Week 3: The Project - Background & History of
Broadcom Corp. (BRCM) & Avago Technologies (AVGO)
By: Andre Swift
FINC-350
What do your businesses have in common?
Broadcom Corp. and Avago Technologies are technological innovations companies. Both are leading designers, developers and global suppliers in their fields of specialty. Both are Fortune 500 companies and are traded on the NASDAQ.
How are the businesses different?
Broadcom Corp. is a global leader and innovator in semiconductor solutions for wired and wireless communications. Broadcom® products seamlessly deliver voice, video, data and multimedia connectivity in the home, office and on mobile environments.
Avago Technologies is a leading innovator, developer and global supplier of a broad range of analog, digital, mixed signal and optoelectronics components and subsystems with a focus in III-V compound semiconductor design and processing.
Provide details on the background and education of their founders.
Avago Technologies was founded in 1961 as a semiconductor products division of Agilent Semiconductor Products Group, which in turn was a semiconductor products division of Hewlett-Packard. Hewlett-Packard was established in 1939 in a two-car garage owned by David Packard and his friend, Bill Hewlett with an initial investment of a little over $530. How they decided on the name HP vs. PH was by a flip of a coin.
William “Bill” Redington Hewlett was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Hewlett’s father, Albion Walter Hewlett, who taught at the University of Michigan Medical School, took a similar position at Stanford Medical School and relocated his family to San Francisco. Bill Hewlett attended Lowell High School and was accepted at Stanford University as a favor to his father who had died of a brain tumor in 1925, where he received his Bachelor’s degree and a degree of Electrical Engineering and also was a member of the Kappa Sigma fraternity. Bill Hewlett also has a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from MIT.
David Packard (September 7, 1912 – March 26, 1996) was born in Pueblo, Colorado. He went to Centennial High School where early on he showed an interest in science, engineering, sports, and leadership. He also attended Stanford University, where he met Bill Hewlett. He earned a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford after a short stint working for the General Electric Company in Schenectady, New York.
Broadcom Corporation was founded in a spare bedroom in Redondo Beach Condos by Henry Nicholas in August 1991 a student from UCLA and Henry Samueli, his professor. They each contributed an initial investment of $5,000 each to get the company started and in 1998, the company went public.
Nicholas was born in 1959 in Cincinnati, Ohio to Marcella and Henry T. Nicholas Jr., who was an attorney and mother a teacher. Nicholas went to Santa Monica High School and throughout his schooling, suffered from dyslexia. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from UCLA, after attending the United States Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Nicholas earned a Master's degree and PhD. in Electrical Engineering from UCLA. His doctoral dissertation on “Architectures, Optimization Techniques, and VLSI Implementations for Direct Digital Frequency Synthesizers” became the basis for the development of the chip that launched Broadcom.
Henry Samueli was born on September 20, 1954 in Buffalo, New York to Sala and Aron Samueli, Polish immigrants who survived Nazi Europe. Samueli graduated from Fairfax High School in Los Angeles and attended UCLA. There, he received his Bachelor’s Degree, Master’s Degree, and Ph.D, all in Electrical Engineering.
What was the business philosophy of the founders?
Avago’s founders who would be HP’s founders, William Hewlett and David Packard, were very proud of their company culture which came to be known as The HP Way. The HP Way is a corporate culture that claimed to be not only centered on