Article: WPost: Profile Kleiner Perkins

Mother Hen to an Industry:
Venture Capital Firm Kleiner Perkins
Has Long Nurtured Internet Enterprises

by Elizabeth Corcoran
Washington Post Staff Writer
2538 words
13 October 1996

MENLO PARK, Calif. -- Renaissance Florence flourished under the patronage of the Medici family. The U.S. steel industry in the early days of the 20th century had the House of Morgan. And these days, the technology industry of Silicon Valley is flourishing with the help of a renowned venture capital firm known as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Kleiner Perkins, based near Stanford University, has just a dozen partners. Over the past 24 years, it has handed out $880 million in funding to help start more than 260 companies. By the end of last year, more than 100 of those companies had gone public and had a combined stock market valuation of about $84 billion at the end of last year. Partners at the venture capital firm also say that their work has created more than 131,000 jobs.

Companies backed by Kleiner Perkins include America Online Inc., Compaq Computer Corp., Genentech Inc., Lotus Development Corp. and Netscape Communications Corp. The firm's original investment in Netscape, for example, was just $5 million. At the close of stock market trading Friday, that investment was worth $361 million -- an astounding 72-fold increase.

What makes Kleiner Perkins stand out among the several hundred venture capital firms in the United States is not just its financial record, but its mission of founding industries, rather than just companies. To do that, Kleiner's partners aim to be the ideal confidant and adviser for entrepreneurs. "We're not financiers," said Brook Byers, who joined Kleiner in 1977. "We're service providers -- we think the key person is the entrepreneur."

Perhaps the most intriguing pillar of Kleiner's work, developed by partner John Doerr, is what he has dubbed the Kleiner keiretsu. He uses the Japanese word keiretsu to mean a network of companies that share experiences, insights, knowledge and information -- partly by relying on Kleiner partners as the agents who dart from one company to another, spreading insights and contacts along the way.

"The keiretsu is a very original idea" in the world of venture capital, said Stewart Alsop, a longtime industry analyst who recently joined the Menlo Park office of venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates.

Forget about the image of venture capitalists as money spigots, waiting for an entre preneur with a bright idea to come calling. Kleiner partners are activists. At times, they have even decided to create companies and products on their own -- by pulling together entrepreneurs and technologists. The most recent example is @Home, a start-up company chaired by Kleiner partner Will Hearst. It aims to deliver multimedia information and entertainment using a combination of cable networks and home-grown technology.

This activist approach has contributed to Kleiner's financial record. Since its start in 1972, Kleiner's investments for its limited partners -- 30 of which are institutions and universities that contribute more than 80 percent of the Kleiner kitty -- have earned a net return of 34 percent a year. A fund initiated in 1994 that includes Kleiner's stake in Netscape boasts a Las Vegas-like payback of better than 190 percent. "But that's not sustainable," Doerr hastened to add.

"KP is one of the top-tier, more-prolific venture firms that you'll come across," said Rolf Selvig with VentureOne Corp., a San Francisco-based investment research firm specializing in the venture capital industry.

But its activist investing style also has raised some eyebrows. "We're the opposite of [Kleiner]," said David Marquardt of August Capital venture group in Menlo Park, and a member of Microsoft Corp.'s board. "We have no pretense that we can create an enterprise," he said. Instead, August Capital believes that bright people who come together will come up with the most compelling new ideas.

The Detractors

Not everyone in Silicon Valley sees Kleiner Perkins as wonderful. The firm is a relentlessly demanding patron, pushing its portfolio companies to grow faster, pay more attention to their customers and ultimately to make money. Kleiner can be ruthless at times, urging a board to fire a chief executive who doesn't deliver. And no deals are small ones for the Kleiner team, which is always swinging for a home run. That can be a problem for a fledgling firm not quite ready to play in the major leagues.

And winning Kleiner's attention doesn't come cheap. Although the firm is always a minority investor, usually holding no more than 25 percent of a start-up's equity, it can be a company's single largest investor. Its partners profit handsomely from their efforts as well, often taking home about a 30 percent share of the profits.

Even Silicon Valley's workaholics marvel at the pace the Kleiner team sets. The firm comprises just a dozen partners and their secretaries. There are no legions of young associates, ready to crunch numbers or fly out to visit companies. There is no branch office. All told, Kleiner itself has fewer people than staff Max's Opera Cafe, a local eatery in the Stanford shopping center.

