In the spring of 1968, a twelve-year-old boy in Los Altos, California, wanted to build a frequency counter. He did not have the parts. He did, however, have the Yellow Pages.
Steve Jobs — skinny, relentless, not yet the prophet of anything — thumbed through the residential listings until he found the home number of the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, then the most important technology company west of the Mississippi. He dialed it. Bill Hewlett picked up.
What happened next became one of Silicon Valley's origin parables, told and retold until it calcified into scripture: the man laughed, chatted with the kid for twenty minutes, gave him the spare parts, and — because this was Hewlett, because this was the kind of thing he did without thinking twice — offered him a summer job on the assembly line, putting together the very frequency counters he'd called about. "He got me a job in the place they built them," Jobs recalled decades later, "and I was in heaven." The story is usually marshaled as evidence of Jobs's audacity, his proto-entrepreneurial nerve. But it reveals something far more interesting about the man who answered the phone. Bill Hewlett's number was in the book. He answered calls from strangers. He gave a child he'd never met both the components and the context to begin a life in technology. He did this, by all accounts, without a second thought — not as philanthropy, not as corporate strategy, but as reflex. The gesture was so thoroughly Hewlett that nobody at the company found it remarkable.
This is the paradox that defines William Redington Hewlett: the man whose name came first — decided by a coin toss in a Palo Alto garage in 1939 — spent his entire career making himself second. He was quieter than
David Packard, less visible, less political, less interested in the mechanics of institutional power. Packard served as Deputy Secretary of Defense under Nixon; Hewlett raised cattle and studied botany. Packard was the organizational architect; Hewlett was the tinkerer, the man who liked to understand how things worked by taking them apart. Yet the company they built together — from $538 in working capital to $49 billion in annual revenue, from a one-car garage to 90,000 employees in 120 countries — bore his name first, a permanent reminder that creation and credit do not always track together, and that the most consequential figures in a story are sometimes the ones who refuse to stand at its center.
The Garage That Became a Landmark
The address is 367 Addison Avenue, Palo Alto. The house is a 1905 Craftsman, two stories, converted to flats in 1918. Behind it sits a small garage — roughly twelve by eighteen feet, with a workbench, a drill press, and, in 1938, the smell of solder and sawdust. In 1989, the State of California designated it Historical Landmark No. 976: "The Birthplace of the Silicon Valley." HP purchased the property for $1.7 million in 2000 and spent five years restoring the exteriors to their 1938 appearance, using historic or in-kind materials, guided by documentary, physical, and pictorial evidence. The plaque does not mention that when Hewlett and Packard started working in that garage, they had no particular product in mind. They had a friendship, a shared mentor, a vague conviction that they could build electronic instruments that didn't yet exist, and five hundred and thirty-eight dollars.
The mentor was Frederick Terman — Stanford's professor of radio engineering, later dean of the School of Engineering, later provost, later canonized alongside
William Shockley as a father of Silicon Valley. Terman was a particular kind of academic: impatient with theory that couldn't be applied, evangelical about the commercial potential of his students' research, and possessed of a gift for recognizing complementary temperaments. He saw in Hewlett the inventor — restless, intuitive, prone to blowing things up in the name of understanding — and in Packard the builder, the organizer, the man who could turn an idea into a schedule and a schedule into a company. When he encouraged them to go into business together, he was not being sentimental. He was engineering a partnership.
By the Numbers
The Hewlett-Packard Empire
$538Initial capital investment, 1939
$49BAnnual revenue at time of Hewlett's death
90,000Employees in 120 countries
#13Ranking among largest U.S. corporations, 2001
$9BHewlett's estimated net worth, Forbes 2000
8Audio oscillators in first major sale (to Walt Disney)
$71.50Price per oscillator sold to Disney
Hewlett arrived at Stanford as a freshman in 1930, admitted on the strength of a recommendation from his high school principal, who had initially been unimpressed by his academic record but changed her mind upon learning he was the son of Albion Walter Hewlett, one of her finest former students. The recommendation was an act of reflected glory — the son coasting on the father's reputation — but it got him through the door. Once inside, he flourished, particularly in Terman's radio engineering classes, where his instinct for hands-on experimentation found its intellectual framework.
