When Jerry Sanders, the founding CEO of AMD, was ousted from Fairchild Semiconductor, he thought about a number of careers: personal management in the entertainment business; a car dealership; a travel agency.
However two phone calls brought him back to the chip business, one from John Carey, later CEO of IDT and Chairman of Wolfson, who said they should set up a company to make digital chips, and one from Jack Gifford, later the founding CEO of Maxim, who said they should form a company to make analogue chips.
Sanders suspected that Gifford only approached him because he thought Sanders would be good at raising money. He turned out to be right. After he'd raised the money to start AMD, Gifford tried to force Sanders out.
Sanders made a brilliant early move. He second-sourced other companies' chips putting 'AM' in front of other companies' part numbers so a Fairchild UA-741 was replicated by AMD as an AM-741, and a National LM-101 was replicated as an AM-101.
The AMD parts were plug-in replacements and AMD offered distributors a better margin than they got for selling the originals.
Obviously, back in 1969, IP issues didn't figure quite so highly in semiconductor executives' priorities as they do today!
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