Yahoo Finance Former Intel Chief Andy Grove Dead At 79
Andy Grove, the former Intel Corp chief executive who is credited with saving the tech giant from financial ruin in the 1980s, has died at age 79.
Mr Grove died on Monday, Intel (Swiss: INTC.SW - news) said. The company did not specify a cause of death.
He had suffered from Parkinson's disease, as well as prostate cancer in the mid-1990s.
During his tenure at Intel, Mr Grove's mercurial but visionary leadership built the Silicon Valley firm into the world's largest chip company.
Intel considers Mr Grove a founding member, although he was technically the company's third employee after founders Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce.
He rescued the cash-strapped company in the mid-1980s with his risky decision to move Intel from memory chips to microprocessors.
Under his leadership, Intel would go on to become not only one of the most profitable tech firms of all time, but also one of the most important.
"Andy made the impossible happen, time and again, and inspired generations of technologists, entrepreneurs, and business leaders," Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said.
Microsoft (NasdaqGS: MSFT - news) co-founder Bill Gates paid tribute to Mr Grove on Twitter (Xetra: A1W6XZ - news) , calling him "one of the greatest business leaders of the 20th century".
Robert Burgelman, a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business who taught classes with Mr Grove in the late 1980s, called his former colleague "one of the most incisive thinkers that I have ever come across".
He said Mr Grove was critical in building Intel and fending off threats from Asian competitors.
"I don't think Intel would have been Intel as we know it, and therefore the US chip industry would not have been what it is" without him, Mr Burgelman said.
Mr Grove was born Andras Istvan Grof. As a Jew growing up in Nazi-occupied Hungary, he survived the Holocaust by moving frequently as a child, boarding with family friends and taking on an assumed name.
His harrowing childhood inspired an "only the paranoid survive" management philosophy that would see him go from a penniless immigrant at age 20 to a tech and business icon worth about $400m, according to Forbes magazine.
Mr Grove was named Time Man of the Year in 1997, with the magazine calling him the "person most responsible for the amazing growth in the power and innovative potential of microchips".
He stepped down as Intel CEO in 1998, and relinquished his chairman title in 2005.
