Until last summer, Shlomit Weiss managed 20,000 people at Intel centers around the world, overseeing development of the company’s most widely-used computer chips. Her resume includes three decades in the bosom of the US-based chip manufacturer, which is also the largest private employer in Israel, and another three years as Mellanox's hardware development manager. And if that's wasn’t enough, she was also one of those who persuaded Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to acquire Mellanox.
But now, at age 62, Weiss is reinventing herself, and busy with the small details of starting an independent business: building her own website, handing out business cards everywhere, and renewing connections with former colleagues in order to find potential clients, namely CEOs who need guidance or good advice. Forty years after studying computer engineering, one of the Technion’s most challenging courses, and reaching a senior position at Intel as the co-general manager of the company’s Design Engineering Group, she is recasting herself as a mentor, an expert in developing executives and building teams, at her newly-founded company, Weissway, a pun on "wise way."
Just a year after leaving Intel, Weiss is roaming in the Israeli summer heat between the offices of local CEOs, and really enjoying what she is doing. "I manage my own time, and I'm not busy, for example, with long team meetings. Being independent is a big advantage in time management; I choose what I do with my time most of the day," she says in an exclusive interview with "Globes." In 2022, Weiss published a book on leadership, "The Engaging Leader," and began lecturing on the topic. In general, it seems that leaving Intel was a sign from above for her to fulfill an old dream and turn her hobby into a second career.
"Everyone blamed everyone else"
While Weiss wants to convey her management experience to the world outside Intel, in recent years Intel has been in a managerial upheaval. For almost a decade, what was once the flagship of the US semiconductor industry has been aground - suffering a leadership, technological, cultural and financial crisis - just at a time when Western countries need independence in chip manufacturing.
A 2021 Bloomberg article noted Intel’s rigid corporate culture, coupled with chaotic, authoritarian management during Brian Krzanich's tenure as CEO, from 2013 to his dismissal in 2017. "I agree that people skills were not his strong point, to say the least," Weiss says. "The company was in a situation in which people were afraid of the CEO, and when you’re afraid of a manager, you don’t tell the truth. Everyone tries to blame everyone else, and only tells the good news. It was an enterprise culture that I don’t believe in."
It wasn’t always that way at Intel.
"Intel went through several generations of management. There were values there of integrity, fairness, openness to differences of opinion, and teamwork to solve problems. But then came the downturn, and in 2021 Pat Gelsinger returned as CEO and tried to bring the enterprise culture back to its original values. But it’s not easy - it’s much easier for a large organization to cultivate fear, rather than to open up and not stifle criticism."
Now, with the arrival of new CEO Lip-Bo Tan last March, Intel’s culture of intensive team discussions and meetings came under fire. Even before announcing extensive layoffs, Tan reduced the number of meetings, and raised the office attendance requirement back to four days a week. "It’s always good to cut back on meetings," says Weiss. "The point is to attend the meetings where you need to be, on subjects on which you contribute directly, and not to just to be seen. Otherwise it’s a waste of time."
And what do you think about returning to the office?
"When people work from home exclusively, it affects their connectedness. It’s not that people don’t work, but they don’t feel the same sense of belonging and commitment, so it’s good to be back. On the other hand, the world has changed and there are things that people can no longer do-for example, coming to the office five times a week. That's why the hybrid compromise is the right one."
"An experience I'll remember for 100 years"
Weiss was born in Romania, the younger of two sisters, to two mechanical engineer parents, both Holocaust survivors. When she was seven, the family immigrated to Israel and settled in Holon. "I didn't know a word of Hebrew," she says. "When I was 10, my father died in a traumatic and unexpected fashion, and my sister and I were left with my mother and grandmother. So, we grew up in an independent environment where you make do with what you have. My mother would go to work every day, even during the Yom Kippur War, and come back at five. I studied physics and mathematics at the New High School in Holon (now called High Tech High) but I encountered my first computer only in the army; during my service as a psychotechnical diagnostician, I was asked to participate in an experimental correspondence course in programming, and I did it as a hobby."
Post-army, the hobby turned into a profession. Weiss enrolled in the Computer Science Department at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, and in her second year she transferred to a newly established computer engineering track. There, she shared a study carrel with Johny Srouji, currently Apple's Senior Vice President of Hardware Technologies, and with former Mellanox CEO Eyal Waldman. She later earned a master's degree in electrical engineering at the Technion, and immediately thereafter was hired by Intel - first as a regular member of the memory controller testing team, and then promoted to team leader.
