Jerry Sanders III grew up in the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, raised by his paternal grandparents.
[1] He was once attacked and beaten by a street gang[2] leaving him so covered in blood[1] that a priest was called to administer the last rites.
The staff from Motorola, also known as "Hogan's Heroes", were conservative and hence immediately clashed with Sanders' boisterous style.
Sanders' flamboyant personality and style made the new management at Fairchild Semiconductor feel uneasy so they fired him.
[2] In 1969, eight engineers left Fairchild Semiconductor together to start a new company, founding Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in Sunnyvale, California, in May 1969.
Through a period of stagflation in 1979, he refused to lay off AMD employees and instead took a leaf from the Japanese rather than engaging in the same rampant layoffs that had occurred at Fairchild earlier.
[2][3] The open-ended legal language of the deal was used by Sanders to lead efforts for AMD to reverse-engineer and clone Intel's 8086 processor.