Packard graduated first and left California for General Electric in Schenectady, New York — the customary trajectory for a Stanford engineering graduate in the 1930s, moving east to where the serious industrial work was done. Hewlett stayed, pursuing a master's degree at MIT (awarded in 1936), then returning to Stanford for further graduate work. It was during this period that he developed the design for a resistance-capacitance audio oscillator — a device for generating audio signals of a single, precise frequency. The design was clever, using an incandescent lamp as a temperature-dependent resistor to stabilize the output, a technique that made the oscillator simpler and cheaper than anything on the market. It was also, in the understated way of truly useful inventions, a product in search of a buyer.
Bowling Lanes, Urinals, and the Art of the Nickel
In 1938, Packard took an effective 50-percent pay cut, left GE, and returned to California to work with Terman and complete a graduate degree. He and his wife Lucile rented the house at 367 Addison Avenue. Hewlett rented the cottage out back. The garage became their workshop. The partnership — formalized in 1939, its name order decided by coin toss — was founded not on a product but on a conviction: they could design and manufacture electronic instruments that were not yet available, that filled gaps no one else had noticed.
"In the beginning, we did anything to bring in a nickel," Hewlett recalled in 1987. "We had a bowling-lane foul-line indicator. We had a thing that would make a urinal flush automatically as soon as a guy came in front of it. We had a shock machine to make people lose weight." This catalog of oddments — a foul-line indicator, an automatic urinal flusher, a weight-loss shock device — is usually cited as charming evidence of scrappy origins. But it reveals something more significant: Hewlett and Packard were not precious about what they built. They were not, in the beginning, trying to change the world. They were trying to survive, and they were willing to build anything that worked, for anyone who would pay.
The oscillator changed the trajectory. Designated the "Model 200A" — a number chosen, with characteristic Hewlett mischief, to make the brand-new company look established — it caught the attention of Bud Hawkins, chief sound engineer at
Walt Disney Studios. Hawkins was developing the multichannel sound system for
Fantasia, Disney's ambitious animated feature, and needed precise audio equipment for testing. Disney purchased eight modified units (now designated "200B") at $71.50 each. The sale was modest in dollar terms but enormous in implication: it validated the product, established a customer relationship with a marquee name, and demonstrated that a two-man operation in a Palo Alto garage could compete with established East Coast instrument manufacturers.
Within a year, they had ten employees and roughly $30,000 in sales. They had outgrown the garage.
The Father's Shadow
William Redington Hewlett was born on May 20, 1913, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His father, Dr. Albion Walter Hewlett, was a respected physician on the faculty of the University of Michigan's medical school — a man of considerable intellectual distinction whose career in academic medicine established the family in the upper reaches of the professional class. When Bill was three, Albion accepted a faculty position at Stanford University, and the family moved to California, settling in San Francisco. The city in the 1910s and 1920s was brash, whimsical, and culturally omnivorous — anchored on the East Bay by UC Berkeley, on the West Bay by Stanford, and centered in a metropolis that had rebuilt itself from earthquake rubble with the confidence of a civilization that believed in its own necessity.
Then, when Bill was twelve, his father died suddenly. A brain tumor. The loss reordered the family's world. Hewlett later said — half-joking, half-confessing — that if his father had lived, he would have studied medicine. Instead, he chose electronics, partly because he liked electric trains.
The joke conceals a deeper truth. Hewlett's entire career can be read as a response to that early loss — not in the obvious psychological sense, but in the way it shaped his relationship to institutions. A boy who loses his father at twelve learns, before he has the language for it, that the world's structures are more fragile than they appear. He also learns — if he is lucky, if his family rallies, as Hewlett's did — that institutions can hold you when individuals cannot. The company he built with Packard was, among other things, an answer to impermanence: a structure designed to outlast any single person, including its founders.
