moore's-law
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Stefan Pastine
Stefan Pastine is an American chemist, inventor and deep-tech founder who builds materials most people never think about but every device depends on. After earning a PhD in organic chemistry from Columbia and doing postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley, he founded Connora Technologies to make recyclable epoxy resins, which was acquired by Aditya Birla Chemicals in 2019. That same year he founded Thintronics, a Bay Area startup developing next-generation dielectric insulator films for printed circuit boards and semiconductor packaging. His pitch is deceptively simple: the insulator, long ignored while engineers obsessed over transistors, is the overlooked bottleneck for faster, cooler AI data centers - and Thintronics wants to unseat a Japanese giant that has held 90% of the market for three decades.
Only in America: My Conversation with Jensen Huang
In an interview for the 'Only in America' series, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sits down with Nvidia founding CEO Jensen Huang at Nvidia's new California campus. Huang recounts his journey from a nine-year-old immigrant sent from Thailand to a boarding school in Oneida, Kentucky, through Oregon State University and Stanford, to founding Nvidia on a business plan many considered impossible. He reflects on the chicken-and-egg problem of introducing a new computing architecture, the decades of grit before AI validated his vision, cautious optimism about artificial intelligence, and why he considers himself the embodiment of the American dream.
Gordon Moore
Gordon Earle Moore (1929-2023) was the co-founder and emeritus chairman of Intel Corporation, and the visionary behind Moore's Law - the observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. A chemist and physicist by training, Moore was one of the 'Traitorous Eight' who left Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, then co-founded Intel in 1968 with Robert Noyce. His 1965 prediction became the guiding principle of the semiconductor industry and fueled the digital revolution. Beyond technology, Moore and his wife Betty donated over $10 billion through their foundation to environmental conservation, scientific research, and patient care, making him one of the most generous philanthropists in history.