Jerry Sanders III grew up in the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, raised by his paternal grandparents. He was once attacked and beaten by a street gang that left him so covered with blood that a priest was called in to administer the last rites, but Jerry recovered. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on an academic scholarship from the Pullman railroad car company. He graduated with his bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1958.

After graduation he went to work for the Douglas Aircraft Company. He eventually moved to Motorola, then to Fairchild Semiconductor. He became known as one of Fairchild’s best sales people in the 1960s and was famous for his style and flair.

In 1968 Sherman Fairchild brought a new management team into Fairchild Semiconductor, led by C. Lester Hogan, then vice president of Motorola Semiconductor. The troops from Motorola, also known as “Hogan’s Heroes”, were notoriously conservative, and immediately clashed with Sanders’ boisterous style. He was one of the architects of Silicon Valley.

In 1969 a group of Fairchild engineers decided to start a new company, which became Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). They asked Jerry Sanders to join them, and he said he would, provided he became the president of the company. Although it caused some dissension within the group, they agreed, and the company was founded with Sanders as President.

Sanders took his trademark style into his position as the CEO of AMD. He remained the company’s consummate salesperson, always available to come in on the really tough negotiations and close them. He loved visiting the Los Angeles sales office on Wilshire Blvd near Hollywood and staying at the Beverly Hills Hilton. Sanders always wanted to make money, but he realized that the key to earning wealth was for everyone else at AMD to make a lot of money too. While growing wealthy, he also lavished wealth generously on all his employees. At the end of the company’s first $1 million quarter, Sanders stood by the door of the company and handed a $100 bill to every employee as they left. Every employee at the company got stock options, a huge innovation at the time.

Sanders gave the company a strong sales and marketing orientation, so that it was successful even though it was often a little behind its competitors in technology and manufacturing. He shared the success of the company with the employees, usually coincident with sales-oriented growth targets. One time, as a successful sales goal was met, the company held a drawing among all the employees, and an immigrant production worker in Sunnyvale, California won $1000 a month for 20 years (USD 240,000).

He drove the company through hard times as well. In 1974, a particularly bad recession almost broke the company, but a brilliant sales deal worked out by Sanders with one of the company’s distributors[citation needed] saved the company. Through many difficult recessions he refused to lay off employees, a reaction to the rampant layoffs that had occurred at Fairchild earlier. Instead of cutting employees, he asked them to work Saturdays to get more done and get new products out sooner.

In 1982, he was responsible for a licensing deal with Intel that made AMD a second source to IBM for the Intel Microprocessor series, a deal that eventually made the company the only real competitor to Intel.

In 2000, Sanders recruited Héctor Ruiz, at the time the president of Motorola’s Semiconductor Products Sector, to serve as AMD’s president and chief operating officer, and to become heir apparent to lead the company upon Sanders’ retirement. Ruiz succeeded Sanders in the CEO’s seat in 2002.

Jerry Sanders has 4 children, three who are now adults and one who is currently living with he and his wife, Tawny, and is currently retired. He enjoys his life by travelling,attending cultural events, and donating his time and money to many non profits in Los Angeles and beyond.He remains in extremely great health, has the same entertaining personality as always.

Sanders created Advanced Micro Devices; his personality was the company’s personality — colorful, brash,and extremely innovative.

Links

• Jerry Sanders
• Jerry Sanders – Sci-techs.com

Steve Ballmer has been known to be very passionate in expressing his enthusiasm. When Microsoft celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2000, Ballmer popped out of the anniversary cake to surprise the audience. His wild screaming and dancing on stage at an employees convention was caught on a widely-circulated video known as “Steve Ballmer going crazy.” A few days later at a developers’ conference, a sweat-soaked Ballmer repeatedly chanted “developers” in front of the bemused gathering.

Family

On October 4, 2007, Ballmer was awarded honorary citizenship of Lausen, Switzerland. His father had worked in that country as a manager at Ford Motor Co in the late 1940s. In 1990 Ballmer married Connie Snyder, on Microsoft’s PR team at the Waggener Group in the ’80s. They have three children. Ballmer’s grandfather lives in Minsk, Belarus.