His high school years at San Francisco's Lowell High School were, by his own account, unremarkable. He suffered from dyslexia — then little understood and rarely accommodated — which made reading and note-taking painful. He compensated by memorizing lectures, ordering them logically in his mind, a habit that trained him in systems thinking before the term existed. His grades were middling. His intellectual curiosity was not. He conducted chemistry experiments (occasionally involving explosives), built a Tesla coil, made an electric arc from carbon rods, and assembled crystal radio sets for himself and his sister. He was, in the language of the era, a tinkerer. In the language of a later era, he was an engineer who hadn't yet found his profession.
I guess that's what I'm most proud of — the fact that we really created a way to work with employees, let them share in the profits and still keep control of it.
The War, and What It Revealed
When the United States entered World War II, Hewlett left the company to serve in the Army, assigned to the office of the Chief Signal Officer. He spent most of the war in military signals intelligence, and in its final phase participated in an intelligence-gathering mission to Japan, assessing the state of Japanese science and technology. Packard, meanwhile, stayed and ran the company. When Hewlett returned in 1945, he found a much larger operation than the one he'd left — 200 employees, growing at 100 percent per year, driven by wartime demand for electronic instruments.
The war years are a gap in most accounts of Hewlett's life, treated as an interlude between founding and growth. But they were formative in ways that rarely get articulated. First, the separation proved that Packard could run the company alone — an important data point for a partnership that would last five decades. Second, Hewlett's military experience gave him a visceral understanding of hierarchical command structures, and he came back determined to build something different. The military model — "the man at the top issues an order and it is passed on down the line until the man at the bottom does as he is told without question (or reason)," as Packard later described it — was precisely what they did not want. Third, and most subtly, the war demonstrated the power of technical contribution in the service of something larger than profit. The instruments HP built during the war helped win it. That experience cemented a conviction that would become the core of the HP Way: a company exists to make a contribution, and profit is the measure of how well it does so, not the purpose.
The Architecture of [Trust](/mental-models/trust)
The HP Way. The phrase has been so thoroughly absorbed into the corporate lexicon that it has lost most of its original voltage. Management consultants cite it. Business school cases anatomize it. Jim Collins, in his foreword to the 2005 edition of
The HP Way, argued that Hewlett and Packard's greatest product was not the audio oscillator, the pocket calculator, or the minicomputer — it was the Hewlett-Packard Company itself, and their greatest idea was the framework of principles that governed it.
The framework, distilled to its essentials, comprised five precepts:
HP exists to make a technical contribution, and should only pursue opportunities consistent with this purpose. HP demands of itself and its people superior performance — profitable growth is both a means and a measure of enduring success. The best results come when you get the right people, trust them, give them freedom to find the best path to achieve objectives, and let them share in the rewards their work makes possible. HP has a responsibility to contribute directly to the well-being of the communities in which it operates. Integrity, period.
The radicalism of this framework is invisible now, buried under decades of imitators. But in the 1940s and 1950s, American corporate culture was rigidly hierarchical: managers wore white collars and sat in offices; workers wore blue collars and stood on factory floors; informal discussion was discouraged; deviation from orders was punished. Hewlett and Packard were building something different — a company where engineers were trusted to manage their own time, where profit-sharing linked individual effort to corporate success, where the founders insisted on being called "Bill" and "Dave" rather than "Mr. Hewlett" and "Mr. Packard."
The operational expression of this philosophy was "Management by Objective" — a term that Packard articulated in a remarkable 1960 speech to HP managers, never intended for publication, in which he laid out his thinking with the plainspoken directness of a man talking to people he trusted:
"I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company's existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. As we investigate this, we inevitably come to the conclusion that a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively which they could not accomplish separately."
Management by Objective meant setting clear goals and then giving people the freedom and resources to achieve them in whatever way they saw fit. Its opposite — Management by Control — meant issuing orders and monitoring compliance. The distinction sounds obvious. In practice, it required enormous discipline and even more trust. It meant tolerating ambiguity, accepting that people would make mistakes, and believing that the net output of autonomous, motivated individuals would exceed the net output of supervised, constrained ones.
