Hamilton Helmer: belief

Transcript context

…That ended up having basically a massive race to the bottom with tons of new entrants who were able to spin up everything that Intel had and compete against them. But then if you go to what they did eventually of power in which is CPUs, again, leadership really mattered. They have come up with this idea for a central processor. The question is, is this a big deal? Do we back this? Most of the board was against it. Their head of sales was adamant that this would never turn into anything, and he was a sharp guy. Andy Grove was dead set against it, I believe is correct. Bob Noyce went out and kind of talked to people. This is the nature of invention, high uncertainty bars, very large bandwidth, deep insights. If I said, no, I really think this eventually is going to go somewhere. Then the chairman of the board backed Bob Noyce and they committed to it, even though they really didn't have the cash and it was a very hard thing for them. There's a case where leadership really mattered, but it wasn't enough. So the question here is sufficiency. If you take a great leader and put him in a different business, that doesn't massively reduce the uncertainty bars that the business is going to be a success. That makes a lot of sense.…

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