Traitorous Eight, the origin of the semiconductor and venture capital industries

Table of Contents

Traitorous Eight’s bio

Shockley Laboratory

In 1955, William Bradford Shockley Jr., one of the co-inventors of semiconductors and the “father of transistors”, left Bell Labs to create Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories. He attracted many talented young scientists to join. He hopes to mass-produce and commercialize the transistor technology he developed by recruiting the smartest scientists and engineers.

Traitorous Eight

But soon, Shockley’s management methods and weird behavior caused dissatisfaction among employees. Among them, the above-mentioned eight people decided to resign together, so they were called “Eight Rebels” by Shockley. Eight people received funding from the New York-based Fairchild Photographic Equipment Company and founded Fairchild Semiconductor Co., Ltd. in 1957. In 2016, ON Semiconductor (ticker: On) acquired Fast Semiconductor for $2.4 billion in cash.

Members of the Traitorous Eight include the following eight semiconductor engineers and scientists:

Robert Noyce
Gordon Moore
Julius Blank
Eugene Kleiner
Jean Hoerni
Jay Last
Sheldon Roberts
Victor Grinich

The origin venture capital industry

It stands to reason that smart people find smart people to do things that change the world, and usually bring good results, but although Shockley is an outstanding scientist and Nobel Prize winner, he is not a good manager and does not understand business models . Therefore, 8 top scientists under him, whom he called the Traitorous Eight, left him, and in the next few decades founded a well-known company and a new investment model: venture capital.

Companies founded by people related to Eight Traitors

Moore and Noyce

Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce then left for Quick. In July 1968, Noyce and Moore founded NM Electronics Corporation, later Intel Corporation (ticker: INTC).

Eugene Kleiner

In 1972, Eugene Kleiner co-founded Kleiner Perkins, Silicon Valley’s largest One of the venture capital firms.

Sanders and Turney

Jerry Sanders (Jerry Sanders) and Edwin Turney (Edwin Turney), who left quickly, founded Advanced Micro Devices (ticker: AMD) in 1969.

Valentine

Don Valentine’s main early career was with Raytheon (ticker: RTX). He later left to join National Semiconductor as a senior sales and marketing executive. In 2011, Texas Instruments (ticker: TXN) acquired National Semiconductor for $6.1 billion.

In 1972, he single-handedly established Sequoia Capital, which is now recognized as the world’s top venture capital and focuses on the technology industry.

Closing words

The birth of Silicon Valley, and the technology industry as we know it now, actually started with these eight traitors who deviated from the norm. For the complete story, you can refer to my previous blog post “The Power Law“.

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