Andrew Grove

Andrew Stephen Grove (born András Gróf; September 2, 1936 – March 21, 2016) was a Hungarian-born American engineer, businessman, and author who served as president, chief executive officer, and chairman of Intel Corporation. Born into a Jewish family in Budapest, Grove survived the Holocaust by living in hiding under a false identity before emigrating to the United States in 1956 following the Hungarian Revolution. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the City College of New York in 1960 and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963.

As Intel's third employee since its founding in, Grove ascended to president in 1979 and CEO in 1987, guiding the company through a strategic pivot from dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips to microprocessors in the mid-1980s, which positioned Intel as the leading supplier for personal computers. This shift, executed amid fierce Japanese competition in memory markets, capitalized on the emerging x86 architecture and enabled Intel's dominance in central processing units (CPUs), fueling the microprocessor revolution and Moore's Law in practice. His rigorous, results-driven management style—emphasizing paranoia toward complacency and decisive adaptation to inflection points—earned him recognition as Time magazine's Man of the Year in 1997.

András Gróf was born on September 2, 1936, in Budapest, Hungary, into a middle-class Jewish family; his father, György Gróf, worked as a dairyman, while his mother, Mária, managed the household. At age four in 1940, he contracted scarlet fever during an epidemic, an illness that nearly proved fatal and left him with a permanent hearing impairment requiring a hearing aid for much of his life. This early health crisis demanded rigorous recovery efforts, including hospital isolation, yet Gróf demonstrated early resilience by adapting to the disability without evident self-pity, focusing instead on functional coping mechanisms.