set up your own company." That didn't sound bad. By doing that we
could stay where we were. We had all boughthouses by then (they were affordable in California
at that time), and we wouldn't have to move. It
seemed a lot easier, so we said, "OK; fine; let's doit," and they said they would find backing for us.
So we sat down with The Wall Street journal,
and went through the New York Stock Exchange
listings, company by company, to identifY which

The Fairchild Eight(a.k.a. the Shockley
Eight' at Fairchild
Semiconductor in
1959. From left:
Gordon Moore,
Sheldon Roberts,
Eugene Kleiner, Bob
Noyce, Victor Grinich,Julius Blank, Jean
Hoerni, and Jay Last.
(© Photograph byWayne F. Miller,
Magnum Photos,

Each of the eightof us invested$500 in thisstartup. ...
Fairchild put up
some $1.3 million to get us
going, and we
started Fairchild
Semiconductor
Corporation.

ones we thought might be interested in supporting a semiconductor venture. We identified 30some companies, and Arthur and Bud went out
and contacted every one of them. They all turned
it down without even talking to us. Then, quite
by accident, Arthur and Bud ran into Sherman
Fairchild, who happened to be a technology buff;
he really loved new technology. He introduced
them to the chairman of Fairchild Camera andInstrument, who was willing to take a shot at
supporting this new company.
Each of the eight of us invested $500 in thisstart-up. That may not sound like much now,
but it was a month's salary in 1957. Fairchild
put up some $1.3 million to get us going, and we
started Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation.
We still weren't really quite entrepreneurs, but
we had learned something along the way . We
had learned from the Shockley experience thatnone of us knew how to run a company, so thefirst thing we had to do was to hire our own boss--essentially hire somebody to run the company.
We advertised for a general manager. Now,
when you advertise for a general manager forsomething like this, what you find is that every
salesman in the country is convinced that he canrun a company. But buried among all the responses from salesmen was one from Ed Baldwin,
the engineering manager for the Hughes semiconductor operation. In the mid-fifties, Hughes
was making diodes and was one of the largest
semiconductor companies in the world.
Baldwin came and told us a lot of things we
didn't know, so we decided that he was the rightguy to bring in to run our company for us. We

hired him, and he taught us a variety of things
that we hadn't learned before-since most of us
had not even worked for a successful manufacturing company. He taught us that the different
parts of the organization should be establishedwith different responsibilities; for example, youhave to set up the manufacturing operation
separate from the development laboratory. You
have to engineer and specify manufacturing
processes, which is completely different fromgetting something to work once in the laboratory. He even taught us that we should bring in amarketing manager, which we did. And everything was working fine: the development andpreproduction engineering for our processes andfirst products was complete; we had a thickprocess-spec book that recorded all the detailed
recipes; and we had interested customers. Then
one day we came to work and discovered that
Baldwin, along with a group of the people that
he had suggested we hire, were leaving to set up
a competing semiconductor company down theroad. This was the first of the Silicon Valley
spin-offs that we suffered.
We never really quite understood this. Baldwin had the same potential equity participationthat we did; but he never invested his $500 so henever got the stock. He didn't consider Fairchild
Semiconductor his company, and since he wanted
his own company, he left llS. (He and his groupalso left with the "recipes"; eventually they had toreturn the copy of the spec book to us.) After our
initial feelings of shock and betrayal, we sat down
and discussed what we should do. Should we goout and hire another guy to come in and run theEngineering & Science/Summer 199425

Literally dozens
of companies cameout of the Fairchild experience.
Not only did thetechnology comeout of it, but
Fairchild also
served as a successful andencouragzng
example of entrepreneurship-theij-that-jerk-cando-it-so-can-I
syndrome.

