William Shockley
![Shockley in 1975](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f8/William_Shockley%2C_Stanford_University.jpg)
Partly as a result of Shockley's attempts to commercialize a new transistor design in the 1950s and 1960s, California's Silicon Valley became a hotbed of electronics innovation. He recruited brilliant employees, but quickly alienated them with his autocratic and erratic management; they left and founded major companies in the industry.
In his later life, while a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University and afterward, Shockley became known as a racist and eugenicist. Provided by Wikipedia