Henry Samueli
Co-founder 1991Background
Henry Samueli was born in 1952 in Buffalo, New York, and pursued a career in electrical engineering that took him to UCLA, where he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering. After his PhD, he joined the UCLA faculty, eventually becoming a full professor. His academic work focused on digital signal processing and integrated circuit design — the foundational technical disciplines underlying the cable modem chips that would make Broadcom Corporation successful. Samueli has remained a beloved figure in the UCLA community, donating approximately $100 million to the university's engineering school, which now bears his name as the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.
Role at Broadcom Inc.
Broadcom's founding history is convoluted, as the modern entity is actually the product of a reverse-takeover by a different company (Avago Technologies). The original Broadcom Corporation was founded in 1991 in Los Angeles by two brilliant UCLA engineering professors: Henry Nicholas and Henry Samueli. Nicholas and Samueli recognized that the nascent boom in internet and broadband communications would require a new generation of specialized, efficient microchips. They possessed a staggering $5,000 of initial capital. Operating out of a small condominium, they focused heavily on combining complex analog and digital functions onto a single silicon chip (a technical challenge at the time). Their chips became the foundational architecture for the explosion of cable modems and set-top boxes in the late 1990s. Broadcom executed an IPO during the dot-com boom, making the founders billionaires, though Nicholas was later ousted amidst personal scandals. The true architect of the modern Broadcom, however, is Hock Tan, the CEO of Avago Technologies. Avago itself was a spin-off from Hewlett-Packard's semiconductor division. Tan is a brilliant, Malaysian-born engineer with a MBA from Harvard. Unlike the traditional visionary founders of Silicon Valley who obsess over product innovation, Tan operates entirely as a ruthless financial engineer. In 2015, Tan's smaller company, Avago, audaciously acquired the much larger Broadcom for $37 billion. Tan retained the more prestigious 'Broadcom' name for the combined entity but immediately installed his draconian, centralized management philosophy, purging underperforming divisions and transforming the company into the most acquisitive and profitable roll-up machine in the history of the technology industry.