26

company) We decided instead that we would
try to go it alone with one of our own. So Bob
Noyce, who was the one of us with the mostsemiconductor industry experience, became
general manager. I took a sideways step to his
previous position as director of research anddevelopment.
Besides what Baldwin had walked off with, we
had a few other ideas coming along at that time.
One of them was something called a planartransistor, created by Jean Hoerni, a Cal tech
postdoc whom Shockley had recruited. In fact, I
had joined Shockley for the trip down to Pasadena to recruit him. Jean was a theoretician, and so
was not very useful at the time we were setting
up the original facility at Fairchild, building
furnaces and all that kind of stuff. He just sat in
his office, scribbling things on a piece of paper,and he came up with this idea for building atransistor with the silicon oxide layer left on top
over the junctions. Where the silicon junctions
come to the surface of the silicon is a very
sensitive area, which we used to expose and had
to work awfully hard to keep clean. Hoerni said,"Why not leave the oxide on there)" The conventional wisdom from Bell Laboratories had
been that by the time you got done, the oxide
was so dirty that you wanted to get rid of it.
Nobody had ever tried leaving the oxide on. We
couldn't try it either, because it required making
four mask steps, each indexed with respect to thenext with very high precision·-a technology that
didn't exist. Our first transistor took two mask
steps, and that was a fairly significant development operation.
So we couldn't even try Jean's idea until a year
and a half or so after we had gone into business.
When we finally got around to trying it, it
turned out to be a great idea; it solved all theprevious surface problems. Then we wondered
what else we might do with this planar technology. Bob Noyce came up with the two key inventions to make a practical integrated circuit: byleaving the oxide on, one could run interconnections as metal films over the top of its devices;and one could also put structures inside the silicon that isolated one transistor from the other.
Noyce and Kilby, who was at Texas Instruments, are often considered co-inventors of theintegrated circuit. In fact, they did dramaticallydifferent things. Kilby built a laboratory model-a little circuit with transistors and resistorsby etching long, thin semiconductor structures,
all connected by tiny wires. It really wasn't apractical production process. What Bob did was
to take the idea of the integrated circuit-thisplanar technology-and come up with a way ofEngineering & Science/Summer 1994

building a practical device.
It turned out that the world really wantedsome of these new devices, which led to somemanagement challenges. We didn't have any
idea of the magnitude of the opportunity we were
dealing with. We were still a bunch of guys in alaboratory, somewhat amazed that people actuallywanted to buy our products. We hadn't thought
about expanding, but here again our theoretician,Jean Hoerni, had early on made a contribution by
designing the layout of our facility to allow forwhat we presumed to be sufficient expansion-an
extra furnace here, more nitrogen cylinders there.
But we had little notion of the impact of our
discovery. Here we had developed and engineered the first integrated circuits, the first
family of logic circuits-very simple devices withsimple gates and flip flops-and put them into
production. I remember calling the senior people
in the laboratory together and saying, "OK, we've
done integrated circuits. What'll we do next?"
And we started looking for all the peculiar
physical effects we could find to see what new
devices we could invent. We hadlZo idea at allthat we had turned the first stone on somethingthat was going to be an $80 billion business.
As a result of our ignorance, we sent our
profits back to the parent company on the East
Coast rather than asking to reinvest them in
expanding Fairchild Semiconductor more rapidly.
Now, it's not clear that we could have expanded
a lot more rapidly even if we had tried, because
there were significant limitations on the management crew we had. We were all still going
through on-the-job training. We were mining
an extremely rich vein of technology, but themining company was too small to handle what
was going on. The net result was what I call the"Silicon-Valley effect": every new idea that camealong created at least one new company. Literally
dozens of companies came out of the Fairchildexperience. Not only did the technology comeout of it, but Fairchild also served as a successful
and encouraging example of entrepreneurship-the if-that-jerk-can-do-it-so-can-I syndrome.
While we were learning on the job, Fairchildgrew to be about a $150 million business andsome 30,000 employees by the late sixties. It wasa fairly significant corporation by the time wewere done. But things began to deterioratepartly, I think, because it was controlled by an
East Coast company. The West Coast tail was
not very effective at wagging the East Coast dog.
Fairchild developed some management problems.
In fact, the board fired two chief executive officers
within a six-month period, and was running thecompany with a three-man committee as theWhen Bob and I
started looking
around for business opportunities.
we identified onethat we thought
would rninimize
the advantages ofthe establishedcompanies.

