Fire In The Belly: Building A World-leading High-tech Company From Scratch In Tumultuous Times (Hardcover)

by Jerry D. Neal (Author), Jerry Bledsoe (Author) "When dreadful, life-altering events occur, somebody with good intentions is apt to offer doubtful solace by saying, Maybe it's all for the best..." (more)
Key Phrases: Micro Devices, Analog Devices, North Carolina (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
When Bill Pratt and Powell Seymour got laid off from their technology jobs in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1991, they had no idea that they were about to become leaders of a revolution in electronic communications.

They did know that they wanted to start their own company, although they had no means to fund it. They asked their friend Jerry Neal to leave his job at the same company and join them to raise money and market their products.

Those products numbered only seven at the time, and they could fit in a small matchbox with plenty of room to spare. But they were unlike any other products. Bill Pratt had designed the first radio frequency integrated circuits, the semiconductor chips that would make the cell-phone phenomenon possible.

Within a year of starting the company, Pratt had designed another chip, the first power amplifier using an exotic technology that many considered unreliable and impossible to commercialize. Although the chip failed at first, it became a company builder.

Now more than half of the cell phones made in the world contain power amplifiers made by RF Micro Devices of Greensboro, the world's leading supplier. The company has plants and offices around the world, and has broadened its reach into every aspect of wireless electronic communications.

Jerry Neal's revealing, entertaining, often funny account of how this came about is much more than a story of one company's beginnings. It's a wild ride through the technology boom of the 1990s, at the peak of which, just nine years after its founding, RF Micro Devices had a market value of $16 billion, twice that of its technology partner, the huge, long-established defense contractor TRW.

Fire in the Belly should be a handbook for entrepreneurs and a textbook for college business majors.

About the Author
Jerry Bledsoe is the author of 20 books, including the New York Times #1 bestseller Bitter Blood. He and his wife, Linda, also live in Randolph County, North Carolina.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Down Home Press (January 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1878086987
• ISBN-13: 978-1878086983
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #94,454 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How the Business of Semiconductors is Done, January 31, 2005

By	J. W. Pearce "SSS-Mag Ed" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have been an electronics design engineer for 30 years but have learned more about the electronics business from reading this book than I have in all of my years! I learned how venture capital really works (and doesn't), how hard work and a solid technology can triumph, and how close to failure you can come and still succeed.

This book should be on every technology MBA's bookshelf. It should also be required reading in every EE and MBA degree program.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An entertaining, riveting story of business success results, September 5, 2005

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

According to all business logic RF Micro Devices should never have been born, much less built to a world-leading high-tech company: yet, it did, and Jerry D. Neal and Jerry Bledsoe chart its amazing rise in Fire In The Belly: Building A World-elevating High-Tech Company From Scratch In Tumultuous Times. Author Neal left his own job to help his friends raise money to start the revolutionary company on a shoestring in 1991: a company which was to market only seven products. These were key products, though, from the first radio frequency integrated circuits cell phones would come to rely on to a power amplifier chip which succeeded in building the company. An entertaining, riveting story of business success results.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An entertaining, riveting story of business success results, September 5, 2005

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

According to all business logic RF Micro Devices should never have been born, much less built to a world-leading high-tech company: yet, it did, and Jerry D. Neal and Jerry Bledsoe chart its amazing rise in Fire In The Belly: Building A World-elevating High-Tech Company From Scratch In Tumultuous Times. Author Neal left his own job to help his friends raise money to start the revolutionary company on a shoestring in 1991: a company which was to market only seven products. These were key products, though, from the first radio frequency integrated circuits cell phones would come to rely on to a power amplifier chip which succeeded in building the company. An entertaining, riveting story of business success results.