Profile · Oshkosh, Wisconsin
Thurman John “T.J.” Rodgers
Founder and longtime CEO of Cypress Semiconductor; born and raised in Oshkosh
$108 million
Thurman John "T.J." Rodgers is the Oshkosh-born engineer who founded Cypress Semiconductor and ran it for thirty-four years. He was born on March 15, 1948, to a General Motors car salesman and a schoolteacher who had taught radio electronics in World War II, and he grew up on Lake Winnebago playing cards for money and wiring experiments at home. At Oshkosh High School, class of 1966, he loved math, chemistry, and physics; one 1980s profile recalled a homemade "Thurm-O-Flare" that put him in the hospital. Dartmouth recruited him for football. He graduated salutatorian in 1970 with majors in chemistry and physics, then earned a Stanford Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1975 and licensed a VMOS patent on the way out. He turned down Intel because he did not want to work for Andy Grove. In 1982 he founded Cypress Semiconductor. Cypress silicon later sat behind the iPod click wheel. When the board would not rescue solar firm SunPower, he wrote a $750,000 personal check and then talked directors into buying in; SunPower later went public. Fortune once called him America's toughest boss. Away from the fab he stomped Pinot grapes at Clos de la Tech in the Santa Cruz Mountains and donated a $3.5 million wireless fermentation network to UC Davis. He still owns familiar Oshkosh names, including Ardy and Ed's, the Country Club, and T.J.'s Harbor Restaurant, and still flies home for Packers games. The chip empire was California; the origin story is Lake Winnebago.