Art Fong - Hewlett-Packard Employee #9

Here is an interesting question. If Microwave Engineer Art Fong had decided to turn down Bill Hewlett's job offer back in 1945, how would the Hewlett Packard product line of microwave signal generators, bridges, and a long line of spectrum analyzers be different today? We think those resulting product lines of today would be substantially different, because Art Fong brought a creativity and completeness to his vision of his products that really did affect those product lines decades into the future. Certainly Art's actual products themselves meant several hundred million dollars of revenues in their lifetimes, but the generations of ongoing products which he conceived, put HP into a sales pre-eminence they would never had if Art told Bill, sorry, no.

Here is an interview I did with Art where we discuss his history, how Bill Hewlett convinced him to join HP and the impact he had on HP and Silicon Valley.