The summer after he graduated high school in 1945, Noyce took classes at Miami University of Ohio, where his older brother was receiving officer training

Noyce began swimming for an hour every day and after watching three Miami divers flipping and twisting through the air, he decided he wanted to dive, too. “After landing flat on my back only twice, I perfected the technique,” he reported to his family. “Before I went home, I did both a half and a full gainer off the ten-foot board – Whoopee!”

He met with similar academic success. At the end of the summer, the head of the physics department made him a job offer: if Noyce would enroll in the fall, the department would place him on the faculty payroll and employ him as a lab assistant, a position traditionally reserved for graduate students. He would be expected to grade papers, teach a few class sessions, and explain experiments to other students – all while he was a freshman. The invitation pierced Noyce’s veneer of academic nonchalance. “My front teeth almost fell out,” he proudly wrote to his parents, sounding like the seventeen year old he was.

Noyce was slowly gathering experiences that would anchor his adult approach to life, which was not so much an approach as a headlong rush into any challenge with the unshakable assumption that he would emerge not only successful, but triumphant. If joining a college physics course as a high school senior meant finishing first in the class or getting an offer to teach, if dating meant snagging the most desirable girl in the school for your steady, and learning to dive meant turning full back flips off the platform’s edge within hours of climbing the board for the first time – well, why wouldn’t you come to think you could do almost anything?

In 1956, 29-year-old Noyce, who had been working in the transistor research group at Philco in Philadelphia, accepted a job with Nobel prizewinning physicist William Shockley in California.

Only a handful of the roughly twenty men who came to Shockley Semiconductor in the first half of 1956 had passed their thirtieth birthday. A few had worked in private corporations, but most had either recently received their doctorates or had been employed exclusively in academic or government labs. Almost no one had worked directly with semiconductors, which were still considered esoteric devices. Many of the researchers, such as Gordon Moore – who had been so frustrated by his government-funded research that he once calculated the taxpayers' cost-per-word he published – were drawn to Shockley by the prospect of “actually making a product and selling it.” The chance to live in California excited them all. In every case, however, the biggest attraction was Shockley himself.

A critical mass of employees had arrived by mid-April, and Shockley arranged a welcoming party. Noyce, then in his last weeks at Philco in Philadelphia, was determined to attend, even though it meant driving across the country in his four-year-old Chevy, its back seat covered with suitcases. As was often the case with him, he ran behind schedule – so far behind in fact, that he had only gotten as far as Salt Lake City by the morning of the festivities. It was raining when he left Utah and positively pouring when he got to the Bay Area. One of the wind-shield wipers had given out, and he had smoked without stopping to keep himself awake. By the time he found the party, at 10 p.m., the celebration was well under way. His appearance made an indelible impression on Julius Blank, another recruit:

He hadn't shaved, he looked like he'd been living in his suit for a week – and he was thirsty. There was a big goddamn bowl of martinis on the table there. Noyce picks up the goddamn bowl, and starts drinking [from] it. Then he passes out. I said to myself, "this is going to be a whole lot of fun.

Noyce and seven other Shockley employees left the company to start their own firm, Fairchild Semiconductor, which became extremely successful. By 1968, Noyce and Gordon Moore (also a Shockley defector and Fairchild co-founder) had tired of their work at Fairchild and decided to launch another startup, a company today called Intel.

Within a month of starting the company, Noyce was on the East Coast, recruiting for his new venture. "He was like the Pied Piper," recalled Roger Borovoy, attorney at both Fairchild and Intel. "If Bob wants you to come, you come." Early recruiting advertisements requested that applicants “please drop a note with qualifications to Bob Noyce” adding oh-so-casually, “he is still doing our personnel work.”

Noyce also hunted for new talent at Stanford. Jim Angell, a friend from MIT and Philco who now taught in the university’s engineering department, suggested that Noyce talk to one of his postdoctoral fellows, a young man so gifted with computers that Angell swore he could tell whether a program was running properly by the rhythm of the lights on the display.