About a year earlier, in Palo Alto, California, a group of eight engineers employed by William Shockley’s semiconductor lab had told their Nobel Prize−winning boss that they were quitting. Shockley had a knack for spotting talent, but he was an awful manager. He thrived on controversy and created a toxic atmosphere that alienated the bright young engineers he’d assembled. So these eight engineers left Shockley Semiconductor and decided to found their own company, Fairchild Semiconductor, with seed funding from an East Coast millionaire.
