WHILE Twitter celebrated its 10th anniversary last week, the world said goodbye to a man without whom the social media site would never have been possible.Former Intel CEO Andy Grove, who built this early Silicon Valley business into the powerhouse it is today, died last week aged 79.“The man who put Intel inside,” as The Economist so neatly summed up, using the company’s most famous marketing phrase, was the first person hired in 1968 when Intel was an unknown maker of memory chips for the IBM mainframes of the day. After Japanese chip makers took an early lead in the 1970s, Grove helped switch the company to making microprocessors. Intel’s first attempts failed; but Grove’s repeated successes would put Intel, and him, among the greats of business. His hard-driving business style would become known as “creative confrontation” and his famous quote that “only the paranoid survive” became his defining maxim.The New York Times wrote in its obituary last week: “Grove helped midwife the ...
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