Legend of Xiangjiang Tycoon - Chapter 506

“The Legend of Hong Kong Tycoon (

The previous generation of the Fairchild family funded the old Watson to reorganize IBM, so the Fairchild family is IBM’s largest shareholder.

Of course, a brief remark from Noyce also played a role in persuading Fairchild.

This is how he describes the semiconductor industry of the future – Noyce said that these basic substances, which are essentially sand and metal wires, will make the cost of future transistor materials close to zero, so competition will turn to manufacturing processes, if Fairchild German investment, he will win this competition.

By then, cheap transistors will bring the cost of consumer electronics down so dramatically that it will be cheaper to manufacture them than to repair them.

Fairchild clearly understood Noyce’s 1957 description of the characteristics of the coming information age.

Noyce and others were all technical backgrounds and had no concept of equity. At that time, there was no equity structure of venture capital for reference. Therefore, these eight people entrusted Locke to design the equity structure of the future company.

The company is divided into 1,325 shares. Eight people including Noyce have 100 shares each. Hayden-Stone Investment Company, where Locke and Coyle are located, holds 225 shares, and the remaining 300 shares. The shares are reserved for future management and employees of the company.

Fairchild gave the soon-to-be company an eighteen-month loan of $1.38 million. In return, he did not own any shares, but had decision-making power (voting rights) over the company and had the right to Acquire all shares for $3 million anytime within eight years.

On September 18, 1957, the eight of them submitted their resignation reports to Shockley.

Shockley was furious at the time, calling them the “Eight Traitors”.

Because in the view of Shockley, the old-fashioned scientist, their behavior is different from the general resignation, but the student betrays the teacher.

Before joining the company, except for Noyce, who had some experience in transistor research, the others mastered transistor technology under his guidance, so in his opinion, it was like cheating.

Of course, this also led to the decline of Shockley.

The newly formed company of the “Eight Traitors” is called Fairchild.

Noyce is the leader of these eight young people. Everyone wants Noyce to be the general manager, but he only wants to be in charge of technology.

So the Eight Traitors decided to find a professional manager to do the management work. Before finding this person, Kleiner was a temporary general manager for a few days because he had contacted financing and was a bridge between investors and the eight founders. After recruiting Edward Baldwin as general manager, he resigned.

Everything that followed was much smoother than all of them expected.

Due to the very advanced technology mastered by Noyce and others, Fairchild quickly won the transistor contract for the Valkyrie supersonic bomber that Beautiful Country was developing at the time.

After the first hit, Fairchild won many military transistor contracts.

Subsequently, Fairchild, through Fairchild’s relationship, won the transistor contract for the transistor computer that IBM was developing, which established its leading position in the world’s semiconductor industry.

By the end of 1958, the company was prosperous and had grown to more than 100 employees, making it the second largest semiconductor company at the time.

Fairchild achieved profitability through its partnership with IBM and supplying transistors to the military, and it took less than a year from its founding to profitability.

In 1959, Fairchild repurchased all of its shares under the agreement.

Noyce and others received about $250,000 each, which was a considerable sum at the time, worth half their lifetime wages.

Without the company’s equity, Noyce and others eventually broke up with Fairchild, but the company was developing rapidly at that time, and its performance covered up all potential contradictions.

In 1959, when Fairchild’s investor Fairchild took back the company’s equity, general manager Edward Baldwin led eight employees to found his own semiconductor company, Rheem.

Rheem also became the first “golden egg” laid by Fairchild.

At that time, the “defection” of Edward Baldwin and others did not have much impact on Fairchild’s business, because Fairchild’s rapid development under the leadership of the new general manager Noyce.

But then people kept leaving Fairchild to start new semiconductor companies next to Fairchild.

The impact of smaller companies such as Rheem on Fairchild’s business in the first few years was not immediately apparent.

After Noyce officially became the general manager of Fairchild, he learned from Shockley’s lesson and worked hard to create a relaxed working atmosphere and a company culture without hierarchy.

