Andrew Grove — the Refugee Who Ran Intel

András István Gróf was born on September 2, 1936, into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, the son of a dairyman. His childhood was shaped by catastrophe. As a small boy he survived a near-fatal case of scarlet fever that permanently damaged his hearing, and during the Second World War he and his mother survived the Nazi and Hungarian Arrow Cross persecution of Hungary’s Jews by hiding under false identities while his father was taken to a labor camp. He told this story in his memoir, Swimming Across.

A decade later, history nearly swallowed him again. When Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the twenty-year-old fled across the border to Austria and made his way to the United States as a refugee, arriving in 1957 nearly penniless and speaking little English. He Anglicized his name to Andrew Grove, worked his way through the City College of New York to a degree in chemical engineering in 1960, and went on to earn a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963.

Grove joined the semiconductor industry at its birth. After working at Fairchild Semiconductor, he became one of the very first employees of Intel when Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded it in 1968 — effectively their operational right hand. Over the next three decades he rose to president in 1979 and chief executive in 1987, and it was Grove, as much as anyone, who built Intel into the dominant force in microprocessors and the engine of the personal-computer era.

Under his leadership Intel made the pivotal, painful decision to abandon the memory-chip business it had pioneered and bet the company on microprocessors — a gamble that made it one of the most valuable companies in the world. Named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1997, Grove was a refugee with damaged hearing and no money who became one of the defining figures of the computer age, and a celebrated teacher of management besides.