Bill Hewlett

Bill Hewlett found one of his own stockrooms padlocked over a weekend, so he cut the lock off, took the parts he needed, and left a note reading "Don't ever lock this door again," signed with his name. It was never locked again.¹ Hewlett was co-founder and, for nearly a decade, chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, an American electronics company that began by building test instruments for engineers and grew into one of the largest technology manufacturers in the world, later making calculators, computers, and printers. He built the company's first product from his own graduate thesis in a rented garage, with his college friend David Packard. HP is widely credited as the founding company of Silicon Valley.

Background

William Redington Hewlett was born May 20, 1913, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and raised in San Francisco after his father, Albion Walter Hewlett, took a post as a physician and professor at Stanford Medical School. Albion died of a brain tumor when Bill was 12. Hewlett was dyslexic at a time the condition had no name and no classroom accommodation, and he compensated by building things instead of reading about them, including crystal radios and a Tesla coil, and by training an unusually retentive memory: he rarely took notes, listened closely instead, and later corrected a professor's textbook from memory as a graduate student at MIT.¹

His high school principal initially refused to write him a Stanford recommendation, judging him unlikely to succeed, and relented only after learning Albion had been one of her best students.¹ Hewlett enrolled at Stanford in 1930, discovered radio engineering under Professor Frederick Terman, a mentor who helped fill the gap left by his father's death, and met David Packard at football tryouts; Packard made the team, Hewlett did not, but the two became close friends. Hewlett graduated in 1934, earned a master's in electrical engineering from MIT in 1936, and returned to Stanford for further study under Terman.

Getting started

Hewlett's Stanford master's thesis, a fourteen-page paper titled "A New Type Resistance-Capacity Oscillator," described a device for generating and testing sound frequencies. In 1938, Terman encouraged Hewlett and Packard to start a business together. Packard, newly married to Lucile Salter, rented a house at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto; the couple lived in the house, Hewlett in the cottage behind it, and the garage became their workshop.

The oscillator's central problem was gain control: keeping the output stable required a component whose resistance changed automatically as current increased. Competing manufacturers used expensive precision parts; Hewlett instead used a three-cent light bulb, whose filament heated and rose in resistance as current rose, stabilizing the output without any custom part. The resulting instrument, numbered the Model 200A to suggest an established product line, cost 54.40 dollars against 200 to 600 dollars for rival designs.¹ Hewlett and Packard started the company on January 1, 1939, with roughly 538 dollars in capital, and settled its name with a coin toss; Packard won and put Hewlett's name first, making it Hewlett-Packard rather than Packard-Hewlett.¹

What he built

Hewlett brought the 200A to a 1939 engineering conference in Portland, where a Walt Disney Productions engineer recognized it as a fit for the stereophonic sound system built for the film Fantasia. Disney ordered eight oscillators, becoming HP's first major customer.¹ The company was profitable in its first full year and stayed profitable every year afterward, a record its founders attributed partly to a Depression-era refusal to fund growth with borrowed money.

HP expanded from test instruments into microwave equipment after World War II, then into scientific instruments, computing, and consumer electronics. By 1957, when HP went public on the New York Stock Exchange, the company had grown from its garage origins into a multimillion-dollar business with several hundred employees, and continued growing quickly in the years that followed. In 1972, after Hewlett challenged his engineers to build a pocket scientific calculator, HP released the HP-35, the first handheld scientific calculator, making slide rules obsolete within a few years. Hewlett served as president and, from 1969 to 1978, chief executive, then moved into board roles until his death, by which point HP had grown from a two-man garage shop into a multibillion-dollar, multinational manufacturer.

How he operates

Hewlett's engineering instinct was to solve a hard problem with the cheapest, simplest material available rather than the most expensive one, as with the light bulb inside the 200A. He also practiced management by walking around, moving through offices and labs to talk directly with the people doing the work. Asked what motivated him, he said the money just happened along, an attitude Terman summarized as HP asking what it could contribute rather than how it could succeed.¹

That belief in open access shaped a founding HP norm, first illustrated by the cut padlock and the note he left in its place. Years later, a twelve-year-old in Mountain View found Hewlett's home number in the phone directory and called for spare parts for a school project; Hewlett assembled a bag of parts and gave him a summer job on HP's assembly line. That boy was Steve Jobs. These practices became known as the HP Way, an early expression of what is now discussed in the Obsessive Natural Builder archetype: building driven by craft and curiosity, not a calculated bid for success.

Where things stand

Hewlett died of heart failure on January 12, 2001, in Palo Alto, at age 87. Hewlett-Packard, later split into HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, remains one of the world's largest technology manufacturers, though its business bears little resemblance to the instrument shop of 1939. In 1966, Hewlett and his wife Flora founded the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, now one of the largest private philanthropic foundations in the United States, funding education, global development, the environment, and the arts. Investor Marc Andreessen has named Hewlett-Packard Silicon Valley's most influential company from roughly 1940 to 1980, tracing a line of mentorship from HP through Intel co-founder Bob Noyce to Steve Jobs and Apple.²

Key facts

• Co-founded Hewlett-Packard with David Packard on January 1, 1939, in a one-car garage in Palo Alto, with about 538 dollars in capital.
• Designed the HP 200A oscillator using a three-cent light bulb as a gain control, cutting its price to 54.40 dollars versus 200 to 600 dollars for rivals.
• Sold Walt Disney Productions eight HP 200A oscillators for Fantasia, HP's first major customer; HP was profitable every year from its founding onward.
• Served as HP's chief executive from 1969 to 1978, by which point HP had gone public (NYSE, 1957) and grown into a multibillion-dollar manufacturer.
• Cut a padlock off a locked stockroom, later giving a young Steve Jobs spare parts and a summer job, an open-access norm that became part of the HP Way.
• Founded the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation with his wife Flora in 1966, now one of the largest private philanthropic foundations in the United States.