My highlights from the book:

1. Bob Noyce took me under his wing,” Steve Jobs explains. “I was young, in my twenties. He was in his early fifties. He tried to give me the lay of the land, give me a perspective that I could only partially understand.” Jobs continues, “You can’t really understand what is going on now unless you understand what came before.”

2. Before Intel and Google, before Microsoft and dot - coms and Apple and Cisco and Sun and Pixar and stock - option millionaires and startup widows and billionaire venture capitalists, there was a group of eight young men — six of them with PhDs, none of them over 32 — who disliked their boss and decided to start their own transistor company. It was 1957.

3. Noyce believed “big is bad” — or if not downright bad, at least not as much fun as small companies in which “everyone works much harder and cooperates more.” When he left daily management at Intel in 1975, he turned his attention to the next generation of high - tech entrepreneurs. This is how he met Jobs.

4. He strongly believed that by investing, he was doing his part, as he put it, to “restock the stream I’ve fished from.”

5. He always threw himself entirely into the activity at hand — in whatever he did , he tried to excel.

6. He inspired in nearly everyone whom he encountered a sense that the future had no limits , and that together they could , as he liked to say, “Go off and do something wonderful.”

7. He was a preacher’s son who rejected organized religion, an outstanding athlete who chainsmoked, and an intensely competitive man who was greatly concerned that people like him. He was worth tens of millions and owned several planes and houses but nonetheless somehow maintained a “just folks” sort of charm.

8. Warren Buffett , who served on a college board with Noyce for several years said:  “Everybody liked Bob. He was an extraordinarily smart guy who didn’t need to let you know he was that smart. He could be your neighbor, but with lots of machinery in his head.”

9. Beginnings fascinated Noyce. He could imagine things few others could see. In 1965, when push - button telephones were brand new and state - of - the - art computers still filled entire rooms, Noyce predicted that the integrated circuit would lead to “portable telephones, personal paging systems, and palm - sized TVs .” His sense of near - limitless possibility led Noyce to pursue technical hunches that his colleagues believed were dead ends.

10. His core had been shaped by his Depression - era boyhood in the small town of Grinnell, Iowa, and by his birth into a family with deep Midwestern roots and a tradition of its men serving as teachers, ministers, or both.

11. That’s not the game.  If you’re going to play, play to win!

12. Those boys, especially Bob, were into devilment.

13. It seemed like he was always in a hurry to get somewhere, and he got there.

14. If you can’t define it in one sentence, you probably don’t understand it.

15. Noyce was slowly gathering experiences that would anchor his adult approach to life, which was not so much an approach as a headlong rush into any challenge with the unshakable assumption that he would emerge not only successful, but triumphant.

16. Bob thrived on adrenaline and gasoline.

17. Every night before he fell asleep, Noyce would mentally rehearse each of his dives in slow motion until he could see himself executing them perfectly. He called this habit “envisioning myself at the next level,” and he carried it with him throughout his life. In his mind’s eye, he could always see himself achieving something more.

18. His own life struck him as so bleak that for one of the few times in his life, Bob Noyce openly questioned what he was doing: “The whole of [ the visit to my brother] served to point out to me how misdirected I am. These people have some worthwhile goals in life. It doesn’t seem to me that I have.

19. Noyce apparently started on the intermediate runs, on the assumption that since he would end up there soon enough, why not just skip the bunny slopes and aim high?

20. Noyce had a profound distrust of people he thought overly cerebral.

21. Bob was not the type to slow down for much of anything.

22. Many of Noyce’s peers felt that they learned more from him than they did from Shockley.

23. Noyce was tempted, but he feared himself ill prepared to oversee an entire company. Moreover, the prospect of having the final say over the many employees he could imagine one day working for Fairchild Semiconductor frightened him.

24. His approach was to know the science cold and then “forget about it.” He did not slog or grind his way to ideas; he felt they just came to him. When he heard Picasso’s famous line about artistic creativity — “I do not seek; I find” — Noyce said that he invented in the same way.

25. In his opinion, there were only two relevant questions in the earliest stages of scientific innovation: “Why won’t this work?” and “What fundamental laws will it violate?” If an idea seemed within the realm of physical possibility, then Noyce deemed it worthy of exploration — conventional wisdom on the topic be damned.

26. “I don’t have any recollection of a ‘ Boom! There it is!’ light bulb going off, ”Noyce later said of his ideas. Instead, he conceived of the integrated circuit in an iterative method he described thus: “[ I thought,] let’s see, if we could do this, we can do that. If we can do that, then we can do this. [It was] a logical sequence. If I hit a wall, I’d back up and then find a path, conceptually, all the way through to the end. [Once you have that path], you can come back and start refining, thinking in little steps that will take you there. Once you get to the point that you can see the top of the mountain, then you know you can get there.”