"I've never seen anybody with the interest and intensity" of Doerr, said James Barksdale, chief executive of Netscape, who was wooed to the Internet start-up from the top job at McCaw Cellular Communications Inc., largely through Doerr's efforts. "He's as bright as a whip and works so hard at it -- he's always on the go."

Kleiner's other partners are no slouches, either. All sport the "Kleiner belt" -- a two-way pager and cellular phone strapped around their waists, making them accessible to entrepreneurs day and night.

Home for the Kleiner gang is an airy, ski-lodge-like office on Sand Hill Road, with large glass-walled offices for each partner. Administrative assistants sprint -- literally -- from one corner to another, delivering papers or connecting an anxious caller with the right partner. A buffet lunch is set up every afternoon so partners don't have to waste time going out to eat.

But apart from Mondays, when the partners gather to review the progress of their companies and assess possible new investments, they spend little time on Sand Hill Road.

"Sixty to 70 percent of our time is spent with our existing companies," said Vinod Khosla, who joined Kleiner in 1986. "Another 20 percent is spent getting educated" in new technologies by attending conferences and meeting people. That leaves about 10 percent of the time for assessing new businesses, Khosla calculated.

Not that Kleiner ever finds itself short of prospective investment opportunities. Kleiner each year receives more than 1,600 business plans, from which the partners cull as many as 300 for closer study. Fewer than 100 of the strongest candidates are eventually invited to make hour-long presentations at Sand Hill Road before the assembled partnership.

From those invited to pitch their ideas, the firm will invest in about 30 new companies a year, each of which will become the responsibility of a specific partner. A majority of the partners must approve a deal -- and a single nay can veto it. That way, should any of the investments get into trouble, all the partners feel responsible.

"When I bring a deal up for partnership approval . . . [the criteria is]: `Are you prepared to spend your time on it for the next five years? Are you excited enough about it?' " Khosla said. "That's the key question -- not is our ROI [return on investment] going to be great."

Although Kleiner Perkins has long concentrated its investments in high-technology businesses, five years ago it began picking about a half dozen more narrowly focused concentrations, aimed at supporting Doerr's keiretsu approach.

Current areas include the Internet and related networking technology, software for business enterprises and medical devices. Once they've picked those targets, Kleiner partners think through what complementary technologies and companies their community of investments will need to thrive.

Take the Internet. Kleiner's original $5 million investment in Netscape is only one of about two dozen investments in Internet-related businesses. Others examples include Shiva Corp., which builds hardware for remote networking, and software maker Macromedia Inc., which makes a hot tool for Web-page designers known as Shockwave.

For companies, becoming part of the Kleiner keiretsu means gaining entree to a network of corporate contacts and ideas, along with the expertise of the Kleiner partners themselves.

"There are a lot of VC [venture capital] firms that can add value," said Jeff Bezos, founder of Internet bookseller Amazon.com Inc., which recently became a Kleiner investment. But Kleiner and Doerr "are the gravitational center of a huge piece of the Internet world," he said. "It's the equivalent of prime real estate, and we can get a lot of value from that."

Like other VC firms, Kleiner spends considerable time helping fledgling companies develop their management teams. To cite the most remarkable example, Kleiner helped Netscape recruit its widely praised CEO, Barksdale, along with six vice presidents.

And they are always on call. "I sometimes jokingly refer to them as the fire department," said Jerry Kaplan, who heads on-line auction house OnSale Inc., one of Kleiner's most recent investments. Kaplan's previous start-up, Go Corp., also was funded by Kleiner. "When you call them in, they come running, [so] you don't call them in every day."

Even on holidays, Kleiner partners are not far from a telephone. It was the Friday after Thanksgiving last year when Bill Homer, Netscape's vice president of marketing, realized he needed a Kleiner hand. Netscape's executives had learned that Microsoft was planning to launch its Internet initiative in early December, and they felt they needed a strong countermove. They already had talked with their counterparts at Sun Microsystems Inc. about coalescing an industry-wide project based on Sun's "Java" software language. Now, the timing was key.

From a cellular phone on a train, Homer "dialed the magic number -- and there [Doerr] was," Homer recalled. (Actually, Doerr was in St. Louis with his family.) Homer explained he needed to track down Sun's top executives. Doerr's response was, "I'll find them," Homer recalled.

By the time Homer had reached home, one Sun executive had left a message on his voice mail, calling in from a vacation in Hawaii. Another interrupted a hiking trip out West to call Homer a few hours later. They clinched the deal in a few days. "Doerr was the one who tracked them down. I couldn't have done it," Homer said.

