The most important technology for the region's growth was, of course, the semiconductor. William Shockley, who had been one of the inventors of the transistor at Bell Labs in New Jersey, moved out to Mountain View and, in 1956, started a company to build transistors using silicon rather than the more expensive germanium that was then commonly used. But Shockley became increasingly erratic and abandoned his silicon transistor project, which led eight of his engineers, most notably Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, to break away to form Fairchild Semiconductor. That company grew to 12,000 employees, but it fragmented in 1968, when Noyce lost a power struggle to become CEO. He took Gordon Moore and founded a company that they called Integrated Electronics Corporation, which they soon smartly abbreviated to Intel. Their third employee was Andrew Grove, who would later grow the company in the 1980s by shifting its focus from memory chips to microprocessors. Within a few years there would be more than fifty companies in the area making semiconductors.