Shockley Semi-conductor

November 3, 1948

A little while ago, I went up to the podium at a presentation by some scientists, and presented my new transistor idea to a group of scientists and board members at Bell Labs. It was amazing! But now, John and Walter are whining about it, and saying things like “you shouldn’t have kept your transistor a secret from us for so long” and “you can’t just hi-jack a presentation to show off your new invention, just because you want too.” Well, I can, and I did, what does that tell you about how intelligent they are. John was so frustrated that he quit, and Walter requested to be moved to another department. I suppose they can’t handle competition. I left too, and got a job teaching at Caltech, but I’ve moved on from there. I’ve started a company called “Shockley Semi-conductor” that manufactures transistors in Palo Alto. People have even started calling the area Silicon Valley, because we use Silicon in our products. I started my company by calling some of the people I worked with at Bell Labs to be my employees but they did not wish to work for me. They said something about “Why would I ever want to work for you?” and “I literally quit my job because of you.” I think it must be because they are too intimidated by how intelligent I am. I was then forced to take an alternate route. I called all the best scientists in the field, and recruited some great scientists, including Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. I think that we will accomplish important work here. Now the scientists and I are trying to make a four-layer diode that will be an improvement on my old transistor, and be far superior to Walter and John’s transistor. People keep telling me it won’t function properly, but I think that they’re not working hard enough. They don’t seem to enjoy it when I tell them that, but if they would just invent the darn thing instead of whining about it, I wouldn’t have to say it.

My beautiful company

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