Social Entrepreneur: Conscious Companies | Benefit Corporations | Impact Investing

Fred Rose grew up on a family farm a few miles from the Canadian border. It was there that Fred learned several life lessons that make him a good entrepreneur: self-sufficiency, a lack of need for permission, perseverance. He was also a bit of an odd man out. Imagine the audacity of a kid in a one-room school house who dared to dream of growing up to be a scientist. Fred told me that he’s always had a bit of chip on his shoulder: a need to prove that he could do what others did not believe he could do. Fred went to work in Silicon Valley in 1979, just as personal computers were on the rise. After a few years, he moved to Minnesota to pursue his degree from the University of Minnesota, where his love for computers began to bloom. After graduation, he went to work for Honeywell where he had the chance to develop radiation-hardened computer chips for space flight. Today, some of his chips are in the Smithsonian Institute. Fred also worked on cutting edge projects including synthesis, where they describe hardware