However, Noyce’s tactical efforts to save Fairchild could not change the genetic defect of Fairchild itself, that is, the problem of equity structure.

When Fairchild was established in the late 1950s, there was no standardized venture capital industry, nor a win-win equity structure for founders and investors.

Although Fairchild’s investment in the “Eight Traitors” does not require property mortgage, and if the company fails to establish, it does not require compensation, but it is indeed given in the form of loans.

Since it is a loan, there will be a day when it will be recovered. When Fairchild recovered all his shares in 1959, from the founder “Eight Traitors” to the general manager Edward Baldwin, in fact, only got the time until it was repurchased. , and lost the possible benefits of the company’s development in the future.

Therefore, this directly led to the departure of Edward Baldwin et al.

When Edward Baldwin and others left Fairchild, some people continued to leave Fairchild to start their own businesses, and Noyce continued to attract new talents to join. Broken by his departure, this man is Rust, one of the “Eight Traitors”.

However, although the departure of Rust and others has caused huge losses to Fairchild, it has also contributed to the development of the semiconductor industry in the entire San Francisco Bay Area where the company is located. This area later grew into what is known today as Silicon Valley.

In 1961, Horny, another of the “Eight Traitors” on Lastra, decided to “defect” to Teledyne to start their new company.

Finally, when they actually left Fairchild, the two of them also pulled Roberts from “Eight Traitors”.

The three of them founded a semiconductor company with the support of Locke and Teledyne, and became an important supplier of semiconductor devices to the US military (including the aerospace industry), directly competing with Fairchild.

In the second year after Rust and others left, David Allison, another technical director of Fairchild, took several engineers to get investment from Lehman Brothers on Wall Street and founded another company to compete head-to-head with Fairchild. company of.

After 3 years, the integrated circuit products of the company dwarfed all semiconductor companies, including Fairchild.

A few months later, Nair and Moore’s assistant House, who Noyce personally recruited, left Fairchild and founded Molectro, which was acquired by Fairchild’s most important competitor, National Semiconductor.

Since then, National Semiconductor Corporation, which was originally in the eastern part of the beautiful country, has also entered Silicon Valley and has been able to develop its own integrated circuits.

That is, in this year, Kleiner also left Fairchild to do angel investment.

Ten years later, he founded Kleiner Perkins, a well-known venture capital fund company in Silicon Valley.

Kleiner is the fourth founder to leave Fairchild, just three years after Fairchild was founded.

Not only are technicians leaving, but some executives in other departments, including Don Valentine, the deputy general manager in charge of sales, are also leaving.

After spending a few short years at National Semiconductor, Valentine founded the famous venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, the fat guy Li Zhiwen met when he invested in Apple.

Fairchild has become accustomed to the departure of founders and executives, and employees’ job-hopping, and let it go.

This has created another culture in Silicon Valley – leaving a well-known existing company and starting a business directly.

Ultimately, the management and technical staff and Fairchild and his assigned professional managers, the management of the increasingly divided.

By 1968, Noyce also felt that if he stayed at Fairchild, he would not get anything done.

At the time, Noyce and Moore hoped to develop very large scale integrated circuits, that is, integrating many small-scale integrated circuits in the past into a single chip, which would be of great benefit to customers.

Fairchild, the company’s owner, wants to sell more chips.

If ten chips are reduced to one chip, Fairchild’s revenue will inevitably decrease in the short term. Eventually, Noyce and Moore found that they had no voice in the company they founded, so they simply left Fairchild to start a new semiconductor company, which would later become Intel.

Just after Noyce and Moore left Fairchild, Greenick and Blank, two other people in the “Eight Traitors”, also left one after another.

So far, the legend of Fairchild has come to an end. Although it still exists independently and was sold to French capital in 1979 for $350 million, its influence on the world semiconductor industry has ended, and an era has ended.

It can be said that half of the roughly 70 semiconductor companies in Silicon Valley are direct or indirect descendants of Fairchild.

A career at Fairchild is the gateway to the semiconductor industry that stretches across Silicon Valley.