When Scott Cook, founder of Intuit Inc., decided in 1990 to accept venture capital funding from Kleiner Perkins, he wanted not just the money, but a board member who was "centrally tied to the cutting edge of PC technology," Cook recalled. Doerr seemed ideal, but Cook had two concerns: Would Doerr be available when he was needed? And would he try to micromanage the firm?

As a precaution, Cook said, "we asked him to write down views about how VCs worked with a company." Since then, Cook has never once had to remind Doerr of his promises. "I don't even know where the document is now," Cook said.

That philosophy -- of being available without trying to run the company -- is religion among Kleiner's partners. "The only time I call [a chief executive] is if I'm on assignment," said Kevin Compton, who joined Kleiner in 1990. "We become the VP [vice president] of whatever the company needs at the moment."

Added Khosla: "My job as a board member is to ask the tough questions, force management to anticipate issues and . . . be a real pain in the butt." But once a company's executives have picked a course, Kleiner will fully back the decision, he added. "In the end, a company can't work on two conflicting strategies at the same time," Khosla explained.

Kleiner nonetheless keeps a close eye on its investments. Every quarter, the partners gather for a marathon day-long examination of their 100 most active investments. Every company is rated on seven parameters, including its financial status and the performance of the top officers. Every Kleiner partner must update the "three goals" to help the company.

Doerr, who spent the first six years of his career at Intel Corp., said he "shamelessly stole" the idea for such intensive reviews from Intel's chief executive, Andrew S. Grove.

Quick With Advice

Kleiner partners, when asked, are ready with advice. When Intuit's proposed merger with Microsoft dissolved last spring, Cook convened his top executives to design a new strategy. At the meeting, "Doerr penned out by hand six or eight overhead slides on the Internet," Cook recalled. Since Intuit had been focused on working Microsoft's proprietary Microsoft Network for months, it hadn't given much thought to the Internet, Cook recalled.

Doerr's enthusiasm for the Internet was contagious. Within three to four weeks, Intuit had launched a program to move its personal finance software to the Internet. By last month, the company had consolidated this new strategy. "The speed with which we moved and the fundamental shift is entirely related to John Doerr," Cook said.

Companies that seem to be stumbling are earmarked for Kleiner's "intensive care unit" -- which means that several partners may jump in to advise the executives.

"It would be easier to say, `The product doesn't work, you're behind schedule,' " said Byers. After all, with its diverse range of investments, Kleiner will succeed regardless of the fate of any single investment. But Kleiner's partners hate to call it quits. "Our motivation is our pride," Byers explained. "We get nice feedback because entrepreneurs know that we don't give up."

To be sure, Kleiner has had its share of flops, notably including Go Corp. and Dynabook Technologies, two firms that tried to develop a technology known as "pen computing," in which users could make handwritten notes on the screens of hand-held computers. Kleiner partners were passionate about the technology -- even as the companies began to crater.

Go "would have been dead many times over if it hadn't been for the ongoing work of Kleiner partners," recalled Kaplan, who was chief executive of the venture. Even so, the best they could do was to sell the remnants to AT&T Corp., which eventually shut it down.

"Would it have been better if the company died sooner?" Kaplan asked. "They went to heroic means to extend the life of the organization," he said, "and as an entrepreneur, that's what you want."

A COMPANY PHILOSOPHY

Kleiner Perkins uses the Japanese term keiretsu to describe its approach toward investing. Keiretsu is a network of companies linked by mutual obligation. This obligation leads to the sharing of experiences and information among the 175 companies it invests in. Here is a look at some Internet companies that are members of Kleiner's keiretsu.

Consumer Platform Software Equipment

Services

@Home Citrix Systems Ascend Communications

America Online MacromediaCom 21

Excite! Netscape Shiva

Intuit OnLive! Sun Microsystems

iVillage

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Profile: Andy Grove, Intel

The Washington Post
8 September 1996

Financial
Intel's Blunt Edge; At 60, Andy Grove Is Still Learning, Looking Ahead and Speaking His Mind
Elizabeth Corcoran
Washington Post Staff Writer
2934 words


