Entrepreneurs and the New Corporate World

European Straits #1

How the “Traitorous Eight” ushered in a new era of entrepreneurship

Large corporations were all-powerful in the 20th century: only in capital-intensive corporate labs could talented researchers and scientists hope to achieve progress. This all started to change when William Shockley created a tech company in Palo Alto to explore new applications for transistors. Shockley unintentionally gave birth to a new entrepreneurial culture when his eight most brilliant engineers betrayed him to venture outside the comforts of corporate life.

• DISCOVER how the 20th-century corporate labs gave way to the Entrepreneurial Age

• READ how Robert Noyce, the leader of the rebellious eight, created the modern Silicon Valley

How personal computing vowed to empower individuals against organizations

Personal computing was born in the counterculture of the 1960s. While the first part of Silicon Valley’s history was about empowering the US military, the second part, after the invention of the microprocessor, would b…