Career

Pre-Microsoft & Life History

Steve Ballmer was born March 24, 1956, to a Swiss father and a Jewish-American mother whose family came from the Eastern European city of Pinsk (today in Belarus). He grew up in Farmington Hills, Michigan. In 1973, he graduated from Detroit Country Day School, a high school, and now sits on its board of directors. In 1977, he graduated from Harvard University  with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics. While in college, Ballmer managed the football team, worked on the Harvard Crimson newspaper as well as the Harvard Advocate, and lived down the hall from fellow sophomore Bill Gates. He then worked for two years as an assistant product manager at Procter & Gamble, where he shared an office with Jeffrey R. Immelt, the current CEO of General Electric. In 1980, he dropped out from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

Microsoft career

Ballmer joined Microsoft on June 11, 1980., and became Microsoft’s 24th employee, the first business manager hired by Gates. He was initially offered a salary of $50,000 as well as a percentage of ownership of the company. When Microsoft was incorporated in 1981, Ballmer owned 8 percent of the company. He has headed several divisions within Microsoft including “Operating Systems Development”, “Operations”, and “Sales and Support.” In January 2000, he was officially named chief executive officer. As CEO Ballmer handled company finances, however Gates still retained control of the “technological vision.” In 2003, Ballmer sold 8.3% of his shareholdings, leaving him with a 4% stake in the company. The same year, Ballmer replaced Microsoft’s employee stock options program, which had been instrumental in making early employees millionaires.

Links

• Steve Ballmer
• Steve Ballmer – Sci-techs.com

Biswamohan Pani – Sci-techs.com

Larry Page is the son of the late Dr. Carl Victor Page, a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at Michigan State University and one of the University of Michigan’s first computer science Ph.D. graduates, and Gloria Page, a computer programming teacher at Michigan State University. Although his mother was Jewish, Page was raised similarly to his father, and did not practice any religion. He is also the brother of Carl Victor Page, Jr.. a co-founder of eGroups, which was later sold to Yahoo!.

During an interview, Page said that “their house was usually a mess, with computers and Popular Science magazines all over the place.” His love affair with computers started when he was six years old when he got “to play with the stuff lying around.” He became the “first kid in his elementary school to turn in an assignment” from a word processor.  His older brother also taught him to take things apart, and before long he was taking “everything in his house apart to see how it worked.” He said that “from a very early age, I also realized I wanted to invent things. So I became really interested in technology…and business. So probably from when I was 12 I knew I was going to start a company eventually.”

Page attended a Montessori school in Lansing, Michigan, and graduated from East Lansing High School. Page holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan with honors and a Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. While at the University of Michigan, “Page created an inkjet printer made of Lego bricks”, served as the president of the HKN,  and was a member of the solar car team.

Other Information

• Born  Lawrence Edward “Larry” Page, March 26, 1973 (1973-03-26)
• Lansing, Michigan
• Occupation  Computer scientist, technology innovator, entrepreneur
• Net worth  $15.8 billion USD (2008)
• Known for  Co-founder of Google, Inc.
• Spouse(s)  Lucinda Southworth

Links

• Larry Page – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Brin emigrated to the United States at the age of six due to his family’s educational barriers in the Soviet Union. Earning his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, he followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps by studying mathematics, double-majoring in computer science. After graduation, he moved to Stanford to acquire a Ph.D in computer science. There he met Larry Page, who quickly became his intellectual soul-mate and close friend. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin’s data mining system to build a superior search engine. The program became popular at Stanford and they suspended their Ph.D studies to start up Google in a rented garage.

The Economist magazine referred to Brin as “Enlightenment Man,” and someone who believes that “knowledge is always good, and certainly always better than ignorance,” a philosophy which is summed up by Google’s motto of making all the world’s information “universally accessible and useful.”

Other Information

• Born  Sergey Mikhailovich Brin, August 21, 1973 (1973-08-21), Moscow, Soviet Union
• Education  Univ. of Maryland (B.S., 1993), Stanford University (M.S., 1995)
• Occupation  Computer scientist, technology innovator, entrepreneur
• Employer  Google, Inc., Mountain View, California
• Title: Co-founder and President
• Salary  USD $1 (2008)
• Net worth  US$15.9 billion
• Known for  Co-founder of Google, Inc. world’s largest internet company
• Spouse(s)  Anne Wojcicki
• Website : stanford.edu/~sergey