Copyright 1996, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- In the wonderland of high technology, people often glorify youth for its own sake. Multimillionaire executives in their twenties boast that they have yet to buy their first suit. High-tech companies throw parties that resemble frat house binges -- with kegs of beer, rock bands and volleyball games. Fortieth or 50th birthdays seem barely a step away from retirement.
Yet the wiliest manager of all in Silicon Valley is a much older hand: 60-year-old Andy Grove.
Grove is a Hungarian immigrant who earned the equivalent of about $250 a week during his first job in the industry, 36 years ago. Now he runs Intel Corp., a company that sold more than $16 billion worth of products last year and is among the most profitable and durable companies in America's high-tech capital.
Over the course of Intel's 28-year history, its "Intel Inside" microprocessors have become the brains of about 85 percent of the world's personal computers. Even more significantly, each new generation of its chips becomes the pacesetter for the rest of the high-tech world.
And inside Intel is Grove, the company's first official employee and its chief executive since 1987.
Better than any other executive in the high-tech world, Grove has hung on through the bronco ride of industry changes. He and Intel have had their share of spills and near disasters. Even with the scars, though, Intel and Grove have thrived.
"Andy is the only person I know who grows younger every year," observed an Intel senior vice president, Albert Yu, who met Grove in the late 1960s. When he was in his thirties, Grove's heavy Hungarian accent and thick glasses made him seem much older, Yu recalled. These days, Grove wears contact lenses and a regular regime of biking and other exercises has made him lean.
Grove has spent far more of his time, however, sharpening his business instincts. In a newly published book, he sums up his attitude with a snappy title: "Only the Paranoid Survive."
Looking for Trouble
Grove may indeed be the Valley's most paranoid executive. Casually mentioning a recent joint venture between two long-time Intel competitors sends him scrambling for a pencil to make a note. "Andy is always looking for the black cloud in the silver lining," said Brian Halla, recently appointed chairman of National Semiconductor Corp., who worked at Intel from 1975 to 1988.
But paranoia, like many of Grove's one-line quips, is too slick an explanation for why he and Intel have emerged as high technology's standard-bearers. Instead, much of Grove's success reflects his willingness to do the grunt work that younger CEOs extol but often skip -- to learn and relearn how the world outside his company is changing.
Every executive can recite, like grade-school catechism, the importance of learning. But few do it. Managers who have had some success typically conceive every new problem as a version of one they have conquered in the past.
Grove had an early start as a cultural changeling. He fled Hungary in 1957 at age 20, speaking no English and arriving in New York with just $20. Although he had once toyed with the idea of becoming a journalist, within three days of landing in the United States, Grove had enrolled in City College's chemical engineering program and ended up with a PhD in the field in 1963 from the University of California at Berkeley.
Finding the Fast Track
Even as he was finishing his chemistry degree, Grove realized he wasn't on the fast track. As he and fellow graduate Ron Whittier, now an Intel senior vice president, worked during their summer breaks in a chemical company, they had endless discussions about why electrical engineers made more money than chemists. "We both decided that the growth was in the semiconductor industry," Whittier recalled. So much for chemistry.
Grove headed straight for semiconductors and for Fairchild Semiconductor Corp., the company founded by renegade students of William Shockley, the man who launched the electronics revolution by co-inventing the transistor. Grove became assistant director in Fairchild's research lab and wrote what became one of the classic texts on semiconductor physics.
When Grove's boss, Gordon Moore, and another Fairchild colleague, Robert Noyce, co-inventor of the integrated circuit, quit to form a start-up business that would make memory chips, Grove clamored to join them. There wasn't much to the new company at the time -- just a vague one-page business plan, recalled Arthur Rock, a venture capital pioneer. But Rock promised $2.5 million in funds.
Grove signed on as Intel's first official employee -- somehow nosing out both Noyce and Moore as the first name on Intel's payroll, recalled Moore with a chuckle.
At first, Moore and Noyce figured that Grove would continue running research, much as he had done at Fairchild. But Grove became fascinated by manufacturing. Treating it as a scientific problem, Grove began reducing the production process into simple classic concepts, Moore said. So the scientist transformed himself into a line manager, the guy who worried about how fast and how much the company could produce.
Grove's instincts proved on target again. The crux of making memory chips, those integrated circuits that store information, was this: How do you churn out the most high-quality chips in the shortest time and with the least waste?
Manufacturing also suited Grove's temperament, which often seemed as brutally direct and unrelenting as one of Newton's laws of physics.
Craig Barrett, who became Intel's chief operating officer in 1993, has crisp memories of some of his early encounters with Grove in the early 1970s after he left a teaching job at Stanford University to join Intel.
