Category:Former Intel Employees
This category is close to being a record of one company's chief executive succession rather than a general employee roster: Gordon Moore co-founded Intel in 1968, and Andy Grove, Craig Barrett, Paul Otellini, Brian Krzanich, Bob Swan, Pat Gelsinger and Lip-Bu Tan have between them held the top job from 1987 to the present. It collects biographical entries on people who worked at Intel Corporation. Alongside the executives sits a much smaller and much more recent group of engineers who left the chip business for software, which is the only other pattern the membership supports.
Background
Intel was founded in 1968 by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, both of whom had come from Fairchild Semiconductor, and it began as a memory chip maker before the shift to microprocessors that defined it. Moore's 1965 observation that the transistor count on an integrated circuit doubled roughly every two years became the industry's planning assumption for more than half a century.
The company promoted from within for most of its history, and the effect is visible in this roster: several members joined in technical roles and stayed for decades before reaching the executive floor.
The succession
Andy Grove came to the semiconductor industry through Fairchild Semiconductor, where he worked alongside Robert Noyce and Moore, and as chief executive from 1987 to 1998 moved the company off memory chips and onto microprocessors. Craig Barrett spent more than three decades at Intel, rising from a technical role in manufacturing, and served as chief executive from 1998 to 2005 and later as chairman; since retiring from the board he has argued publicly about American semiconductor manufacturing policy. Paul Otellini joined in 1974, became president and chief operating officer in 2002, succeeded Barrett in May 2005 and was the first person to lead the company without an engineering degree. Brian Krzanich joined as a process engineer in 1982 and became chief executive from May 2013 to June 2018, a tenure marked by a commitment to remove conflict minerals from the supply chain and by delays in reaching 10-nanometre manufacturing.
Bob Swan broke the pattern. He arrived as a finance executive, having been chief financial officer at eBay, Electronic Data Systems and TRW before Intel, and his appointment as chief executive from January 2019 to February 2021 surprised observers used to engineers in the role; he left for Andreessen Horowitz. Pat Gelsinger joined as a teenager in the late 1970s, was chief architect of the i486 microprocessor, left to run VMware and returned as chief executive from February 2021 to December 2024. Lip-Bu Tan, who had led Cadence Design Systems from 2009 to 2021 and chairs Walden International, has held the office since 2025.
The engineers who left for software
The second group in this category is small, recent and pointed in the opposite direction. Siddhant Paliwal worked as a software engineering intern at Intel before co-founding Bear, a marketing platform for artificial intelligence agents. Joe Fioti worked as a chip designer at Intel and left after concluding that the binding constraint on artificial intelligence hardware performance sat in software rather than in the chips, a thesis he built the compiler company Luminal on. Both cases run counter to the direction of travel in the rest of the roster, where careers converge on the company rather than away from it.
Two further members are associated with the company through its board rather than its payroll, and should be read that way: Aneel Bhusri, the co-founder of Workday, served on Intel's board from 2014 to 2019, and Jim Goetz of Sequoia Capital has also sat on it.
See also
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