The Man Behind the Microchip

Leslie Berlin's biography of Robert Noyce, co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel and co-inventor of the integrated circuit, also portrays how money, politics, culture, business and technology mix in Silicon Valley. Celebrated as Silicon Valley's answer to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, Noyce was a daring risk taker who flew his own jets and skied mountains reachable only by helicopter. Berlin shows an ambitious, fiercely competitive multimillionaire with an easy, folksy charm, a preacher's son from the Midwest who turned away from organized religion, and someone who never looked back, at times at a cost. She draws on documents never seen before and on interviews with dozens of figures, including Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett.

Patrick Collison names it on his Bookshelf page.