Moore (left) and
Noyce at Intel in theearly seventies.
Starting a company
wasn't always easy.

board of directors. Clearly the direction of thecompany was going to change. When Bob
Noyce (who was the logical internal candidate to
become chief executive of the parent company,
Fairchild Camera) saw that he would be bypassed
for the job, he decided to leave. I felt that new
management would probably change the natureof the company significantly. I decided I'd rather
leave before any changes, than after. So the twoof us set off to do something else. We had reallycome a long way at Fairchild. We had also madea tremendous number of mistakes, and we hadsquandered opportunities along the way. 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.
Fortunately, good products make up for a lot of
problems in an organization, and I think that waswhat happened in our case.
When Bob and I started looking around forbusiness opportunities, we identified one that wethought would minimize the advantages of theestablished companies, such as Texas Instruments, Fairchild, and the others. This opportunity was one that would change the leverage. The
semiconductor industry had gotten to the pointby then where having large, low-cost assemblyplants in Southeast Asia was very importantcompetitively. But technology was capable ofmaking a more complex chip than we werecapable of defining. If you identified a complex
circuit function, it tended to be unique; it might
be used only once in every computer, so the unit
volume did not allow you to amortize the designcost. The net result was that relatively simple
circuits were still being made, even as the technology continued to evolve. We thought we saw
in semiconductor memory an opportunity tomake a product of almost arbitrary complexitythat could be used in all digital systems, and thatwould change the leverage from low-cost assembly back to cleverness in processing silicon. We
started our business on this idea.
Now, this was at a time when venture capital
was at a peak. Bob Noyce called Arthur Rockand said, "Hey, we want to set up a new company. Would you help us raise the money?" Arthur said sure, and that was the commitment of
our first round of financing . We wrote a singlepage business plan. It was very general. It said
we were going to work with silicon; we weregoing to do diffusion and other similar processes
and make interesting products.
Then we started looking at technologies thatwould be appropriate for the business we were
undertaking. In retrospect, I call it our "Goldilocks" technology strategy. We pursued three

Engineering & Science/Summer 199427

In 1969 Intel's 106
employees pose infront of the originalplant in Mountain
View, California.
Noyce stands in front
at left and Moore atright. Work was
already under way on
the microprocessor,
which was invented
by Intel engineer Ted
Hoff (standing at rightbehind Moore). The
world's first commer·
cial microprocessor,
Intel's 4004, shown on
the opposite page,
was introduced in
1971.

28

different directions. One was a particular kind of
bipolar transistor, called a Schottky bipolar, thatwas different from what was being used then. It
turned out that the technology worked just beautifully; better than anyone could have expected.
In fact, it worked so well, that competitors wereable to copy it rapidly. That was technology thatwas too easy. We chose another technology forassembling a lot of memory chips in one package-flipping them over and doing an advanced
type of assembly. We're still working on that
one, 25 years later. That one was too hard.
Fortunately, we also chose a third one-a newversion of the MOS (metal oxide semiconductor)
technology called silicon-gate MOS. Here thetransistor's "gate" electrode that previously was
made of a metal (usually aluminum)-the M in
MOS-was replaced by a film of silicon that had
several important advantages for device switching
speed and packing density on the silicon wafer
surface. And that one was just right. By concentrating on this one technology and focusing ourattention on a couple of difficult problems withit, we were able to solve the problems and get on
with it. But the established companies that weretending their main business and doing newprocess development on the side, didn't havetime to focus on solving the problems and took
several years to get going on it. Our initial
estimate was that we had five years to grow big
enough to prevent the existing companies fromputting us out of business. In fact, we had sevenyears before the big companies got into ourtechnology. Fortunately, very much by luck, we
had hit on a technology that had just the rightEngineering & Science/Summer 1994

degree of difficulty for a successful start-up. Thiswas how Intel began.
At Intel, we decided not to make the samekind of mistakes that we had made at Fairchild.
At Fairchild, for example, we used industrial
distributors to sell a good portion of our products-we sold them to a distributor; the distributor sold them to the final customer. We recorded
the sale when the product went to the distributor. Bur in our business, prices only go down.
The only question is whether they go down at 20
percent per year or at 80 percent per year. Once
at Fairchild, for example, when we had our
distributors well stocked with our products,
Motorola introduced a competitive device at asignificantly lower price. To match their prices,
we would have had to reverse sales revenue we
had already counted and to take a terrible hit on
our profit-and-Ioss statement, which we didn't
think we could afford. So we sat there andwatched our market share deteriorate while thatinventory sold out. We decided we wouldn't let
this happen at Intel. We don't take credit for asale when we sell a product to our distributor,
but only when it has moved off his shelves to thefinal customer. This was a bit of "technology"
that we had to sell to our accounting firm,
because it hadn't been done previously. But itturned out to solve that particular problem very
well. It is now standard industry practice.
From my own point of view, I had grown very
frustrated running a laboratory at Fairchild. As
the manufacturing group grew more competenttechnically, they were less willing to listen to thepeople in the laboratory as the experts. So when
we came up with some new idea in the laboratory-for example, stable MOS devices-we hadgreat difficulty transferring the detailed instructions to manufacturing. We were much more
effective in transferring new technology to thespin-off companies than we were internally. To
avoid that problem at Intel, and to promotemaximum efficiency of transfer from development to manufacturing, we decided not to set up
a separate laboratory. We've set up a variety ofdifferent kinds of mechanisms and organizations
along the way to make the development-tomanufacturing transfer as efficient as possible,
even at a sacrifice in efficiency of either the
manufacturing or the development process
individually. This has minimized spin-offs,
because we design our development specificallyto transfer into the factory; so we don't have theproblem of developing technology and ideas that
we have no place for. Technology transfer isalways difficult. We have tried to minimize
the need to transfer it.