A Crisis Strikes
Barrett was still adjusting to life in industry when a manufacturing crisis occurred. Intel was having trouble switching to a new material to package its chips. Because of his knowledge of materials science, Barrett recalled that he was "ripped out of my job and put in charge of this" task force asked to solve the problem.
Grove spared no time on niceties. Instead, he "used to incessantly corner me in the hallway and tell me I was wasting $24,000 an hour while I was dillydallying," Barrett recalled. Barrett's team soon fixed the problem.
Grove also became a master of clever phrases and one-liners that succinctly carried his message. Among those still in vogue at Intel is "constructive confrontation." In essence, it meant: Cut out the pleasantries and grapple with statistically valid data and facts.
Confrontational Manager
Constructive confrontation can be an effective, albeit brutal technique. "Occasionally, we . . . suggest [to Grove] there may be an alternative to grabbing someone and slamming them over the head with a sledgehammer," Barrett said.
For some people, such continual confrontation exacts a price. Former Intel executives are plentiful in Silicon Valley, some because they had had enough of the Intel way.
Grove's basset hound face droops at the suggestion that he's too tough a manager.
"I don't think I'm any tougher than anyone else," Grove protested.
"I mean okay, yes, every once in a while, I get excited about something and lose my temper. It's very rare. It's just that I can say something in an extremely low voice, in an ordinary voice, but it is to the point and unapologetic. . . . Some people have a hard time with that, and they think I'm shouting and I'm not shouting."
For all his intensity, those who like Grove say he's one of the best people managers they know. Of Intel's 13 top executive officers, 11 have been with Intel and Grove for more than 20 years. The newcomers have logged a mere 15 years.
Intel Vice President Yu met Grove in the 1960s, when he interviewed for a job at Fairchild. A specialist in optics, Yu was keen to try a new area of technology. Unfortunately, most of the people who interviewed him were only interested in the knowledge he already possessed. Not Grove.
"Andy was the only one who asked me good questions," Yu recalled. "He was interested in me as an individual . . . not just in my knowledge." Several years later, Grove invited Yu to join Intel to work in manufacturing. "Manufacturing? I'd never done that," Yu said. "But he had confidence that I could figure it out."
John Doerr, a leading venture capitalist with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in California, also was touched by Grove's personal skills during his six-year stint as an engineer at Intel. When in 1980 Doerr announced he was leaving for Kleiner Perkins, Grove tried to tempt him to stay by offering to put him in charge of Intel's fledgling software group. "He reaches inside of you and pulls your heart out and puts it in front of you," Doerr said.
The DRAM Dilemma
All of Grove's skills were tested when Intel confronted a true identity crisis in the mid-1980s. Intel was fast losing share in its cornerstone product -- the dynamic random access memory chip -- to Japan's electronics giants. Around 1985, Japan's share of the world market for such chips surged past that of U.S. companies. Equally bitter: U.S. companies had to concede that the Japanese chips were higher quality products.
In his book, Grove describes a discussion with Moore in mid-1985. "I turned back to Gordon and I said, `If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?' Gordon answered without hesitation, `He would get us out of memories.' I stared at him, numb, then said, `Why shouldn't you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?' "
And Grove did just that. Painfully at first, Intel began moving into microprocessors -- the logic chips that have proved far more profitable than memory chips.
Reinventing Intel in this way was audacious. Memory chips were the rock on which Intel was founded. Executives believed such chips were technology "drivers" -- products that sharpen their manufacturing techniques so they could later make more profitable products such as microprocessors. In retrospect, Grove said, those tightly held beliefs were a "trap."
"At the time we were making those statements it was no longer a true and an objective observation of our own reality," Grove said. The experience helped teach him the faint line between relying on what one knows and getting entangled in emotions.
Finding a Balance
"There is a spectrum of balance," Grove said. On the one end is completely rational, numbers-oriented decision making; on the other, instinct-based emotional responses. "Particularly when you're dealing with a new trend, numbers will not show the power of a new idea. This is where your accumulated experience and your openness to peripheral events" are crucial, he said.
Still, that schooling didn't prevent Grove from stumbling when consumers began complaining about flaws in their new Pentium microprocessors in November 1994.
"I was thickheaded. I don't know how to say that differently," Grove said ruefully.
At the time, Intel recently had launched its "Intel Inside" campaign to shore up the company's brand name with consumers. Yet Grove and others still thought of their customers as the same technically savvy people as in the past, people who expected a few glitches in new chip designs. Intel didn't see itself as a consumer company -- one that had to worry when customers complained that the Pentium chip made occasional arithmetic mistakes.