Hewlett's specific contribution to this culture was what one colleague called the "hat-wearing process" — a method for evaluating new ideas that protected both innovation and institutional rigor. When an engineer brought Hewlett a new concept, he would first put on his "enthusiasm hat": listening, expressing excitement, asking gentle questions. A few days later, he'd switch to his "inquisition hat": probing, questioning, stress-testing the idea with pointed precision. Shortly thereafter came the "decision hat": delivering judgment with logic and sensitivity. The sequence was deliberate. By separating the phases of reception, evaluation, and decision, Hewlett ensured that inventors felt heard before they were judged — and that judgment, when it came, was grounded in genuine understanding rather than reflexive skepticism.
We feel our objectives can best be achieved by people who understand what they are trying to do and can utilize their own capabilities to do them. Supervision is not a job of giving orders; it is a job of providing the opportunity for people to use their capabilities efficiently and effectively.
Management by Walking Around
The phrase "Management by Walking Around" — MBWA — is now a cliché of business literature. But at HP, it was a literal practice, not a metaphor. Hewlett and Packard walked the floors. They talked to engineers at their benches. They knew what was being built, and by whom, and whether the builds were compiling.
The anecdotes about this practice have the texture of company mythology, but they are consistent enough, and told by enough independent sources, to constitute something close to documentary evidence. Michael Malone, who covered HP as a reporter and later signed a book contract to tell the story of Bill and Dave, describes being invited back to HP after years of exile during the Carly Fiorina era. At a 2005 event for company veterans — Malone and Steve Wozniak were the youngest people in the room, and both were gray-haired — the oldest HPer present was Art Fong, then in his 90s, who had been "an old-timer when I was an HP intern in 1975." The gathering had the quality of Proust's final party: a room full of people who had lived something extraordinary and were watching it recede.
What they described, consistently, was a culture in which the founders' physical presence communicated a set of values that no memo could convey. When Hewlett walked through a lab, he was not performing accessibility. He was gathering information, yes — but he was also demonstrating that the work mattered enough for the co-founder to want to understand it, and that the person doing the work mattered enough to be spoken to directly.
One Hacker News commenter, recalling HP in the late 1990s, described a UK general manager who insisted on "walkabouts" alone, separate from his entourage. The manager stopped to speak to a recent graduate, who — not recognizing him — politely asked him to come back in ten minutes, as he was waiting for a build to finish. The manager smiled, said "of course, hope it compiles OK," and returned later. The anecdote is small. It is also, in microcosm, the entire HP Way: respect for the individual's work, tolerance for not being recognized, the understanding that the build matters more than the hierarchy.
The Genius of the And
Jim Collins, the management theorist who spent years studying HP as part of his research for Built to Last and Good to Great, identified what he called "the genius of the And" at the heart of the HP Way — the refusal to accept that seemingly contradictory objectives were actually in tension.
Make a technical contribution and meet customer needs. Take care of your people and demand results. Set unwavering standards and allow immense operating flexibility. Achieve growth and achieve profitability. Limit growth to arenas of distinctive contribution and create new arenas of growth through innovation. Never compromise integrity and always win in your chosen fields. Contribute to the community and deliver exceptional shareholder returns.
Behind these specifics, Collins argued, lay the biggest "And" of all: preserve the core and stimulate progress. Every great institution, he wrote — company, university, nation — exhibits a duality of continuity and change. On one hand, a set of values and purposes that remain constant. On the other, a relentless drive to change everything else: practices, strategies, structures, methods, cultural norms, competitive approaches.
Hewlett embodied this duality with particular grace. He was conservative about values and radical about technology. He insisted that HP exist to make a technical contribution — and then pushed the company through the earth-shaking shifts from vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits, incorporating each new technology into the company's core business of designing and manufacturing highly differentiated test and measurement instruments. The test and measurement business — signal generators, frequency counters, spectrum analyzers — was unloved by everyone except the people who used them. It was also enormously profitable, and it was the foundation on which everything else was built.