Intel's 4004 chip,
which contained
2,200 transistors, wasa 4-bit microprocessor
and addressed 9.2 Kof memory (on anoth·
er chip). Although
this computer·on·a·chip began the revolu·tion in personal com·puters, the company
missed the boat on
getting into the PC
business.

From the beginning at Intel, we planned on
being big. Since we had already been fairly
successful at Fairchild, anything less successful in
our new venture would have been a disappointment. So, at the very beginning we recruited astaff that had high potential and that we thought
would be around to run the company for sometime. This is an opportunity that many start-ups
miss. There is no better chance to train managers
than in a start-up, where they have the opportunity to see the entire company as it grows. It
starts small and simple; one can see all the operations as they get bigger. I think that people
looking at start-ups, venture capitalists in particular, ought to push very strongly not tosquander the opportunity to develop management during that time period.
We also tried to minimize bureaucracy.
When we started Intel, for example, each one of
us took an area of technology as his own. And
instead of purchase requisitions, we gave ourengineers purchase order forms, so they could
work with the equipment supplier directly andjust hand the salesman a purchase order. This
shocked some of the vendors, but it was a very
effective, no-bureaucracy way of getting going.
Unfortunately, we can't do that today any more,
but at the time, when we were a faitly small
company, it worked very well.
Another thing we had learned along the way
was to raise money before we needed it. One
thing you find out after a little bit of experience
as an entrepreneur is that the bank will lend you
money as long as you don't need it. You can sell
stock as long as you really don't have to. With
good advice from directors such as Arthur Rock,
we have always had plenty of capital on hand, sothat we haven't been hindered in our ability to
raIse more.
At Fairchild we had no idea that we needed anorganization-that we had to set up a manufacturing department and an engineering department and a sales force. All these things soundlogical, but they take a while to figure out. And
one of the most important elements in an entrepreneurial organization is people management.
There are a lot of things that I've learned very late
in life about managing people, and ifI could goback again to the beginning ofIntel, I would domany things differently. For example, I havecome to appreciate the value of regular one-onone meetings with subordinates, where thesubordinate controls the meeting agenda. Suchsessions are very efficient for transferring information in both directions.
I suppose I can't end without bragging a bit
about Intel. We just completed our 25th year;

UWhat the heckwould anyone
want a computerfor in his home?"

our revenue was $8.8 billion, and our earnings
were over $2 billion. That puts us at least in the
top 20 and maybe in the top 10 of the world's
most profitable companies. We have steadily
increased our lead as the largest semiconductor
manufacturer and have more than 30,000
employees worldwide.
But there are some things I'm not quite soproud of that have come along with it. In 1984,
for example, we hit a peak of 26,000 employees;
in 1986 we were down to under 18,000. laying
off 8,000 employees is not a very pleasant task,
and it's something I think could have been
avoided had Intel management been a bit more
careful and perceptive.
And I can look back at a few missed opportunities. Some we missed by default. I remember
talking with venture capitalist Bill Davidow,
when he worked for Intel, about an engineering
workstation. Intel sold something we called a"development system," which was a specialpurpose computer for the engineer. We imagined that the engineer in the future would have asingle computer on his desk, and we talked about
what it ought to be. But even though we talked
about it, we were too darned busy doing otherthings, and we never got around to moving inthat direction. So we missed that chance completely. I suppose I could also look at the PC as
an opportunity we missed. long before Apple,
one of our engineers came to me with the suggestion that Intel ought to build a computer forthe home. And I asked him, "What the heckwould anyone want a computer for in his home?"(I still sometimes wonder, in spite of having a few

Engineering & Science/Summer 1994

29

Most of what I
learned as anentrepreneur wasby trial anderror, but I thinka lot of this really
could have beenlearned more
efficiently.

