 Here's your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at a really special presentation where at Santa Clara, California, the R&B building, the Robert Noyce building, headquarters of Intel. In the Intel Museum, a really great location to interview someone I've been trying to get on theCUBE now for months and months and months. We finally got on the calendar, so Leslie Berlin, welcome. Thanks. Leslie is a historian at Stanford. She's been studying Silicon Valley. She's part of her PhD work and she wrote a really terrific book called The Man Behind the Microchip, the story of Robert Noyce. And Robert Noyce is probably of the three kind of guys we think about that founded Intel. He's the one that unfortunately passed away early and we don't know as much about him, I think as most people do. So I wanted to get Leslie on terrific book and talk a little bit about Mr. Robert Noyce because we're in R&B. Right. So it's awesome. So we all know about Andy Grove, right? Only the paranoid survive and we all know about Gordon Moore and Moore's law but we don't know about Robert Noyce. What should people know about Robert Noyce? Who was he? Give us kind of a little background. So my favorite little sound bite about Noyce was that he was called the Thomas Edison and the Henry Ford of Silicon Valley, sort of a twofer and one guy. And that's because he both invented one of the most important technologies in the Valley which was the integrated circuit which lies at the heart of all modern electronics, better known as the microchip. And he also started two of the most important companies in Silicon Valley history. The first one was Fairchild Semiconductor which is really the first successful Silicon company in Silicon Valley. It is what made Silicon work in Silicon Valley. And then the second was Intel which nothing more needs to be said. We're right here and look at it. Yeah, it is interesting. He created the Silicon that created Silicon Valley and as you talk about in your book, Silicon Valley used to be agricultural, used to be apricots and peaches and really a big fruit growing region and he really changed that with what he did. And what's interesting to me too is a lot of the characteristics of Robert Noyce both as an inventor as well as a businessman, as an adventurer, as a risk taker, really define and continue to define what Silicon Valley is today and a lot of the leaders that followed after him. I know he had a lot of influence on people like jobs and others. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the personality kind of behind the man. Right, so I think the sort of first thing Noyce would do if he heard us having this conversation right now is he'd say, whoa, whoa, whoa, I didn't do all that by myself. He would be the first person to tell you that he was a team player from the very beginning. So he's actually considered the co-inventor of the integrated circuit but what he did to sort of make it possible to layer on top of the Silicon wafer was only one step in what needed to happen to actually finally get to where we are now, obviously. In addition, when he started Fairchild Semiconductor he was one of eight founders of that company and we can talk about that in a second. And then here at Intel, he co-founded Intel with Gordon Moore. He didn't do that by himself. And of course, Andy Grove came on very quickly, Les Vides came on very quickly. And so the whole way through, he's always been a team player. And I think that really, that aspect of his personality is very important for understanding how Silicon Valley works and how high-tech innovation in general works. You don't, we all have this idea of sort of the mad scientist in his, with his white lab coat, the hair. I mean, no one who knows what they're talking about has that idea, but that's the image we still have in our minds of inventors. And it's really very much of a team effort. So that would be the first thing I'd say about Noyce's personality. The second thing I'd say is that he was this very unusual combination of sort of an extreme risk taker and very, very humble. He was the son of a preacher and the grandson of two preachers. He grew up in the middle of Iowa. He liked to be seen. He was a champion diver. He was, he sang in madrigal groups for his entire, actually all the way through, which I think is also interesting. Madrigals is a type of singing where all the voices blend together. And again, one of these sort of team approaches. And he never was above sort of showing off one of the many parties that defined early Silicon Valley culture. But he was always very humble. At the same time, he was a huge risk taker from the time that he was a young boy and decided to build a boy-sized glider pulling together everyone in the neighborhood, taking it to the roof of a barn behind his house and running right off the edge of the roof, standing inside this glider. And from that very moment, through everything he did, both technically and entrepreneurially, he really was, he basically never saw an idea he didn't like. And part of what made the team approach, particularly here at Intel, so important for him, was that he was someone who just, I mean, ideas just sort of fell off this guy. He was, he was in, he could have been inspired by a doorknob. But he didn't have anything really in the way of a filter. And Gordon Moore was this incredible filter who worked right next to him and was able to say, nope, nope, nope, nope, interest, you know, how about that one? Let's try that one. And that made for a great partnership. The other thing about Noyce, we really like to think of our sort