At a conference of semiconductor engineers in Sunnyvale in 1969, fewer than 24 of the 400 attendees had never worked at Fairchild.

In this sense, it is no exaggeration to say that Fairchild Semiconductor is the “cradle of Silicon Valley talents”. Of course, it can also be called the “West Point Military Academy” or “Whampoa Military Academy” in the semiconductor industry of the lighthouse country.

And Fairchild “Whampoa Military Academy” brought talents to HKSMC.

“Thank you Fairy Child, but are they all right?” Li Zhiwen asked.

“Boss, what are you talking about?” Zhang Zhongmou asked.

“Of course it’s about loyalty!” Li Zhiwen said. After all, knowing the development of Fairy Child, Li Zhiwen had a hard time trusting Fairy Child’s people.

“Boss, the semiconductor industry is different from other ordinary industries. Let me put it this way, everyone here has the idea of ​​​​starting a business!” Zhang Zhongmou is now pointing at the busy HKSMC staff downstairs by the window.

And Li Zhiwen also stood up and stood beside Zhang Zhongmou.

“Including you?” Li Zhiwen asked.

“Of course, if I don’t have the idea of ​​starting a business, I won’t resign from Texas Instruments. After all, my position in Texas Instruments is already very high, so why make it more difficult to start a new business?” Zhang Zhongmou said.

“Then why did you promise me instead of choosing to do it yourself, is it just because of that photo, that conversation?” Li Zhiwen said.

“Because I don’t have money, or I don’t have enough money, I squander it.” Zhang Zhongmou laughed at himself.

“I’m a Chinese. Of course, don’t tell me anything about retribution. I haven’t been back to Asia for more than 30 years.”

“But in semiconductor centers like Silicon Valley, white people have always discriminated against yellow people, even though I was the vice president of Texas Instruments.”

“So I wanted to create a great company, one that made white people sound like a thumbs up.”

“And it’s hard to do that just by me or with my savings.”

“Of course, I can be a profitable company, just like I do wafer foundry for various semiconductor companies now, and he can make my company a very profitable company.”

“But that’s all~www.mtlnovel.com~ Of course it’s also very long.”

“It was your idea that changed me. You said that you wanted to be a great semiconductor company, but I just happened to have no way out. In this case, why not try it? Anyway, you gave enough salary and enough research and development funds. A lot.” Zhang Zhongmou looked at Li Zhiwen after he finished speaking.

“It turns out that it’s because I’m a fool and have a lot of money!” Li Zhiwen said.

“Of course, but if I don’t get the equity, boss, you may also receive my resignation letter one day. After all, it is better to work for yourself than to work for others.” Zhang Zhongmou said.

Zhang Zhongmou’s words actually reminded Li Zhiwen in disguise that if he could not come up with an effective equity incentive plan, these young people downstairs would leave in batches like Fairchild’s employees.

“I understand, I will come up with a plan as soon as possible, but I need your help in this matter!” Li Zhiwen said.

“Of course, I’d love to, and I don’t want to put my business in crisis!”

“High-tech companies play the same way as high-tech companies, and they can’t bring in those other customs!” Zhang Zhongmou said.

“Of course, but I think since it is a high-tech company, how about we split it first?” Li Zhiwen said.

“How does the boss look like?” Zhang Zhongmou looked at Li Zhiwen with interest.

Obviously, what Li Zhiwen said about the split was deliberate, and Zhang Zhongmou also wanted to see what Li Zhiwen said.

“It’s very simple, split the Hong Kong part and the Silicon Valley part of HKSMC, and set up two companies. The Hong Kong part is responsible for OEM and R&D, and the Silicon Valley part is also responsible for R&D.” Li Zhiwen said.

It is impossible for Li Zhiwen to only be responsible for the processing in Hong Kong. Once the situation changes, it is very likely that he will be subject to Silicon Valley. This is what Li Zhiwen does not want to see, so it is necessary for Hong Kong to ensure R&D.