WHAT’s a bloke from Lewisham doing at the top of one of America’s greatest
tech businesses?
“I was just fascinated by computers,” says Sean Maloney. “And I think I was
always going to end up there. Tech firms are more accepting of
unconventional backgrounds. It’s what you can do, not where you are from.”
Maloney, 51, a likeably blunt south Londoner, proves that in spades. Despite a
haphazard education - chucked out of two schools, failing to finish a
diploma course at Thames Polytechnic - he is now executive vice-president of
Intel, the world’s biggest chip-maker, and tipped to head the company when
the current chief executive, Paul Otellini, retires.
That would make him one of the most powerful Britons in global business.
Intel, based in California, has revenues of $38 billion (£19 billion) and
rivals Microsoft, Apple and Google as a key driver of the world’s tech
revolution. The company produces the smaller, faster microprocessors that
are radically altering media, telecoms, transport, healthcare and more.
It’s a jump from the scruffy back streets where Maloney grew up, the youngest
of six in a London Irish family in Lewisham, scene of antifascist riots in
1977. Maloney was a self-styled reprobate before he discovered technology -
you could say that computers saved him.
“I went from being a devout Christian to reading Marx, substituting one dogma
for another,” he says. “But you’ve got to remember the UK was much more
politically polarised in the 1970s.”
And now he is calling the shots at an all-powerful multinational that’s rarely
out of the spotlight - currently under investigation by the EU for stifling
competition, and recently excoriated by Nicholas Negroponte, the internet
guru, for pulling out of his One Laptop Per Child foundation, which aims to
give Third World children access to cheap computing. Intel is backing
another venture.
Maloney, sitting in the London offices of Intel’s British PR firm, stiffens
when I bring it up. Intel is a leader in American corporate responsibility,
donating $100m a year to good causes. The Negroponte criticisms hurt. “I
wish Nicholas well, but our view is that there should be hundreds of
different types of computers in those markets, and good luck to him.” Do
impoverished Third World children need a competitive choice, though? They
just want access, surely?
“Look,” he says, “we have been in these markets for 15 years, they want a
choice as much as Britons do. And I think American or western companies need
to appreciate they want to develop their own industries too. None of that is
a criticism of Nick.”
As for the EU investigation: “We have been conspicuously successful since the
early 1990s, we are following market rules, we are not strong-arming anyone.
But maybe it’s human nature, you cut down the tallest poppies, there might
be something in that.” Then Maloney rubs his cropped hair in exasperation.
Tall and enthusiastic, with a pinhead balanced bouncily on thin shoulders,
he seems more state school head teacher than Master of the Future Universe.
He started his career writing software, before moving into management with
Intel, then being hand-picked by trailblazing boss Andy Grove - author of
the bestselling management book Only The Paranoid Survive - to be his
“technical assistant” 17 years ago.
Maloney explains the role thus: “You work on deals, evaluate technology, write
speeches, do everything.” Grove himself was “brilliant and inspirational. He
taught me always to question the obvious”. Maloney’s own technical assistant
sits patiently outside while we talk.
Since that stint with Grove, Maloney has established himself as Intel’s top
management troubleshooter, working around the world. He is currently based
at Intel’s Palo Alto headquarters where he leads the company’s 4,500-strong
sales and marketing team, a job he took on two years ago to stem the loss of
market share to rivals like AMD.
But it is only when Maloney mentions the media owners he advises, and the
Barack Obama presidential campaign, which he backs, that you realise how
embedded he is in America’s top tier. He still agonises over his
mid-Atlantic accent - “Oh man,” he exclaims a couple of times - and the fact
that, eventually, he might have to take up American citizenship.
Because a Briton wouldn’t be allowed to the very top of Intel? “No, there’s no
corporate pressure,” he says, “but at some point you are not where you were
from.” He has an American wife - his third marriage - and three of his five
children are at American universities. Most mornings he rows his boat in San
Francisco Bay. It’s home.
And inside Intel he has the tough job of driving forward profitability as the
company shakes itself up. “We are focusing very strongly on our core
strengths, which are the microprocessor and everything round that,
transistors as well – the fundamental building blocks of modern society.”
That gives him a unique viewpoint on the changes ahead, though he admits even
Intel is never certain where its technology will lead. “With our current
Core2 Duo products, the most common application - and biggest generator of
web traffic – is streaming video. That didn’t exist three years ago.”
And he can foresee bigger changes coming. Notebook computers as common as
mobile phones, the web as primary provider of entertainment needs, worldwide
wireless internet access, like a virtual “umbrella” girdling the globe.
Intel supports a mooted Wimax system, others back a rival - “It’ll sort
itself out,” says Maloney.
As for media, commercial television in its current form is doomed, he
predicts. “The internet is going to hit broadcast media like a ton of bricks
in the next 24 months.”
He knows that from his own experience. Intel has advertised hard, to boost
overall consumer demand - it famously paid part of the television
advertising costs for hardware manufacturers that included its Intel Inside
jingle. Now Maloney, who pioneered such advertising in Asia in the 1990s, is
pushing more marketing online.