From that point, Weiss's managerial career began to soar. She was given the opportunity to work on some of Intel's most prestigious projects of the 1990s and early 2000s. For example, she managed a chip design group in Portland, at the request of Intel EVP Dadi (David) Perlmutter, after which then-Intel Israel President Mooly (Shmuel) Eden brought her back to Israel to manage the Israeli CPU project code-named "Timna". After that, she managed an architecture group working on the successful "Marom" project - a chip that was revolutionary at the time, and was designed for both servers and personal computers.
Later, Rony Friedman, now manager of Apple in Israel, sent her back to California to manage productization (the process of transferring design to production). She then she returned to Israel to manage large parts of the "Sandy Bridge" project, Intel's most ambitious attempt to compete with Nvidia and integrate a graphics processor into a core processor for the first time. "That year, Mooly worked in marketing. He stood on stage at a major conference and presented Sandy Bridge. Suddenly, he stopped his presentation, pointed at me, and said: ‘Here’s the project manager, you can applaud her.’ Everyone stood up and clapped. It's an experience I will remember in a hundred years."
Keeping quiet about a mega-deal
One of Weiss' dominant personality traits is that she is not there to take up space. If she realizes she has nothing to contribute to the workplace, she gets up and leaves. If something is not going well, she comments on it, in her own style.
In 2017, after a wave of departures that included Eden and Perlmutter, Weiss left Intel after 22 years at the company. "The day after the announcement that I was leaving came out, I received a call from Eyal Waldman, who was looking for a manager for the design group. I told him that I still hadn't come to terms with having left Intel, and he gave me a week to think about it. During that time, we met a few times, I met with the board of directors, and I joined Mellanox."
In fact, Weiss arrived at Mellanox to manage the hardware development group about two years before Nvidia acquired the company. "It was a company that was different from anything I knew at Intel: the management is Israeli, and everyone works from here. That means you can make decisions in casual conversations and the management is much less formal. Suddenly, everything around me seemed like a mess, but it also meant that things moved faster. I tried to introduce organized work methods, but it was a very different experience from what I had known before. I was the only woman in senior management."
In the run-up to the sale to Nvidia, Weiss was one of the few who were in on the secret. "We did everything secretly in a long process, because you can't buy a company like Mellanox in one day. I met with CEO Jensen Huang. Even then, he seemed to me like a man who knew how to talk to people, and was perceived overall as a very smart and approachable person."
In May 2020, the acquisition was completed, but Weiss, despite the big money and the glittering brand name of the acquiring company, found herself at a loose end for a long time. "Initially, there was talk that Mellanox would remain separate in its organizational structure and products, but at some point, Huang decided to integrate Mellanox into Nvidia, which meant that he took the chip design group that I managed and broke it up into parts according to areas of expertise. They asked me if I was interested in another role. I said no thanks, and after a year with Nvidia, I planned to retire."
"My contribution is irrelevant"
However, retirement plans changed very quickly when the rumor of Weiss's departure spread and reached Intel. At that, Sunil Shenoy, another Intel VP who had also left during Krzanich's time as CEO, received an offer to return to the company and manage its entire engineering organization. After a brief conversation with Weiss, in which Shenoy informed her that he had been appointed to the position, Gelsinger himself called her. "He said: ‘Let's make Intel great again,’" she smiles. "He asked me: ‘Don't you want to feel the chips in your hands again?’ I told him yes, I wanted to see Intel succeed. Moreover, I was interested in how Gelsinger intended to get the corporate culture back on track. I received answers that sounded convincing; he talked about openness and a healthy culture, so I said "Let’s go, I'm coming back.’"
And so, in 2021, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Weiss was appointed co-manager of Intel's Design Engineering Group, a global group of 20,000 people, the largest in the company, and responsible for all engineering, from managing chip architecture, through to design, packaging, and testing. Despite the senior role, here too, Weiss would not compromise on location and continued to work from Israel. In the morning she would meet her Israeli staff at the development centers in Israel, and from 2 pm to 1 am she would have conversations with the company's headquarters in Santa Clara.
However, despite appointing the popular Gelsinger, the company's situation continued to deteriorate. The main problems -- a sick organizational culture, loss of technological leadership to TSMC and loss of market share to competitors such as AMD, Qualcomm and Nvidia -- continued under Gelsinger.
At this point, Weiss once again found herself facing a restructuring that threatened to take away her authority. After splitting off the entire manufacturing sector into a separate division aimed at attracting chip designers outside Intel, Gelsinger turned to splitting up the division headed by Weiss and Shenoy. "I don't think that, at an organization like Intel, engineering is something that should be kept out of sight, and so I didn’t find myself succeeding in contributing to the organization the way I’d planned. If my contribution is no longer relevant, I have no place in the company."
How did Gelsinger take your decision to leave?
"He asked why, but he understood. He didn't have a similar role to offer me."