30of them.) The only example he could come up
with was something for the housewife to put her
recipes on. I could imagine Betty at the stovecooking, poking at her computer to read therecipe. It seemed ridiculous! Well, perhaps we
didn't miss that opportunity after all, because we
do make a profit out of the PC business-not by
being in it, but by serving it. And that may be
the best way.
We missed other opportunities by poor execution. One that really bothers me is that in 1985
we were driven out of the dynamic random accessmemory (DRAM) business, the business in which
we had made Out first significant profits andwhich had gotten us started as a successful company. But we were driven out partly because we
didn't execute a couple of generations of productsvery well, and partly because Japanese dumping
drove us out. Different economics for the Japanese companies allowed them to run their factories and sell their products far below cost. But
it still bothers me that we couldn't compete successfully in a business we had created.
Now, I don't mind missing an opportunity
because we tried and failed. We took some fairly
aggressive and not always successful steps toward
producing computer products early in the company's life-for example, the 432. The 432 wasprobably the first 32-bit microprocessor; it was
hardware designed to execute object-oriented
software; the hardware and software were designed together and had many advanced features.
At the time that we designed the system, thetechnology wasn't quite ready for such complexity, and in order to get all the functionality on thechip, we had to sacrifice performance. It ended
up being so slow it could do hardly anything, andwe had to abandon it. But at least it was anaggressive shot-one that we just didn't target
correctly.
Another shot that misfired was digital
watches. We were the first company in theliquid-crystal, digital-watch business. We hoped
the watch was a path to a portable digital productthat could be expanded to do much more thantell time. Other companies entering the eletronic-watch market drove prices through the floor.
The business opportunity we saw was completely
destroyed, if it ever really existed. I still have my$15-million watch, along with memories ofMicroma Watch, a division ofIntei. It wakes
me up in the morning; it has a good alarm systemon it, and liquid-crystal displays last for at least
20 years.
In retrospect, there are a lot of things we could
have done better along the way, but we didenough right to grow a fairly large company.

Engineering & Science/Summer 1994

The world has really been changing, too, during
this time period. Industry here and abroad has
enjoyed huge improvements in efficiency. For
example, I mentioned earlier that we had 26,000
employees in 1984. We just passed 26,000
employees again during this last year, and thecompany is five times as big in revenue as it wasthen. The competition today is a lot stronger
than it was in the past. A start-up company
today probably can't afford the sort of on-the-job
training that we could.
There is such a thing as a natural-born entrepreneur, for whom the entrepreneurial urge
drives everything and who can make a businessout of almost anything. But the accidental entrepreneur like me has to fall into the opportunity
or be pushed into it. Then the entrepreneurial
spirit eventually catches on. To me the opportunities to start a company are few and far between.
Things have to line up right. I'm not the sort ofentrepreneur who can just say, ''I'm going to starta company. Let's look for an opportunity." In
my entire career I think I've seen only about threeideas come by that I would consider a basis onwhich to try to start an enterprise. But starting acompany is certainly exciting, and building a
successful enterprise is satisfYing and rewarding.
Most of what I learned as an entrepreneur wasby trial and error, but I think a lot of this really
could have been learned more efficiently. I thinka place like Caltech could offer an opportunity to
avoid the need for trial and error in a lot of this.
Broadening the education to include some instruction in business-a little bit about financeand organizations-would certainly be useful,and I think a course in this direction would probably be a significant addition to the curriculum.
But a technical education is probably the best
start for an entrepreneur in a high-tech business.
And it's important to remember one otherthing that is essential for any entrepreneurialorganization: do what you do well. Look at otherthings as incremental opportunities, but don'tchange the basis of what you do well. For Caltech, what it does well is train the best scientists
and engineers in the world. My advice to Cal techis this: help students a bit if they want to move inentrepreneurial directions, but don't change thebasic nature of a Cal tech education.

Gordon Moore is chairman of the hoard of Intel
Corporation. He is afro chair of Calteeh's hoard oftrustees, elected last fall to slleceed Rtthen Mettler, This
article is adapted from a talk he gave at Calteeh lastlVIareb at tbe grotmdhreaking ceremonies of tbe Gordon
tmd Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering, being
built witb a $16.8 million gift from tbe Moores.