Andrew Grove’s ambition and drive led him on an unlikely course from his native Hungary to the University of California at Berkeley to found one of the most innovative and dominant American technology companies of modern times.

Grove’s unlikely path started in Budapest in 1936 as Gróf András, the family name coming first in Hungary. In 1956, Grove, nicknamed Andris, escaped with his family under cover of night as the Russian’s crushed the Hungarian Revolution, arriving in New York the following year. He lived with an uncle in the Bronx and worked his way through school, graduating at the head of his class with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from City College of New York in 1960. He then moved to California and earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963. He immediately found work at Fairchild Semiconductor, where the integrated circuit was invented four years before. Grove became assistant director of research and development at Fairchild in 1967.

The following year, fellow Fairchild engineers Gordon Moore and integrated circuit co-inventor Robert Noyce left to form a new electronics company eventually named Intel. Grove asked to come along, and became Intel employee number four. None of the three knew exactly what the new company would be. According to Grove, the first Intel business plan was one page that said “absolutely nothing."

What Intel did was to invent and commercialize the microprocessor, starting with the four-bit 4004 chip in 1971, followed by the eight-bit 8008 in 1972 and what is considered the first all-purpose chip, the 8080 in 1974, which was used in the first personal computer, the Altair 8800. Grove soon came to be recognized as the company visionary and the driving force in moving the company from being merely a chip provider to a technology leader. In 1979, Grove was named president of Intel. Two years later, IBM tapped Intel to supply the new 8088 chips for the IBM PC. Grove was the day-to-day leader at Intel and is largely credited for building the company into the market leader it is today and is one of the primary drivers in ushering in the Information Age.

In 1987, Grove was named Intel’s CEO, the same year he received the IEEE Engineering Leadership Recognition award. In May 1997, he added chairman to his list of Intel titles, the same year he was named “Technology Leader of the Year” by Industry Week, CEO of the Year by CEO magazine, and “Man of the Year” by Time magazine. Ironically, Grove resigned as CEO the following year.

Grove has written more than 40 technical papers and holds several patents on semiconductor devices and technology. He taught a graduate course in semiconductor device physics at his alma mater Cal Berkeley for six years. In 2004, Grove was named the Most Influential Business Person in the Last Twenty-Five Years by the Wharton School of Business and the Nightly Business Report. He stepped down as chairman in May 2005, but still holds the title senior advisor. Grove is involved in numerous industry and charitable organizations, most prominently in research to cure prostate cancer, which he suffered from in the mid-1990s. He also teaches a course entitled “Strategy and Action in the Information Processing Industry" at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.