Andy Grove, who died on Monday at 79, was not one of the technology industry’s household names. But the chemical engineer who turned Intel from a brilliant science project into the first industrial giant of the personal computing era has long been guaranteed a revered place in Silicon Valley lore.

Grove, who joined Intel in 1968, rose to become chief executive at the peak of its PC industry power, from 1987-98, and served as chairman until 2004.

He did as much as almost anyone to shape the computing world that has emerged over the past half century — and, in the process, to define the business culture that has taken such a powerful grip on modern management thinking.

His personal idiosyncrasies, insecurities and passions coalesced into a powerful brew. They included an iconoclastic disregard for the normal conventions of business and a win-at-all-costs determination; a relentless addiction to pre-emptive corporate reinvention and the merits of moving fast; a taste for gutsy, bet-the-farm risks; and an eye for the kind of industry domination that new digital technologies made possible.

“Many of the senior statesmen in the Valley worked for him, many of the [venture capitalists] worked for him,” says David Yoffie, an Intel director from the late 1980s and a professor at Harvard Business School. “In some sense, his career was the story of Silicon Valley.”

Grove was the classic outsider who found himself in the computing world that came to life in the 1960s. He was born András Gróf in Hungary on September 2 1936. His father was conscripted into a Jewish labour battalion during the second world war while he and his mother moved around Hungary to avoid detention and the fate that befell many Hungarian Jews who were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz.

It was after the Hungarian uprising of 1956 was brutally suppressed by the Soviet Union that Grove fled the country, escaping by foot into Austria and then a new life in the US.

He never went back. Instead, arriving in Silicon Valley at the start of the 1960s, he was catapulted into a future that he helped to invent.

Grove was one of the great business communicators, despite a thick accent that remained with him and a hearing impediment from early in life.

He also translated his thinking into some of the most influential management books of the late 20th century. One — Only the Paranoid Survive — became a mantra not just for Grove but for the whole of Silicon Valley, where the threat of being disrupted by the next new upstart engendered persistent anxiety.

As he wrote in the opening lines: “The more successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing left.” Many managers may sense this truism. Few have the guts to do something about it.

The paranoia was not just for show. “I sat in many, many meetings with Andy while he looked at the worst outcome, and what could possibly go wrong,” says Mr Yoffie. He adds that it was this refusal to rest on past success — and the ability to see how the various pieces of the business world would fall into place — that enabled Grove to take the pre-emptive actions needed to put Intel at the top of its industry.

Perhaps the most significant was Grove’s determination to make Intel the sole source for the new PC microprocessors, rather than just one of several suppliers — a move that was to give the company unassailable economies of scale and cement its lead.

IBM, at the time its biggest customer and the originator of the PC, was against the move. But Grove remained firm and the rapid emergence of a new industry, led by Compaq Computer, provided a ready market. IBM’s grip on the computing world was broken and Intel — along with Microsoft — had turned itself into one of the tech industry’s dominant monopolists.

Grove showed a similar determination when, assailed by competition from Japan, he decided to abandon memory chips, the company’s original business, to bet everything on microprocessors.

But if he got the big strategic decisions right, Grove was as well known for a relentless attention to detail and a mercilessly demanding management style. Hired as Intel’s first employee by founders Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, it was his ability to get things done that made him invaluable.

He had followed a postgraduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley with a job as a research scientist at Fairchild Semiconductor, Silicon Valley’s original chipmaker. But he came into his own as an operational genius, turning the cottage industry that was chipmaking into one of the most demanding of high-tech sectors.

As with Steve Jobs at Apple, Grove’s rages became famous, and his treatment of subordinates could be vicious. But the tempers never undermined his drive. “He had a talent for pushing people harder than they had ever been pushed before — and for making people want to please him,” says Mr Yoffie. “He was such a hard man to please.”