The independent division model that Hewlett and Packard created was the organizational expression of this philosophy. Each division operated with significant autonomy — setting its own budgets, managing its own engineering, responsible for its own P&L. The founders drove overall strategy, but the divisions drove innovation. The structure encouraged entrepreneurial behavior within a large organization, making HP, in effect, a holding company for dozens of small, focused engineering teams.
It also created problems. By the time John Young succeeded Hewlett and Packard as CEO in 1978, three of HP's independent divisions had developed separate, incompatible 16-bit microprocessor computer systems. The very autonomy that had fueled innovation had produced fragmentation. Young's massive effort to create a unified 32-bit architecture — HP PA/RISC — required him to centralize control over budgets and discretion, violating the independent division model that many employees considered sacred. The HP Way, it turned out, was supple enough to navigate technological revolutions but brittle when it came to organizational consolidation. The principles remained. The structures had to change.
The Calculator That Fit in a Shirt Pocket
In 1968, HP introduced the 9100A, which the company — with a precision about nomenclature that bordered on philosophical — called a "desktop calculator" rather than a computer. Hewlett, interviewed in the company magazine Measure, explained its capabilities with the patient enthusiasm of a man who genuinely loved what his engineers had built: a surveyor could enter polar coordinates, press a single key, and receive rectangular coordinates instantly. The device used no integrated circuits; instead, it relied on a read-only memory containing over 32,000 bits of information, stored in a sixteen-layer laminated circuit board — a feat of manufacturing complexity that was, in its own way, as elegant as the user interface.
But the product that best captures Hewlett's approach to innovation came four years later. The HP-35, released in 1972, was the world's first handheld scientific calculator. Its origin story is pure Hewlett: he asked his engineers to build a version of their desktop calculator that could fit in his shirt pocket. Not a briefcase. Not a desk drawer. A shirt pocket. The constraint was physical, personal, and completely arbitrary — Hewlett simply wanted to carry the thing around. The engineers delivered. The HP-35 rendered the slide rule obsolete overnight and opened a consumer market that HP had never previously addressed.
The shirt-pocket test was not a management technique. It was an instinct — the instinct of a man who had been taking things apart since childhood, who understood that the best products are the ones you actually want to use, and who believed that the gap between "technically possible" and "personally useful" was where the most interesting engineering happened.
Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something quite different.
Creativity and the Elephant
On a sunny day in June 1986, fifty years after he'd walked across the MIT stage to receive his master's degree, Bill Hewlett returned to Cambridge to deliver the commencement address. He was seventy-three. He had been vice chairman of HP's board. He would remain director emeritus until 1987. He had, by any measure, lived one of the most consequential careers in American technology. He chose to talk about creativity.
"When I was preparing this address," he told the graduating class, "I happened to ask Chuck House, who heads our engineering productivity department, what he thought about creativity. With a twinkle in his eye, Chuck said, 'Creativity is what screws up my engineering program.'" The audience laughed. Hewlett continued: "
Thomas Edison is alleged to have remarked about his laboratory, 'There ain't no rules around here, we're trying to accomplish something.' I cite these two comments, because they say a great deal about the creative process. It works best when it is not too structured, but it must, in the long run, be tamed, harnessed, and hitched to the wagon of man's needs."
He then offered a definition borrowed from Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi: "Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something quite different." And he admitted the limits of his own attempt to describe what he'd spent a career fostering: "Trying to describe [creativity] in detail reminds me of the story of the three blind men who attempted to describe an elephant solely by their sense of feel. One explored the trunk, one discovered the tusks, the third investigated the animal's enormous feet. But none really had a good picture of what the elephant looked like."
