Temporarily brought in to “fight the fire” but was abandoned, Intel’s shortest-term CEO joined the famous venture capital A16Z

The “Fire Fighter” is back!

[Guide] After serving for two and a half years, he led the chip’s big brother Intel on the road of “mercury retrograde”. According to sources, Intel’s former chief administrative officer, Bob Swan, now joins Andreessen Horowitz, a well-known American venture capital firm. Swan, who once ascended Intel’s “throne” as CFO, finally returned to his roots.

If you want to wear a crown, you must bear its weight.

He is the CEO of Intel with the shortest tenure, and he is also the first CEO of Intel with financial background.

Five months after leaving the chip “big brother”, he returned to where he took root.

He is the former Intel CEO Bob Swan, and now he has joined the famous American venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

Swan will join the company as a growth operating partner, serve on the board of directors, help the company find new investments, and provide guidance to the founders of the venture capital company’s portfolio.

It is reported that the a16z group manages approximately US$7.9 billion in regulatory assets.

Joined Intel as CFO and was promoted to CEO in 7 months

In 2016, he joined Intel as the “Chief Financial Officer” and was responsible for Intel’s global finance, mergers and acquisitions, investor relations, IT and corporate strategy organizations. Many years of experience made people look at his performance with admiration.

It is worth mentioning that before Bob Swan, all Intel CEOs had more or less engineer experience or technical background, and he was the only CEO with a financial background.

On June 21, 2018, Swan was first appointed as the “Interim CEO” of Intel Corporation.

His succession was related to a “peachy incident” that occurred at the company at that time, and Swan was completely drawn to “fight the fire.”

Because Intel gave a great affirmation to Swan’s leadership and outstanding performance, more than 7 months later, “temporary” became “official”.

Since then, he has been the CEO of Intel Corporation.

At that time, Intel was dealing with chip manufacturing issues internally, and facing increasingly fierce competition from companies such as AMD and Nvidia externally.

He has made drastic changes in many aspects on the road of Intel’s business development, among which his “three knives” are more interesting.

These “three knives” cut off Intel’s smartphone modem business ($1 billion), Nervana AI chip business, and NAND flash memory business ($9 billion).

Swan once said that in the past, my goal has always been to allow Intel to enter a new “distributed intelligence era”, improve execution, strengthen our core “CPU business”, and expand the scope of business to accelerate growth.

With significant progress on these priorities, we now have the right moment to transition to Intel’s next leader.

Under his leadership, Intel has made significant progress in its strategy of transforming from a CPU to a “multi-architecture XPU” company.

He left to Intel, which is a strong strategic and financial advantage.

Abandoned “Fire Fighter”? The first CTO returns

Swan, who has not yet sat on the throne of Intel, stepped down as CEO in February this year.

The person who replaced it was Pat Gelsinger, a 30-year Intel veteran. A lightning change in command made Intel’s stock price soar overnight.

During Swan’s tenure, due to his lack of strategic thinking about technology, Intel suffered a “hit” from its competitors and did not regain a new lease of life.

Since then, Big Brother Chip has embarked on a “mercury retrograde” road.

During his tenure, Intel also experienced several postponements of advanced process technologies such as 10nm, and PPT will always be just PPT.

At the time when Nvidia and AMD were making big purchases, Intel also sold its memory chip business to SK Hynix for $9 billion.

In the summer of 2020, Intel announced that its latest generation of chips would be postponed to market. However, at that time, AMD’s chips had been widely used in notebook computers.

Last fall, Apple announced that it would use its own proprietary chip M1 in Mac computers, breaking the “15-year” cooperative relationship with Intel in chip supply.

In December, after Intel lost market share to rivals AMD, Samsung and TSMC, Dan Loeb’s hedge fund Third Point urged Intel’s board to explore “strategic alternatives.”

Return to the rooted place

Bob Swan was born in New York in 1960.

He started working at General Electric in 1985 after obtaining an MBA and held various senior financial positions during his 15-year tenure.

Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer of GE Lighting Group, to Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer of Webvan (American Fresh Food E-commerce), Chief Financial Officer of TRW (Tianhe), and then Chief Financial Officer of HP Enterprise Services Officer, eBay Chief Financial Officer…

Now, Swan will serve on the board of a16z and join the company as a growth and operation partner to help the company find new investments.

David George, the partner of Andreessen Horowitz, who oversees the fund, said, “Swan has been a mentor and friend to many people in the company for many years, and he has established a long-term relationship with many of us at a16z, including the acquisition of Skype nearly 10 years ago. Work closely with the company.”