of, these founders who developed these sort of big stories around them, because it's interesting you say that maybe Noyce wasn't as well known as Moore and Grove. Noyce was the rock star of Silicon Valley in the 1980s. I mean, he, to say he was on the scale that Steve Jobs was is not quite fair because electronics hadn't filtered down to consumers yet. So, but to the extent that there was someone who was seen as sort of the face and the incarnation of a Silicon Valley spirit, that was absolutely Bob Noyce. And so we like to think of these people as almost infallible, but Noyce would be the first to tell you that he was not a good manager at all. His nickname was Dr. Nice. He hated for people to be angry at him. He hated confrontation. And he, when they started Fairchild in 1957, this company grew to be one of the fastest growing, most successful companies up to date. And then it all fell apart. It completely fell apart. And there were a lot of reasons it did, but Noyce was pointed out in a letter that he wrote when he resigned from Fairchild that he had to bear some of the blame. And one of the reasons that he did was that he just trusted that he had hired very smart people and they were gonna do what they said. He realized he needed someone who would come around and make sure they did what they said and that was Andy Grove, who Noyce called the whip. And this made them an incredibly powerful team. So I realize that's a theme I keep coming back to, but it's an important one. It's an important one. And you combine that teamwork with this kind of phenomenon of being part of a bigger company. And you talked about in your book, when you went to Shockley and Shockley was a legend in the business to then leave that and start at Fairchild, which was just not done back in the day. And what a unique concept that was. And then the difficulty they had in getting people to come to Silicon Valley. I love your explanation of the shot with the umbrella that it was their Christmas shot. Come to the Valley, it's beautiful weather, good schools and affordable housing, which is a great little plug. But it does take a special team. And it's funny you talk about Andy being kind of the taskmaster. I remember when I came to Intel, it was famous for Andy standing outside and you better be through those doors at 8 a.m. because meetings here start at 8 a.m. So it does take a combination and the fact that he appreciated that to build something as big as Intel after Fairchild didn't or wasn't as successful as he wanted really is a good statement. Well, and he also really recognized his limits by which I mean he knew he was great at starting things. He knew he was great at inspiring people, getting things off the ground. He moved out of the executive suite and into the chairmanship of the board when Intel was only six years old. So he really recognized where he was good and the sort of long-term vision that he could provide. I love your point about Silicon Valley having been just the boonies back in the day. I mean, that's absolutely right. Everything of interest that was happening anywhere in electronics when we're talking about, so Fairchild's founded in 57, Noyce came in 56 to work for William Shockley. And everything of interest in tech was still more or less happening sort of take Bell Labs and sort of draw a couple of circles around it. And you had some interesting stuff happening in Southern California. But yeah, it was, they definitely were recruiting for a certain type of person and they really benefited as Silicon Valley has always benefited from huge waves of migration. Back in Noyce's day, these were people coming from the rest of the United States to California. So you had something insane like 100 people moving into Santa Clara County every hour for 20 years. I mean, the population of this place between, say, 1950 and 1970 went berserk. But it's continued to have the real benefit of what I think of as a constant refresh button of new minds coming in, people wanting to be here. And now those people come from all over the world and that is just an, it's an incalculably valuable part of not only Silicon Valley, but the entire American economy. So talk about kind of the Silicon Valley, the myth, kind of what we think of as Silicon Valley. It's way more than Silicon now. It's not even really probably based in Santa Clara. The center seems to kind of move up and down 101 depending on what's hot, you know, whether it's in Redwood City when Oracle's on a tear up to San Mateo and Salesforce and kind of a software up to San Francisco around media, which really seems to be booming now. And of course you have Google sitting right where Silicon Graphics was and Mountain View and all the activity. But talk about kind of ethos of what makes Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley, how much of that, you know, kind of came from early trend setters like noise. How much of it's real? How much of its perception and will it continue? Will it sustain? I mean, you're a historian and you're living in the middle of a relatively short historical period that you can actually talk to most of the principals. Yeah, yeah, it's actually been a really wonderful part of having chosen this field. Yeah, so I would say the essence of Silicon Valley has remained the same in some sense, by which I mean this is a region that has reinvented itself decade after decade after decade. So if you were here in the 40s, particularly during the war and immediately after, because one thing that people don't really necessarily know about Silicon Valley is how important the Department of Defense was in