Jerry Sanders

Walter Jeremiah Sanders III ("Jerry Sanders") was a salesman at Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1960s. He was one of the company's best sales people and was famous for style and flair. He then co-founded Advanced Micro Devices and took his trademark style into his position as its CEO.

Jerry was kind of Hollywood, even though he grew up in the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, raised by his paternal grandparents. He was once attacked and beaten by a street gang that left him so covered with blood that a priest was called in to administer the last rites, but Jerry recovered. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on an academic scholarship from the Pullman railroad car company. He graduated with his bachelor's degree in engineering in 1958, and then went to work for the Douglas Aircraft Company. He eventually moved to Motorola, then to Fairchild Semiconductor.

In the late 1960s Sherman Fairchild brought a new management team into Fairchild Semiconductor, led by Lester C Hogan, then president of Motorola Semiconductor. The troops from Motorola (Hogan's Heroes) were notoriously conservative, and immediately clashed with Sander's boisterous style. He wasn't happy and neither were they. In 1969 a group of Fairchild engineers decided to start a new company, which became Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). They asked Jerry to join them, and he said he would, provided he became the president of the company. Although it caused some dissension within the group, they agreed, and AMD was founded with Sanders as President.

Sanders remained the company's consummate salesperson, always available to come in on the really tough negotiations and close them. He loved visiting the Los Angeles sales office on Wilshire Blvd near Hollywood and staying at the Beverly Hills Hilton. Sanders always wanted to make money — lots of money — but he realized that the key to earning wealth was for everyone else at AMD to make a lot of money too. While growing wealthy, he also lavished wealth generously on all his employees. At the end of the company's first $1 million quarter, Sanders stood by the door of the company and handed a $100 bill to every employee as they left. Every employee at the company got stock options, a huge innovation at the time.

Sanders gave the company a strong sales and marketing orientation, so that it was successful even though it was often a little behind its competitors in technology and manufacturing. He shared the success of the company with the employees, usually coincident with sales-oriented growth targets. One time, as a successful sales goal was met, the company held a drawing among all the employees, and an immigrant production worker in Sunnyvale, California won $1000 a month for 20 years (a new house).

He drove the company through hard times as well. In 1974, a particularly bad recession almost broke the company, but a brilliant sales deal worked out by Sanders with one of the company's distributors saved the company. Through many difficult recessions he refused to lay off employees, a reaction to the rampant layoffs that had occurred at Fairchild earlier. Instead of cutting employees, he asked them to work Saturdays to get more done and get new products out sooner.

Around 1980, he was responsible for a licensing deal with Intel that made AMD a second source to IBM for the Intel Microprocessor series, a deal that eventually made the company the only real competitor to Intel.

Sanders created Advanced Micro Devices; his personality was the company's personality — colorful, brash, perhaps a little too "Hollywood" for some. He is one of the architects of Silicon Valley.

External link

• Interview with Jerry Sanders at his alma mater (http://www.uiaa.org/urbana/illinoisalumni/utxt0402e.html)
• Jerry Sanders Special (http://www.amdboard.com/sanderspecial.html)