Arthur Rock
Arthur Rock (born August 19, 1926 in Rochester , New York ) is an American venture capitalist in the high-tech sector and was a pioneer in this regard in Silicon Valley .
Life
Rock, whose father immigrated from Russia and had a candy store, graduated from Syracuse University with a bachelor's degree in 1948 and Harvard Business School with a degree in business administration ( MBA ) in 1951. He was initially a business analyst in New York City and then in corporate finance at the brokerage firm Hayden, Stone & Company in New York. There he specialized in the financing of startups in the high-tech sector. In 1961 he moved entirely to California when the success of Silicon Valley was already emerging. In San Francisco , he founded the venture capital firm Davis & Rock with Thomas J. Davis . Early on, he successfully invested in companies such as Apple and Intel .
Important projects
Rock was involved in the semiconductor industry as early as 1955 when he acquired General Transistor Chapter. In 1957 he helped the traitorous eight ( eight traitors ) Fairchild Semiconductor to found by the aviation industrialist Sherman Fairchild convinced to finance them. The father of one of the Eight Traitors , Eugen Kleiner (who later became a venture capitalist himself), had a stake in Hayden Stone and that's how contact came about. Fairchild was able to provide the start-up capital of around $ 1.5 million comfortably because his father had been a partner of Thomas J. Watson and owned one of the largest private blocks of shares in IBM. In return, he received call options on the shares (which were divided to 10% between the eight founders and 20% in Hayden Stone). As early as the late 1960s, he was able to more than make up for the losses at Fairchild Camera and Instruments. Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce , two of the Eight Traitors , were dissatisfied with Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968 because the leadership came from the east coast and there was tension (among other things, the company management refused to give action options to employees). In this case, Rock was one of the shareholders (alongside Gordon and Moore) and on the board of Intel from the start.
Immediately after founding Davis & Rock, he was also the investor (and on the board of directors) of Scientific Data Systems (SDS), a successful manufacturer of computers for scientific purposes, which was bought by Xerox , who then compete with IBM in their very own field wanted and failed. IBM wanted to enter the copier market and Xerox wanted to respond by buying SDS and realigning it. Also in the early stages of Davis & Rock, they received funding from Teledyne . In total, they brokered $ 3 million in investments in the first eight years from 1961 to 1968, which raised $ 100 million for their investors.
Rock was also an early investor in Apple, though the appearance of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak initially put him off. Former Marketing Vice President of Intel Mike Markkula, who invested in the two himself, and a visit to the homebrew computer show in San José , where he couldn't even come to the Apple booth due to the large number of visitors, convinced him of the potential of the home computer. Rock had further problems with his job, which he called in a 2002 interview Disturbing force described (Disturbing Force), and made for its replacement by John Sculley . In general, he was satisfied with its management, but after around ten years he was also in favor of Michael Spindler's replacement and then left Apple's supervisory board. One reason was that they didn't use Intel chips. After Rock, Sculley became too interested in politics as a supporter of Bill Clinton and moved to the East Coast with his new wife, who didn't like California, which made him lose his bite.
He stayed out of the internet and telecom bubble in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2007 .
Private
He is married to attorney Toni Rembe, who has been a partner in the large law firm Pillsbury Winthrop in San Francisco since 1971. In 2003 he donated $ 25 million to Harvard Business School to establish the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Interview, Harvard Business School, 2001, pdf
- ↑ Silicon Genesis Oral History Interview 2002 ( memento of the original from June 6, 2012 on WebCite ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Rock, Arthur |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American entrepreneur |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 19, 1926 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rochester , New York |