Andy Grove has died
I'm sorry to hear of his passing. My first job in the Bay Area was working for Intel in Santa Clara, and I worked in the same building that Andy did at the time (Santa Clara 4). It amazed me that he had a cubical (well it had slightly higher walls but was still just a cube.) I have two very influential memories of my time at Intel, the first was when I went to a design update meeting on the 80386 and Andy locked the door to the room at the time the meeting started, a couple of people who should have attended in person were stuck waiting in the hall. The second was that when we had one of our "business update meetings" (which really was a layoff was happening to the people who weren't in the meeting so we called them "BUMmer" meetings sometimes). Andy said that because Intel was losing money the slowest of all semiconductor companies we were by definition the best semiconductor company in the world.<p>Both of those experiences left me deeply impressed with how <i>focused</i> he was on the path forward. What ever was happening around you didn't matter, it was "Put one foot in front of the other and make progress against the goal now." kind of focus.