The blue blood of Intel employees
Four months after she left, Gelsinger was himself removed from the company and replaced by Lip-Bo Tan, who is also feeling uneasy these days, with criticism coming from US President Donald J. Trump and the Trump administration. "Everyone who worked at Intel is very connected to the company, and I'm curious to see how things will change with the new CEO. People ask me, ‘Will he succeed or not?’ There's no magic charm. Most CEOs come to the job with new strategic plans and a view of the future, and in the end, everyone is tested on their performance.
"The chips that are the core of computing are not going away, and their importance is only increasing. Everything depends on them. Intel has brilliant engineers, a culture of work and caring. In the days of Dadi Perlmutter, we would say that Intel employees have 'blue blood.' But it very much depends on focus. If you do a bit of everything, it all comes out mediocre, but if you choose to do three out of ten things, they’ll turn out great."
Speaking of Perlmutter, he left after not being made CEO of Intel. Was that really on the agenda?
"He was one of the candidates for CEO, and as soon as Krzanich was appointed, Dadi left. He had a chance to be CEO, although it's hard for me to say how much of a chance, but he could have been a great CEO. I have no doubt that Intel would have been in a better position if Perlmutter had been appointed CEO of the company."
The acquisition
The Mellanox acquisition is currently one of Nvidia's most successful. Do you think Mellanox could have been an even more prosperous company if it had remained independent?
"Today, we can see the importance of communication chips for inter-GPU communication, and Mellanox had innovative and good technologies. If it had remained independent, it could undoubtedly have reinvented itself. On the other hand, the fact that Nvidia is here, and in such a significant configuration, is a very big blessing for Israel."
After working at both companies, how do you feel about the fact that Nvidia is on track to overtake Intel and become the largest private employer in Israel within a few years?
"It depends on what Intel does. The fact that there are cuts there could be an opportunity to improve and go in new directions. So it may not be the largest employer here, but I believe it will still carry a lot of weight here. The two companies - Intel and Nvidia - are similar in this sense: both are 'Corporate America', both are active in the latest technology, and both are helping the development of engineers in Israel and the growth of the local industry."
In addition to the cuts in development, Intel has made its first significant wave of layoffs and is freezing construction of a new factory in Kiryat Gat. Maybe there was no point in giving Intel state grants?
"I see it differently: I don't think Israel gave Intel a grant at the expense of someone else, because there was no-one else. It’s better to give money to someone who really wants to invest here and not look for someone else who is not interested. At that point in time, Intel had genuine potential to produce the most out of it."
What to study?
These days, as mentioned, Weiss is trying to bring her experience to other organizations. "I talk about how important it is to get to know the person beyond the task, and to address what really bothers them. For example, I had a new senior engineer who was very quiet and shy. After two months, I called him in for a talk and asked him how he was feeling. He didn't talk much and just said he was learning.
"I asked him anyway, is there anything new you want to tell me? He said: ‘Yes, I had a granddaughter.’ Those few words made a very big difference. The next thing was that I asked him to show me pictures of the granddaughter and suddenly he opened up. I told him: From now on, once a week, I want to see a picture of your granddaughter. These are small things that are not taught in school, but this is an example of how a manager needs to adapt to each person."
Are you a different manager from the ones you met at Intel or Nvidia?
"I think I manage a little differently: Some manage like a battalion commander in the army, and if you don't go their way, you’re in trouble. And there are managers for whom it’s important that their employees should like them, and then 'everything’s fine' and 'If you didn't make it, it’s no big deal'. I believe that these approaches should be integrated."
Towards the end, we asked Weiss what she would recommend to young people. She did find a job at Intel without previous experience, but today that’s mission impossible. "I think juniors today have higher demands of their first jobs. I hear from young people that they want to start in a super-interesting role, want a higher salary, and want to move on to the next project quickly. Sometimes it's a lack of patience: I spent three years in verification, which is very routine work, but it develops the expertise needed to get to the next role - and today people don't have that patience.
"I'm not one of those who think that AI will mean that there will be no work for engineers; they will have a different job. The meaning of being an engineer today is to promote artificial intelligence, algorithms and hardware that will do faster processing to better utilize what artificial intelligence has to offer."
What haven't the universities understood yet?
"They have to move forward in the world of AI, think about what they need to teach and what needs to be changed in the syllabus. Engineering is a collection of components that require a comprehensive vision. We need curricula that will produce people who know how to build, use, repair systems, and who know how to work with each other as a team. That's what I was missing at the Technion: a holistic picture, making connections, and teamwork to bring results."
So, what’s worth studying in the age of AI?
"What a person loves and is passionate about. If you don't have a sparkle in your eye - don't study it."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on August 26, 2025.
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