The metaphor was perfect — and not only because it was self-deprecating. Hewlett had spent forty-seven years at HP trying to create the conditions under which creative people could do their best work. He had learned, and was honest enough to say, that the process remained partly mysterious to him. The best he could do was establish the environment and observe who flourished. He could feel the trunk, the tusks, the feet. The elephant remained whole and alive and slightly beyond his grasp.
The [Division](/mental-models/division) of Temperaments
Every great partnership is, at some level, a division of labor between temperaments. Hewlett and Packard's complementarity was so clean it reads like fiction. Packard was tall, physically imposing, gregarious, politically engaged — a man comfortable with power and its exercise. He served as Deputy Secretary of Defense under Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1971, a role that suited his organizational instincts and his appetite for large-scale systems management. Hewlett was quiet, self-effacing, more comfortable in a lab than a boardroom. His hobbies were botanical study, cattle ranching, and mountain climbing — solitary pursuits, or pursuits requiring a very small team and a high tolerance for being alone with the natural world.
In the company, Packard concentrated on operations, production, and the organizational architecture. Hewlett focused on technical innovation, product development, and the cultivation of the engineering culture. "Hewlett was more proficient in technical innovation," notes the IEEE's biographical sketch, "starting with the company's first product, an audio oscillator." Packard built the machine. Hewlett built what the machine made.
The coin toss that put Hewlett's name first was, in this light, an accident that told the truth. In the hierarchy of creation, the idea precedes the institution. The oscillator precedes the company. The tinkerer precedes the manager. Hewlett's name went first not because he was more important — the question of relative importance between them was, by all accounts, one neither man entertained — but because alphabetical chance honored the sequence of creation itself.
They were also, crucially, friends. Not business partners who maintained a cordial professional relationship, but genuine friends who had met as students, camped together, shared meals, trusted each other with the kind of implicit trust that comes from decades of proximity. "I think it is obvious that we started this company because Bill and I, and some of those working with us in the early days, felt that we were able to design and make instruments which were not as yet available," Packard wrote. The sentence is simple. The pronoun structure — "Bill and I" — is revealing. Hewlett came first even in Packard's own syntax.
What Happened After
Hewlett retired as vice chairman of HP's board in 1987, the same year he received Stanford's "Degree of Uncommon Man" — an honor whose very name captures something essential about how his peers understood him. Uncommon, not extraordinary. The distinction matters. Extraordinary implies separation from the ordinary. Uncommon implies a different quality of engagement with it.
In retirement, he pursued the interests that had always competed for his attention with the company: botany, mountain climbing, cattle ranching. He was a part-time botanist of real seriousness, not the dilettante variety. He and his first wife, Flora Lamson — whom he married in 1939, the same year HP was founded, a coincidence of timing that suggests the year represented a comprehensive commitment to adult life — had established the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in 1966 "to promote the well-being of mankind." By 2001, it had $2 billion in assets. In 1995, Hewlett endowed the Public Policy Institute of California with $70 million. In 1999, he donated $5 million to MIT to establish the William R. Hewlett Presidential Leadership Fund, inspired by his own commencement speech there thirteen years earlier. Flora died in 1977. Hewlett later remarried.
He suffered a stroke in 1993 and was in poor health for the last eight years of his life. He died in his sleep on January 12, 2001, at his home in Palo Alto, surrounded by his family. He was eighty-seven. Forbes had ranked him the twenty-sixth richest American, with an estimated net worth of $9 billion. Carly Fiorina — who had become HP's CEO in 1999 and would preside over the tumultuous 2001 acquisition of Compaq and, in the view of many longtime HP employees, the dismantling of the culture Hewlett had spent his life building — described him as "great and gentle."
The gentleness was real. So was the greatness. But neither word captures the most important thing about Hewlett, which was the relationship between the two qualities — the way his gentleness was not weakness but a form of engineering, a deliberately designed system for producing innovation, loyalty, and enduring institutional strength. He was gentle because he had calculated, correctly, that gentleness was the most efficient way to get the most out of creative people. He was great because the calculation worked.
