Business History: From Tyrant to Tech Empire

William Shockley was a brilliant inventor and Nobel Prize winner, but he was a terrible boss. Paranoid, cruel, and obsessed with micromanaging, he drove away the team of young engineers — later called “The Traitorous Eight” — he had assembled in Northern California. They went on to pioneer silicon chips, create companies like Intel and AMD, and fund tech giants like Google and Slack. This episode from Business History, hosted by former Planet Money hosts Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith, tells the story of how one bad boss accidentally sparked the tech revolution that became Silicon Valley.

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