Ze'ev Drori

Early life

Ze'ev Drori was born and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel. His father worked for the Tel Aviv Municipality and his mother was a homemaker. Uninterested in school, he left home at 15 to move to Kibbutz Hulda, where despite his young age Drori worked in the fields.

Drori enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces at 17, and moved through the ranks to become an officer in the Paratroopers Brigade. As an officer at the age of 20, he led his platoon during Israel's many skirmishes with its neighbors.

At the completion of his military service, Drori passed his Israeli matriculation exams (Bagrut) and went to the United States to study. Having gained admission to the Polytechnic University of New York, Drori supported himself by working a variety of jobs, including as a chimney sweep, a dishwasher/busboy, in a slaughterhouse, in a cold-storage house in the meat-packing district of New York and on a lumberyard. Upon receiving his B.S, Drori accepted a position with IBM in Burlington, Vermont. He was soon promoted to head IBM's semiconductor memory operation as the engineering manager. He left IBM after receiving a job offer from Fairchild Semiconductor in Mountain View, one of the pioneering Silicon Valley electronics firms. He left Fairchild to start his own company in 1970.