Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe

over his shoulder. A problem would come up, and he couldn’t stand it, and he would go to Noyce and hyperventilate and ask him what to do. And Noyce would lower his head, turn on his 100-ampere eyes, listen, and say, “Look, here are your guidelines. You’ve got to consider A, you’ve got to consider B, and you’ve got to consider C.” Then he would turn on the Gary Cooper smile: “But if you think I’m going to make your decision for you, you’re mistaken. Hey … it’s your ass.”
    Back East, in the conventional corporation, any functionary wishing to make an unusually large purchase had to have the approval of a superior or two or three superiors or even a committee, a procedure
that ate up days, weeks, in paperwork. Noyce turned that around. At Fairchild any engineer, even a weenie just out of Caltech, could make any purchase he wanted, no matter how enormous, unless someone else objected strongly enough to try to stop it. Noyce called this the Short Circuit Paper Route. There was only one piece of paper involved, the piece of paper the engineer handed somebody in the purchasing department.
    The spirit of the start-up phase! My God! Who could forget the exhilaration of the past few years! To be young and free out here on the silicon frontier! Noyce was determined to maintain that spirit during the expansion phase. And for the time being at least, here in the early 1960s, the notion of a permanent start-up operation didn’t seem too far-fetched. Fairchild was unable to coast on the tremendous advantage Noyce’s invention of the integrated circuit had provided. Competitors were setting up shop in the Santa Clara Valley like gold rushers. And where did they come from? Why, from Fairchild itself! And how could that be? Nothing to it … Defection capital!
    Defectors (or redefectors) from Fairchild started up more than fifty companies, all making or supplying microchips. Raytheon Semiconductor, Signetics, General Microelectronics, Intersil, Advanced Micro Devices, Qualidyne—off they spun, each with a sillier pseudo-tech engineerologism for a name than the one before. Defectors! What a merry game that was. Jean Hoerni and three of the other original eight defectors from Shockley defected from Fairchild to form what would soon become known as Teledyne Semiconductors, and that was only round one. After all, why not make all the money for yourself! The urge to use defection capital was so irresistible that the word “defection,” with its note of betrayal, withered away. Defectors were merely the Fairchildren, as Adam Smith dubbed them. Occasionally defectors from other companies, such as the men from Texas Instruments and Westinghouse who started Siliconix, moved into the Santa Clara Valley to join the free-for-all. But it was the Fairchildren who turned the Santa Clara Valley into the Silicon Valley. Acre by acre the fruit trees were uprooted, and two-story Silicon Modern office buildings and factories
went up. The state of California built a new freeway past the area, Route 280. Children heard the phrase “Silicon Valley” so often, they grew up thinking it was the name on the map.
    Everywhere the Fairchild émigrés went, they took the Noyce approach with them. It wasn’t enough to start up a company; you had to start up a community, a community in which there were no social distinctions, and it was first come, first served, in the parking lot, and everyone was supposed to internalize the common goals. The atmosphere of the new companies was so democratic, it startled businessmen from the East. Some fifty-five-year-old biggie with his jowls swelling up smoothly from out of his F. R. Tripler modified-spread white collar and silk jacquard-print necktie would call up from GE or RCA and say, “This is Harold B. Thatchwaite,” and the twenty-three-year-old secretary on the other end of the line, out in the Silicon Valley, would say in one of those sunny blond pale blue-eyed California voices, “Just a