Mr. Alexander (Alex) Vladimir d’Arbeloff

Co-founder of Teradyne with fellow MIT alumnus, Nick DeWolf. Teradyne was a multi-billion dollar Boston, Massachusetts-based manufacturer of Automatic Test Equipment (ATE). They built Teradyne into one of the largest players in the global ATE market as integrated circuits became increasingly important to every aspect of modern technology. Born in Paris to a Georgian noble, Vladimir d'Arbeloff, from Koutais, and German-Russian Baroness, Catherine T. (Tiepolt) d'Arbeloff, after fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution a decade earlier, his parents met and married in France. In 1936, as war began to threaten Europe, the family began a nomadic existence, moving first to Argentina, then to Paraguay, and eventually to the United States, settling in New York in 1940. English was the fourth language he learned to speak; but by the time he entered MIT in 1945, he had lost all trace of Russian, French, and Spanish in his speaking - he wanted to be an American, and to fit in like any other young man. In 1949, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he became a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity. Soon after graduation, he found that he was not particularly well suited to the corporate culture of the 1950s, and he found it difficult to execute poor strategies when he knew he could develop better ones.