Of all Indians in Silicon Valley, probably the most famous is Vinod Dham. That is because he is the ‘Father of the Pentium chip’. If there is an invention in the last 20 years that has changed the face of computing, it is Intel’s Pentium processor, and the man who made it possible is Vinod. After his BE in electrical engineering from Delhi College of Engineering in 1971, Vinod joined India’s first semi-conductor manufacturing factory. At the time, semiconductors were the newest magical things. While working there, Vinod’s “love for semiconductors bloomed”. This took him to the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, USA, where he completed his master’s in electrical, with specialisation in Solid State science. After a short stint at NCR Corporation, where he worked on developing Non-volatile memories, he joined Intel where he helped invent flash memories. Impressed by his work on producing 386 and 486 chips, Intel promoted him to be the in-charge of producing the 586 chip, which was later called ‘Pentium’. By the time he left Intel in 1995, he was the vice-president of the microprocessor group and was instrumental in taking the Pentium chip forward. He later joined AMD as the vice president of their computation products groups, and helped AMD become a strong competitor to Intel. He is now a venture capitalist and mentor for many startups.