27. Noyce was “a very good supervisor of technical people, precisely because he was casual and didn’t interfere with his researchers’ work. Creative freedom and collaboration, which proved crucial to the young company’s technical success, blossomed under Noyce’s laissez - faire management of the lab.

28. “It was with a great deal of fear of inadequacy, if I can put it that way, that I got into [an] administrative role” — so much fear ,in fact, that he would agree only to a six - month trial run as general manager, after which he planned to return to the lab.

29. Noyce’s top objective was to keep Fairchild from becoming Shockley Semiconductor Labs, a place he called “the model of what not to do.”

30. Noyce did not talk much about religion, though he did on one occasion point out the entrepreneurial and motivational messages latent in the Christmas story, he appreciated not as a miraculous tale of a virgin birth but as a reminder that “one event, or one man, can substantially change the course of history.”

31. Noyce once said that “the job of the manager is an enabling, not a directive job … coaching, and not direction, is the first quality of leadership now. Get the barriers out of the way to let people do the things they do well.”

32. Noyce’s focus on the future and innovation appealed to the creative instincts of many Fairchild Semiconductor employees and permeated the company.

33. The best way to get something done is to have enough confidence in yourself and your men to do it yourselves.

34. A young organization has to be fast moving.

35. We were a hard, young, hungry group. Our attitude was We don’t give a damn what money you have to offer, buddy. We’re going to do this ourselves.

36. Noyce remained calm in the face of potential disasters that had others panicking. “I remember we lost the process at the diode plant,” said one employee. “We simply lost it. I mean, it’s like all of a sudden the bread came out of the oven and it was all flat. It just didn’t work any more. I said to Bob, ‘My god, this is terrifying. Oh my god, we’re going die.’ He said, ‘Oh no. We’ll figure it out.’ He was completely relaxed about it; it was wonderful and calming to me.”

37. For Noyce, the energy and growth were incredibly seductive. Piloting Fairchild through its acceleration, Noyce told a friend, was a bit like riding a fast horse — that same combination of exhilaration and fear and teetering on the edge of losing control but never quite doing so.

38. One thing I learned at Fairchild is that I don’t run large organizations well. I don’t have the discipline to do that, have the follow through. My interests and skills are in a different place, that’s all. It’s getting people together to do something, but that only works for me in a smaller group.

39. We didn’t want people to know what we were going to be doing . We thought it would attract too many competitors too soon. 
 

40. Secrecy was essential for Noyce and Moore’s plan to work.

41. Use money to buy time because money is cheaper than time.

42. After observing William Shockley’s methods of using simplifying assumptions to speed up his company’s research, Noyce had come to believe that scientists could approach their work in two very different ways. Researchers could adopt the “pretty” approach, in which they devote a great deal of time and effort to developing a technique or machine that will allow them to test their ideas with exact measurements that yield final definitive answers. Or a researcher could try the “quick and dirty” way, moving forward with an idea as soon as a rather rudimentary test indicates it will probably work. Noyce believed that the quick - and - dirty method generated “90 percent of the answer in 10 percent of the time.” He disdained the pretty method as “a bit like telling a soccer player never to kick the ball until you have an ideal shot all carefully lined up and know exactly how hard to kick the ball. Ninety minutes may be over before you locate that opportunity.”

43. Noyce believed that for a company to be successful, it “must keep the vision of product and direction very narrow , while keeping the peripheral vision of market forces affecting the business very broad.”

44. Noyce’s idea of planning was to yell, “Let’s take the hill!” and then so inspire his troops with his own charisma and intelligence that they all began running behind him, no one exactly sure of his responsibilities, but everyone heading in the same general direction with the same general end in mind.

45. “That’s an impossible task. Let’s do it.” Noyce liked to say, “You can only lose 100 percent, but the multiples on the up side are fantastic.”

46. Noyce was invited to dinner at the home of an entrepreneur whose company the Callanish Fund had supported. After the dishes had been cleared and the children sent to bed, Noyce listened as the company founder explained that some day, if the business did well, he would like to move his family into a bigger, nicer house. Noyce looked up at him and said very quietly, “You’ve got a nice family. I screwed up mine. Just stay where you are.” Twenty - five years and a successful company later, the entrepreneur has not moved.

47. His financial success directly benefited the entrepreneurs whose companies he funded, but the stories about Noyce’s success indirectly inspired many more. One entrepreneur put it this way: “Why do we love this dynamic environment? I’ll tell you why. Because we have seen what Steve Jobs, Bob Noyce, Nolan Bushnell [founder of Atari], and many others have done, and we know it can and will happen many times again. ”In other words, if they could do it, why couldn’t he? Such rationale functioned as a self - fulfilling prophecy in Silicon Valley, propelling the region forward on a self - perpetuating cycle of entrepreneurship and wealth. [This is what I hope Founders does]

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