An old friend died yesterday, and his life was so exceptional that it deserves to be commemorated here. His name was Alex d’Arbeloff, and most people who have heard of him knew him as the cofounder and long-time CEO of Teradyne, Inc., a major manufacturer of semiconductor test systems. But that was only for openers. After retirement, he was the Chairman of MIT, a lecturer at its Sloan School, and an organizer and director of many high-tech companies. He was still going strong right to the end.
Alex was born 80 years ago in Paris of Russian émigré parents and wound up in New York in 1938, after the family spent a couple of years in South America. After high school in New York, Alex enrolled at MIT, and it was there he met Nick DeWolf, with whom he founded Teradyne in 1960. The pair launched Teradyne in a most unlikely location: not along Route 128, but in the heart of downtown Boston, and for the next three decades Teradyne’s three downtown buildings were a fixture in Boston, drawing visiting customers from all over the world and providing good jobs and benefits to thousands of workers who could commute to and from work via the “T.”
By the time Alex retired in 1997, Teradyne was a multibillion-dollar company and the leader in its field. The next time you marvel at the dependability of your TV or cell phone or the electronics in your car, you might tip your hat to the test technology, largely from Teradyne, that makes everything so bulletproof. There was more to Teradyne than semiconductor testing, because Alex’s appetite for innovation knew no bounds. There was a breakthrough test system, called 4TEL, for telephone lines. There was a connection company which grew to become a billion-dollar enterprise in its own right. Teradyne’s biggest successes grew out of in-house projects; he had little appetite for acquisitions – or, for that matter, most of the other games today’s CEOs play.
Alex succeeded so brilliantly on the strength of some qualities that are all too rare these days. First, he had an uncompromising sense of integrity. If someone violated Alex’s sense of right and wrong, he or she was gone in an instant. It happened rarely, because the hiring process was well filtered, but it happened. Second, Alex had an uncanny sense of recognizing true talent, attracting it, and retaining it. The team that Alex assembled in the early nineteen-seventies was essentially the team he built the Company around, and it was an incredible team, an all-star at every position. Third, he knew how to deal with people. A mutual friend, the CEO of another company says, “I never met anyone who was a better people person than Alex.” That’s because Alex respected people as human beings, and he never, ever belittled anyone. Fourth, he had a wonderful sense of humor. “Alex stories” are legion, and his own favorites were funny stories where the humor came at the expense of Alex himself. He would never make fun of others, but he loved it when people made fun of him.
It must be said that Alex was the consummate family man. His wife Brit and their four children were the inner circle, but the extended family also included his parents, Brit’s parents, his two brothers, and of course the growing d’Arbeloff clan. It was probably inevitable that the stroke that cut him down occurred at a family gathering last Saturday.
I was lucky enough to work closely with Alex for 27 years. They were unforgettable years, because he was an unforgettable man. We lost a giant yesterday.
