During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when he was 20, he left his home and family and escaped across the border into Austria. Penniless and barely able to speak English, in 1957 he eventually made his way to the United States. He later changed his name to the anglicized Andrew S. Grove. Grove summarized his first twenty years of life in Hungary in his memoirs:

Soon after arriving in the United States, in New York’s Catskill Resort, in 1957, he met his future wife, Eva Kastan, who was a fellow Hungarian refugee. They met while he held a job as a busboy and she was a waitress while studying at Hunter College. One year after they met, in June 1958 they married in New York, Queens, according to a Roman Catholic ceremony. They remained married until Grove died. They had two daughters, Karen Grove and Robie Spector, and eight grandchildren.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the City College of New York in 1960. (After his retirement, he donated $ 26 million to the school.) The New York Times also wrote about him that “a refugee became a senior in engineering.” It was followed by a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963.

After completing his Ph.D. in 1963, Grove worked at Fairchild Semiconductor as a researcher, and by 1967 had become its assistant director of development. His work there made him familiar with the early development of integrated circuits, which would lead to the “microcomputer revolution” in the 1970s. In 1967, he wrote a college textbook on the subject, Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices.

In 1968, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore co-founded Intel, after they and Grove left Fairchild Semiconductor. Grove joined on the day of its incorporation, although he was not a founder according to the company. Fellow Hungarian émigré Leslie L. Vadász was Intel’s fourth employee. Grove worked initially as the company’s director of engineering, and helped get its early manufacturing operations started. In 1983, he wrote a book, High Output Management, in which he described many of his methods and manufacturing concepts.

Initially, Intel primarily manufactured static memory chips for mainframe computers, but in the early/mid-1970s Intel introduced one of the earliest digital watches, an electronic calculator, and also the world’s first general-purpose microprocessor, the 4-bit 4004. By 1974 Intel had developed the 8-bit 8008 and quickly thereafter, in 1975, the 8080 processor, which would become the core of the Altair, the world’s first so-called PC (personal computer) which began the PC revolution. Soon came the 8086 16-bit microprocessor and a cost-reduced version, the 8088, which IBM chose for its IBM PC which brought personal computers to the masses. In 1985, Intel produced the world’s first 32-bit 80386 microprocessor which began a long line of increasingly powerful microprocessors including the 80486, the Pentium, and a plethora of supporting integrated circuits and computers built with them. All under Grove’s leadership.

In 1975, Doerr wrote of attending a course within Intel taught by Andy Grove, where he was introduced to the theory of OKRs. Grove explained his simple but effective perspective on management: “The key result has to be measurable. But at the end you can look, and without any arguments: Did I do that or did I not do it? Yes? No? Simple. No judgments in it.”

The company’s revenue increased from $2,672 in its first year to $20.8 billion in 1997. Grove was Intel’s president in 1979, its CEO in 1987 and its chairman and CEO in 1997. He relinquished his CEO title in May 1998, having been diagnosed with prostate cancer a few years earlier, and remained chairman of the board until November 2004. Grove continued his work at Intel as a senior advisor and had been a lecturer at Stanford University. He reflected back upon Intel’s growth through the years:

Grove was also in the minority of high-tech leaders when he advocated taxing internet sales made to other states: “I don’t think electronic commerce needs federal or state subsidies in terms of tax advantages,” he told a Congressional committee in 2000. At the same hearing, he also expressed his opinion about internet privacy, stating that “personal data is a form of property and it’s inevitable that governments will regulate property rights.” He said that it would be better if the federal government established its own uniform privacy standards rather than have states create a patchwork of different laws.

In 2005, Grove made the largest donation that the City College of New York (CUNY) has ever received. His grant of $26 million transformed the CCNY School of Engineering into the Grove School of Engineering.

While Grove naturally supported helping technology startups, he also felt that America was wrong in thinking that those new companies would increase employment. “Startups are a wonderful thing,” he wrote in a 2010 article for Bloomberg, “but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment.” Although many of those startups and entrepreneurs would achieve tremendous success and wealth, said Grove, he was more concerned with the overall negative effect on America: “What kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work—and masses of unemployed?”

He felt that employment growth depended on those companies’ ability or willingness to scale up within the U.S. According to Grove, Silicon Valley’s “innovation machine” over the last few decades has not been adding many jobs, although American tech companies have instead been adding jobs in Asia “like mad.” He noted that while our investments in startups have increased dramatically, those investments have in fact resulted in fewer jobs: “Simply put,” he wrote, “the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs.” He therefore worked to keep Intel’s manufacturing in the U.S., with the company having 90,000 employees in 2010. He explained the causes and effects of many business’s growth plans:

Grove was a longtime member of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), along with being one of its overseers and a member of its board of directors. He was also the founding supporter of the IRC’s Pathways to Citizenship program. In 2010, the IRC honored him as one of ten distinguished refugees. In an interview in Esquire magazine in 2000, Grove encouraged the United States to be “vigilant as a nation to have tolerance for difference, a tolerance for new people.” He pointed out that immigration and immigrants are what made America what it is.

One of the earliest investors in Google, John Doerr, called Andy Grove the “Father of OKRs” in Doerr’s 2018 book, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs. An acronym for Objectives and Key Results, it became central to Google’s culture as a “management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization.” The objective is the clearly defined goal, while the key results were the specific benchmarks to ensure achievement of that goal were “measurable and verifiable.”