Arthur Rock
Arthur Skirt ( born August 19, 1926 in Rochester, New York) is an American venture capital - timer in the high- tech field and was in this respect a pioneer in Silicon Valley.
Life
Rock, whose father had immigrated from Russia and had a candy store, graduated from Syracuse University with a bachelor 's degree in 1948 and from Harvard Business School with a degree in Business Administration ( MBA) in 1951. Initially, he was a business analyst in New York City and then in the field of corporate finance at the brokerage firm Hayden, Stone & Company in New York. There, he specialized in the financing of start-ups in the high- tech sector. In 1961 he moved to California, when it became already the success of Silicon Valley. In San Francisco, he and Thomas J. Davis, the venture capital firm Davis & Rock. He invested successfully early in companies such as Apple and Intel.
Important projects
Rock had been in 1955 related to the semiconductor industry when he procured transistor Chapter General. In 1957, he helped the Traitorous Eight (Eight traitors ) Fairchild Semiconductor to start by convincing the aviation industrialist Sherman Fairchild fund this. This could provide the starting capital of approximately $ 1.5 million easily available because it had been his father a partner of Thomas J. Watson, and one of the largest privately owned IBM stock packages. As compensation he received call options on the shares (which were split with 10 % among the eight founders and 20 % at Hayden Stone). By the late 1960s he was the losses of Fairchild Camera and Instrument to more than compensate. Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, two of the eight traitors, 1968 were dissatisfied with Fairchild Semiconductor, since the guide was from the east coast here and there were tensions (among other things, rejected the company's management to give action options to employees). In this case, rock was from the beginning one of the shareholders (in addition to Gordon and Moore) and the Supervisory Board at Intel.
DC After the founding of Davis & Rock he was also the capital ( and the Supervisory Board ) from Scientific Data Systems (SDS ), a successful manufacturer of computers for scientific purposes, which was acquired by Xerox, then so do IBM competitors on their very own area wanted, and thus failed. Also in the initial phase of Davis & Rock dropped their funding from Teledyne. Overall, she taught in the first eight years from 1961 to 1968 three million U.S. dollars of investment that yielded 100 million for its investors.
Rock was also an early investor in Apple, although the appearance of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak deterred him first. The former marketing vice president of Intel Mike Markkula, who invested themselves in the two, and a visit to the Homebrew Computer Show in San Jose, where he could not even get to the Apple booth because of the influx of visitors, but they convinced him of the potential of the home computer. Rock had on his problems with Jobs, whom he described in a 2002 interview as a Disruptive Force ( Disturbing Force), and made for its replacement by John Sculley. In general, he was satisfied with his management, but he was around 10 years for its replacement by Michael Spindler, and left after the board of Apple.
From the Internet and telecom bubble in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he held out.
Private
He is married to lawyer Toni Rembe, who was in the large law firm Pillsbury Winthrop in San Francisco since 1971 partner. In 2003, he donated $ 25 million to Harvard Business School to the founding of Arthur rock Centre for Entrepreneurship.