“This is because we don’t know what TV ads work any more. Demographically kids
have so many forms of activity going on at once: TV, cellphone, instant
messaging. The idea of paying a lot of money for a commercial TV message
that gets broadcast to everybody, whether interested in your product or not
at a time of day when you don’t know if any of them are paying attention, is
really unattractive. You want to advertise your product to someone who is
interested. That’s all about to unfold.”
He also predicts that social-networking sites like Facebook will be “the
predominant way people work with each other”.
Really? Is he on Facebook? “Yeah, of course I’m on Facebook. I do it to keep
in touch with my teenage children.” Has he tried talking to them face to
face? He laughs and thumbs his nose at me. “Yeah, yeah, I do try, but they
are at university, and I know an awful lot more about them now.”
Such humour makes Maloney stand out from the more sleekly polished bosses
running corporate America. Friends say he is little changed since he started
moving up the Intel ladder. “Sean is dynamic, energetic, garrulous and a
good listener,” says film-maker Brian Hill, who married Maloney’s sister.
“But the whole family is like that. They take a proposition and question it
from different angles. It’s quite painful at times.”
That’s tied to a work ethic that Maloney attributes to his mother, a
night-nurse, born in County Mayo. His attention to detail comes from his
father, a dye-factory chemist. Despite both parents’ Irish roots, Maloney
says he has always felt British - he is a long-standing England rugby
supporter. “Though when in Ireland I do pretend to be Irish,” he says.
He was turned on to computers by an older brother, who showed him how to
produce a printout - essential when he was given 1,000 lines at the
Christian Brothers school he attended. “A new punishment, when they weren’t
whacking me.”
Maloney later got his first job writing software for mainframes at Barclays.
He was running a support team when Intel spotted an article he had written
for a tech journal. On the back of it, they offered him a job at their
British base. He loved their unfusty style.
“The first day I noticed the boss drove the same company car as me, and I
asked him why. He stepped behind me and said, ‘It looks like we have the
same size arse, why would I need a bigger car?’ That was my first
conversation with him. Fantastic.” Colleagues back then describe him as a
scruffy geek, obsessed with technology, but ambitious. “He always got top
ratings in every appraisal,” says Paul Greenfield, his former UK boss, now
chief executive of Aspex Semiconductors. “And he’s totally engaging, with a
touch of the Blarney.”
Twenty-five years on, Maloney is still charming his peers. Some believe that
in 2005 he was short-listed to be chief executive at Hewlett-Packard,
another American giant based in Palo Alto.
He is now only one rung from the top slot at Intel - only three others share
the executive vice-president title.
Does he want to be chief executive? Otellini is 57, and has to stand down at
60. “We’ll see,” says Maloney. “I am currently fully engaged in the job I am
in and Paul has a long time to go. But I can’t imagine retiring at any
point.”
And the future for the company? “If we get complacent, we die. But cyberspace
is going to be much more 3D, and our technology is likely to be at the heart
of that.” He repeats the mantra: “Smaller, faster, smaller, faster.”
Most importantly, the next wave of innovation will revolutionise drug
research, which needs “an astonishing amount” of computing power. “I expect
microprocessors to change peoples’ lives more in the next 10 years than the
last 10 years.”
But he has a plane to catch, and his advisers are restless. “We finished?” he
asks, then grins. “Man, that was intense.”
SEAN MALONEY’S WORKING DAY
THE Intel sales and marketing chief wakes at his Palo Alto home at 5.15am. “I
either row in San Francisco Bay or go to the gym,” says Sean Maloney. Then
he drives himself to Intel’s HQ. “It takes 15 minutes, because the
‘Governator’ lets me use the car pool lane in a Prius.”
He starts work at 7.15am. “Typically I would be in customer meetings or
engineering reviews. We are very engineering-orientated, everything is
tracked and measured.” He has 18 executives reporting directly to him. “That
number will go down.” He finishes at 6pm, will often attend a company dinner
and is home by 8pm. He goes to bed at 9pm.
VITAL STATISTICS
Born:July 5, 1956
Marital status:married three times; he has five children
School:Brockley County
University:Thames Polytechnic
First job:writing software for mainframe computers
Salary package:£688,000 plus stock options
Home:Palo Alto, California
Car:black Toyota Prius
Favourite book:The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi
Favourite music:The Buzzcocks
Favourite film:The Third Man
Favourite gadget:Carl Douglas racing boat
Last holiday:Vermont
DOWNTIME
SEAN MALONEY is a fanatical rower. “I have just the one boat, built by Carl
Douglas, the most magically talented boatbuilder in the world. It’s probably
the last wooden boat on San Francisco Bay. Ugly oarsman but beautiful boat.”
His other main hobbies are reading history, and supporting Bath and England
rugby teams – despite his Irish parentage. “I took my mum once to an
England-Ireland match and Ireland won. She thought that was great.”
Otherwise he spends his money on his five children. He regrets not keeping a
home in England. “I sold it – what a fool.”