"We thought of ourselves as an engineering company," Grove said. "That was our past . . . and how our instincts were shaped."
After about three weeks of shrill public criticism and long internal meetings, Intel relented and offered every unhappy customer a chance to trade in their old Pentiums for new ones.
"You had a bunch of engineers interfacing with a bunch of consumers . . . and the engineers got a lesson," Barrett concluded.
In 1993, Grove turned over running Intel's day-to-day operations to Barrett and turned his attention solely to devising Intel's future strategy. His biggest worry, he said, is "stagnation," or to put it more bluntly, the chance that consumers won't see a compelling reason to buy an ever more powerful personal computer.
For years, Grove himself didn't use a PC much. "I was not a daily user. What would I use it for? I don't do spreadsheets," he said. Apart from typing out a weekly newspaper column with management advice, Grove's desktop PC was unused.
Discovering E-Mail
That changed around 1989, when Grove "discovered" electronic mail. Since then, he has been convinced that the future of the PC is as a communications device. Grove became Intel's main cheerleader for a battery of PC communications technologies, including video conferencing and voice communication via the Internet.
Grove's enthusiasm for video conferencing, which still outstrips consumers' interest, has attracted criticism from some longtime industry analysts. Venture capitalist Stewart Alsop, for example, argues that Grove's backing of video conferencing stifled Intel's own objective assessment of the technology. Even so, a growing number of computer makers are now packaging such technologies with their products.
And like every other company in the industry, Intel and Grove are wrestling with what the Internet and low-cost Internet "appliances" might mean for their business. In his book, Grove argues that the Internet appliances will not profoundly change how Intel carries out its business.
Yet, he worries. "My whole thesis is that . . . a company that has a vested interest in `A' will always pooh-pooh `B,' " Grove said.
So at least for now, Intel has two groups doing development projects on Internet appliances and the future of communications on the Internet.
Looking Down the Road
Grove keeps devouring new information on the Internet, the industry and the competition.
A few years ago, he pledged to retire at age 55. Instead, he has broadened his job at Intel to spend most of his time thinking about its future. And each time he has headed off to learn a new field, he has washed many of the details of the past from his mind.
Much hasn't changed for Grove. He still has the same tiny office, just slightly larger than his secretary's, with chip mementos aligned on a desk blotter with the precision of transistors in a circuit design. He still likes to grouse about the trouble he has finding a parking spot in Intel's free-for-all lot.
During a bout with prostate cancer more than a year ago, he sharpened his data analysis techniques to figure out what treatment would offer him the best odds.
"I'm -- knock on wood -- doing very well," he said. "There's always a chance of it recurring," but he added: "Actually, my chance of getting a recurrence are mathematically smaller than the average person getting it in the first place."
Just don't suggest to Grove that he's mellowed.
"I don't like either the tough description or the mellowing description," he said. "I want to be kind of nice, middle ground. I have been trying to set the record straight for 15 years, and nobody believes me."
SPEAKING OUT
EXCERPTS FROM ANDREW GROVE'S BOOK
On paranoia
"I'm often credited with the motto `Only the paranoid survive.' I have no idea when I first said this, but the fact remains that when it comes to business I believe in the value of paranoia."
On the Pentium crisis
"I was the last one to understand the implications of the Pentium crisis. It took a barrage of relentless criticism to make me realize that something had changed -- and that we need to adapt to a new environment."
On managing
"Business people are not just managers; they are also human. They have emotions, and a lot of their emotions are tied up in the identity and well-being of their business."
ANDREW GROVE IN PROFILE
A LOOK AT THE MAN INSIDE INTEL
Birth name: Andras Grof
Age: 60
Born: Budapest, Hungary
Came to the United States: 1957
Joined Intel: 1968; became president in 1979 and chief executive in 1987.
Number of e-mails answered per day: 50
Company he admires the most: "Being a diplomatic sort, I'll stay away from our industry. Beyond it, Wal-Mart and FedEx both come to mind . . . doing something in an extraordinary way; both stayed focused on their task for a long time, both use technology superbly, both impacted their customers' lives in a big way."
The techiest gadget he owns: "A big screen projection TV ... that makes my PC stand for user friendliness by comparison."
Change he'd most like to see the federal government enact: "That's easy. Honest to goodness pay for performance."
Longest time it has taken him to find a parking place at Intel, which doesn't have reserved parking: "Five to 10 minutes looking and 15 minutes walking from the damn spot to my office."
Favorite sport: "Biking, kayaking, running, swimming . . . a variety so it doesn't get to be a drudgery."
Least favorite sport: "Fly fishing; it's boring."
One-time hobby: Opera singing
Family: Married for 38 years, 2 daughters.
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