Silicon Valley began with a bad boss. In 1956, the physicist William Shockley opened Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View, recruiting some of the brightest young engineering minds.

Shockley was a brilliant inventor and winner of the Nobel Prize in physics. He was also, by many accounts, a lout. Before long, a core group of lab workers had enough of his bullying and in September 1957 they struck out on their own.

The eight men were young, eager, and bound by a genuine fondness for one another. The company they founded, Fairchild Semiconductor, went on to build the first silicon transistors and integrated circuits. It begat company after company, including Intel, setting off an explosion of innovation that made California the world tech capital.

Shockley’s lab failed. Embittered, he referred to his former employees as “the traitorous eight,” a label that stuck and is now viewed with affection. Then, inexplicably, Shockley spent the second half of his career pursuing an intense interest in eugenics, arguing for the inferiority of Black people.

In a 2006 interview with NPR, his biographer, Joel Shurkin, said Shockley was a miserable man. “There was something wrong with him,” he said. “What was wrong with him, we don’t really know. He was at best paranoid. He was probably obsessive compulsive.”

The father of Silicon Valley died in 1989 as a disgraced bigot, having earned nothing from his company. Fairchild’s founders were by then fabulously wealthy, heroes of the tech revolution.

This article is from the California Sun, a newsletter that delivers must-read stories to your inbox each morning . Sign up here.