1961–1969: Fairchild Semiconductor

Jerry Sanders joined Fairchild Semiconductor in 1961 as a young engineer.^[4] At Fairchild, Sanders quickly rose from lower sales positions up to a succession of management positions in marketing, making him a likely candidate for one of the company's top vice presidencies.^[2] However, in 1968, a new management team was brought into Fairchild Semiconductor by Sherman Fairchild, led by C. Lester Hogan, then vice president of Motorola Semiconductor. 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. Sanders said that, on his firing from Fairchild, "My whole life has been about treating people fairly, and I wasn't treated fairly".^[2]

1969–2004: Advanced Micro Devices

In 1969, eight engineers left Fairchild Semiconductor together to start a new company, founding Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in Sunnyvale, California, in May 1969. They asked Jerry Sanders to join them, and he said he would, provided he became the president of the company. Although it caused some dissension within the group, they agreed, and the company was founded with Sanders as President. Every employee at the company got stock options, an innovation at the time.

Sanders gave the company a strong sales and marketing orientation, so that it was successful even though it was often behind its competitors in technology and manufacturing; Stacy Rasgo, a semiconductor analyst at Bernstein Research, called Sanders "one of the best salesmen that Silicon Valley had ever seen".^[5] He shared the success of the company with the employees, usually coincident with sales-oriented growth targets.

Sanders at AMD famously remarked that in the semiconductor industry "real men have fabs".^[6] Originally intended as a jibe against competitors, Sanders’s remarks have been largely disproven in the years since. From 1969 to 2009, AMD fabricated its own processors but it later sold off its foundry division as GlobalFoundries in 2009.^[7] AMD is now fabless and outsources its fabrication to GlobalFoundries and TSMC.

He steered the company through hard times as well. In 1974, a particularly bad recession almost broke the company. Through a period of stagflation in 1979, he refused to layoff AMD employees and instead took a leaf from the Japanese rather than engaging in the same rampant layoffs that had occurred at Fairchild earlier.^[8] Instead of reducing employees, he asked them to work Saturdays to get more done and get new products out sooner. There were also good times for the company. Sanders gave each one of his employees $100 as they walked out of the door during AMD's first $1 million quarter. AMD implemented a cash profit-sharing employee compensation program, where employees would regularly get profit checks of $1,000 or more.

In 1976, Intel needed a second source to produce its 8085 processor for IBM PCs so it turned to AMD. In 1982, Sanders was responsible for a renegotiated licensing deal that would enable AMD to copy Intel's processor microcode to make its own x86 processors, a deal that eventually made the company the only real competitor to Intel.^[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. Intel successfully countersued AMD which caused AMD's stock to collapse and nearly killed the company.^[9]

In 2000, Sanders recruited Héctor Ruiz, at the time the president of Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector, to serve as AMD's president and CEO, and to become heir apparent to lead the company upon Sanders' retirement. He stayed with the company as chairman after Ruiz succeeded him as CEO in 2002.^[3] Sanders stepped down as AMD chair in April 2004 after 35 years at the company.^[10]