launching this area because the Department of Defense had deep pockets and would do anything during the war, but especially during the space race. Anything to get faster, cheaper, better payloads up, heavier into space. And so they spent enormous amounts of money on Silicon Valley technology. At a time before there were venture capitalists, before they were a very important source of capital. But if you look back in the, say, 40s, people would have said, oh, Silicon Valley's all about instrumentation. This is the land of Hewlett Packard. When you get into the 50s, you start seeing some semiconductors in the 60s. It's really semiconductors. The 70s, well now you're in consumer electronics. You have Atari, you have Apple. These start to be sort of the companies. Then you have the personal electronics revolution. You have biotech starting late 70s into the 80s and it sort of seems like, well maybe that's the way we're gonna be going. And then you get into the whole sort of web and web 2.0 and then the bubble and then it comes back. And this seems to be sort of the MO of the Valley and really it's vital asset. If you think about it, there've been sort of regional economies. I mean, go back to medieval Europe. They're sort of the shoemaking town. This has been going on forever. You've got Detroit here. In the 50s, that was a specific industrial economy. But what has made Silicon Valley absolutely unique in my mind is that what that economy is, what that industry is, has continued to morph again and again. For that again, I give a lot of credit to two things. One, the existence of Moore's law, which has been vitally important for making it possible to do more and more and more with electronics. And two, these people coming in who have actually made Moore's law happen. Moore's law is not a law of nature. Moore's law is an agreement that we've all made among ourselves that it ought to be possible to double the rate of transistors, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then people say, well, this ought to be possible. Let's make it happen. And the customers plan their next release around the assumption of these sorts of changes. And so it is a human construct. And so it's that combination of the technology and the people that have made it possible for the Valley to reinvent itself, reinvent itself and reinvent itself because people have been counting the Valley out since the oil crisis in the 70s. And it's always been the same thing. It's too expensive, people's commutes are horrible, and it's too crowded. These have been the reasons that Silicon Valley has going to die since the mid-1970s. And the other thing that's really important when I'm talking about the changes in the Valley is that we've also seen it go from a manufacturing economy to basically a software economy and a thought economy. You had, in the beginning here, Apple was building its computers here. Intel was building its chips here. There were factories. Some of them were called fabs. But they were factories. And there were factory workers. And there were very good middle-class jobs. And it was a different type of economy than it is now. And again, it's the Valley's ability to just morph that, to me, has been unique and can be traced to the technology and the people. Because it's really this idea that there are no limits. I mean, you summed it up as more laws, really, a function of people deciding that there should be no limits. And it just continues to amaze me how the industries continue to shift, even outside of core technology. I mean, the latest examples being Tesla. It's a car manufacturer. They took over the manufacturing facility in Fremont from Toyota, who was making trucks over there. Now they're making cars. Uber, which is a way to cite an example, but it's still a phenomenal example of who would ever think you could digitally transform the taxi industry of all things. And just again, this phenomenal thing. And as you said, people continuing to build on the shoulders of others with open source, with, and now an API economy, with cloud and mobile and social. It just continues to roll. So again, from a historian's perspective, we're running a little bit out of time. You're sitting at Stanford, which again keeps these people coming in through Stanford. The weather's too nice. They don't leave. Doesn't happen at Penn. Exactly, right, right. What's next? What are you working on? What do you kind of see as the next big wave or what's kind of keeping your attention right now? Well, I have moved all the way into the early 1980s in my research. So. No, I am fascinated by the 1970s, which is this timeframe during which you have the birth, really in the space of eight years, you have the birth of five major industries in the space of basically eight miles here in the valley. And that's what I'm writing about now. And I'm very excited. Winds are coming out. Here we have a date. Approximate date. I'm submitting the manuscript at the end of this year. Oh, awesome. That'll be up to the publisher. All right. Well, Leslie, we'll have to get you back on when that book gets out. I love that. I can't believe your other book came out in 2006, so still go out and read it. It's a phenomenal book. It's a timeless piece about someone who's really important in Silicon Valley and what Silicon Valley means, much more than Silicon. Thank you. Thanks for stopping by. Leslie Berlin from Stanford, the author of The Man Behind the Microchip, a biography of Robert Noyce. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We are at R&B, Robert Noyce Building, Santa Clara, California. Thanks for watching.