The Garage in the Rearview
After Hewlett and Packard retired, HP was led by a succession of CEOs — John Young, Lew Platt, Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd, Léo Apotheker,
Meg Whitman — who faced the impossible task of stewarding a culture built by two specific people in a specific time. The company grew. It became the world's largest technology company by revenue under Hurd, surpassing IBM in 2008 with $118 billion in sales. It also split, in 2015, into Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc. — a bifurcation that many believed was fifteen years overdue.
The culture did not survive intact. Fiorina, who arrived from Lucent in 1999 with enormous ambition and a taste for the spotlight, pursued the Compaq acquisition over fierce opposition — including from Walter Hewlett, Bill's son, who mounted a proxy fight to stop the deal. She won the vote. She lost, in the estimation of many who had known the founders, something harder to measure. Michael Malone, who covered HP for decades, wrote that Fiorina "did a pretty good job of destroying this legendary culture at the company during her quest for personal glory … to the point that even the few survivors of the old days can barely remember what it was like to work for the company once-considered the most enlightened on the planet."
Mark Hurd — the NCR veteran who replaced Fiorina in 2005 and was, by all accounts, a brilliant operator, the kind of executive who wakes at 4:45 a.m. without an alarm because a competitor on the East Coast might already be working — restored operational discipline but never quite rekindled the HP Way. He was, as one analyst put it, "the most adept at taking costs out of the system of any executive I know."
Cost-taking and culture-building are not the same skill.
Brian Armstrong, the Coinbase CEO, read
Bill & Dave, the biography of the founders, as his own company grew past a thousand employees. His assessment was admiring but clear-eyed: "HP is a great case study in how to build a string of successful products and create repeatable innovation across multiple business units. … Therefore, HP is also a cautionary tale of how a company can become so dependent on a founder that it doesn't survive into the next generation."
The question Armstrong posed — whether any single company needs to last forever, or whether the principles it embodies can survive its dissolution — is the question that hovers over Hewlett's legacy. The company split. The culture fragmented. The principles endure, embedded in the DNA of every Silicon Valley startup that offers flexible hours, casual dress, employee stock options, and the assumption that engineers should be trusted to manage their own work. These are now so ubiquitous as to be invisible. They were not inevitable. Someone had to invent them.
What the Elephant Looked Like
Ted Gioia, writing in 2024, offered a comparison that would have made Hewlett uncomfortable — not because it was wrong, but because it drew attention:
"When I first came to Silicon Valley at age 17, the two leading technologists in the region were named William Hewlett and David Packard. They used their extra cash to fund schools, museums, and hospitals — both my children were born at the Lucile Packard Children's Hospital — not immortality machines, or rockets to Mars, or a dystopian Internet of brains, or worshiping at the Church of the Singularity. … Bill Hewlett had more wisdom than ego. He invested in the community where he lived — not the Red Planet. Instead of promulgating social engineering schemes, Hewlett and Packard built a new engineering school at their alma mater, and named it after their favorite teacher."
The teacher was Fred Terman. The engineering school was the Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Center at Stanford. The act of naming it after their mentor rather than themselves was characteristic — a public declaration that the debt came first, that the chain of influence mattered more than the individual links. Hewlett's number was in the phone book. His name was on the building — but it was someone else's name he put on the school.
He did not have, as Walter Isaacson wrote of Steve Jobs, "conspicuous consumption needs" or "the competitive urge to see how high on the Forbes list he could get." What he had was a conviction — held quietly, expressed through decades of consistent action rather than through speeches or memoirs or publicity campaigns — that a company should exist to make something useful, that the people who make it should be treated as adults, and that the profits should be shared. It is, in the end, a very simple philosophy. Simple philosophies are the hardest to maintain.
On the day he died, the garage at 367 Addison Avenue was still standing. The workbench was still there. The house had been restored to look exactly as it did in 1938, when two young men with $538 and no particular product walked in and began to tinker. The California landmark plaque, bolted to the exterior, reads: "The Birthplace of the Silicon Valley." It does not mention the urinal flusher.
