Life lessons from Gordon Moore, the man behind Silicon Valley's most famous law

You may never have heard the name “Gordon Moore” but you likely know the famous technology ‘law’ named for him. Moore predicted 50 years ago that the number of transistors on a chip would increase exponentially, doubling roughly every two years. Known as Moore’s Law, the dictum that tech performance will double every two years has made us anxious every time we commit to a new laptop knowing it will be half as good as what’s on the market before we’ve had a chance to wear out its keyboard.

Moore’s Law has held up over the last half century as a way to understand tech innovation, and so on Monday night, people packed into the Exploratorium in San Francisco to celebrate the man behind it. Moore, now 86, was in attendance and interviewed on stage by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman. He looked a bit frail, but his ideas were sharp as ever.

Moore did not come up with his law from within the ivory towers of academia. He was in the tech weeds in the early days of Silicon Valley’s growth, back when the Valley was named for the hardware it was producing. In 1964, the trade journal Electronics pinged Moore who was the director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductors to write an article for its 35th anniversary issue. Moore had been thinking for some time about how the company’s products—integrated circuits, the building blocks of computer chips—would change the world. This was an opportunity to put his theories into words, with the headline, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.”

Four years later, in 1968, Moore ventured off with Bob Noyce to help put his law into action, co-founding Intel, a company that became the most successful chip manufacturer in the world. Fifty years on, many of the things Moore foresaw have come to pass and his writings have become the equivalent of Silicon Valley dogma. There are physicists and academics who have said in recent years that Moore’s Law is beginning to collapse, and that tech innovation will have to slow down due to materials constraints, but it hasn’t happened yet.

“There are all kinds of barriers we’re always thinking are going to prevent us from taking the next step, and somehow or other, as we get closer, the engineers have figured out ways around it,” he said. “But someday it has to stop. No exponential like this can go on forever.”

Moore is still considered one of Silicon Valley’s most influential figures. It was inspiring to hear him talk. He was humble, gracious and funny. These are the five most important things I took away from Friedman’s interview of Moore.

1. Don’t be a lemming.

When asked what kind of startup he’d start today, Moore answered like a boss:

I have a different view of startups from many people doing it today. To me, you have to have an idea for a product that has some uniqueness in the market — that’s essential.

Starting a company just because the market is hot is probably not the best reason, but the advice, I think, is germane to more than just entrepreneurs looking to found new companies. To succeed at anything, you have to be able to differentiate yourself from the pack — to offer your customers (or readers) something they can’t get anywhere else. Be essential. Words to live by.