Computer History Museum

Carsten, Jack oral history

In this oral history, Jack describes the details of his long career in semiconductors at Texas Instruments (TI) and Intel, and later moving into venture. He grew up in the Midwest, received a BS in Physics at Duke University and then moved to Dallas to work for TI. He worked on a variety of projects, both military and commercial, and became general manager of the TTL division in Houston from 1969-1973. He subsequently took over as GM of the MOS division in Houston. From there, Jack was recruited to go to Intel in 1975. While there he played a significant management role as GM of the microprocessor business and later the memory business. While running memory, Carsten had to oversee the exit from the memory business and the layoff of about 4000 employees. Carsten found his time at Intel to be both challenging and rewarding. During the period 1976 to 1983, the overall business grew from $300M to about $1.5B. He speaks highly of the leadership offered by Noyce, Moore and Grove, although he notes that Grove had his blind spots and drove off many key executives. Upon leaving Intel in 1987, Carsten went to US Venture Partners as a General Partner until 1990. He then founded his own investment firm, Technology Investments. In 1998, Carsten founded Horizon Ventures, where he remains as GP to this day and currently manages eight companies. He also continues to make angel investments from Technology Investments.

Item Details

Date
2015-07-24 (Made)
Type
Document
Catalogue number
102737945
Organization
Computer History Museum (Publisher)
People
Eric Dennis (Videographer)
Jeff Katz (Interviewer)
Jack Carsten (Interviewee)
Category
Transcript
Format
PDF
Credit line
Computer History Museum
Place of publication
USA/CA/Mountain View
Language
English
Acquisition number
X7549.2016
Subject
Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI), Intel, Semiconductor History, ASIC
Archive collection
CHM Oral History collection
Archive hierarchy
Oral History collection