When Chips Are Down, Nicholas Puts Family First

Henry Nicholas, the multibillionaire co-founder of chip maker Broadcom Corp., strolls through the 15,000 square feet of opulence that he calls home.

Expensive antiques are everywhere -- marble-top chests, suits of armor, first-edition books. But it’s the things in the family room that showcase what really seems to matter to the 44-year-old Nicholas these days: Twister, Bot Blox and other children’s toys.

Henry T. Nicholas III is trying hard to be a father to his kids.

In the fall of 2002, Nicholas’ wife, Stacey, filed for divorce, fed up with her husband always putting work before her and their two sons and daughter.

Terrified of losing them, Nicholas stepped down in January 2003 as chief executive of Broadcom, the company that catapulted his net worth to $10 billion in 2000, according to Forbes magazine. The hard-charging entrepreneur -- known for demanding 60- and 70-hour weeks from employees and summoning executives to meetings after midnight and even on Christmas Eve -- publicly vowed to change his ways and win back his family and his life.

“Stacey doesn’t believe that I’ll be able to make family my No. 1 priority,” he said at the time. “It’s an experiment I look forward to performing. And I love the challenge.”

A year later, things at home are clearly better.

For starters, Nicholas is living there again. Last week, at his Laguna Hills mansion, he and his wife sat down together for an interview, holding hands. They talked about the $10-million donation they were making to the San Juan Capistrano private school attended by their children. The gift, one of the largest of its kind in the nation, comes as UC Irvine researchers, backed in part by Nicholas, begin to explore new uses of classroom technology at St. Margaret’s Episcopal.

Still, for all of the mending, there is more to be done.

Stacey Nicholas, 39, has yet to withdraw her divorce petition. When asked how her husband has lived up to his promise to be more family man and less firebrand, she choked up and had to leave the room.

“I’m struggling with change,” Henry acknowledged, “with a workaholic attitude that caused us to live the unlivable.”

Many CEOs, of course, are go-getters. And their families are often the ones to pay the price. “People don’t buy stock in a company where the CEO stands up and says, ‘God I love my kids,’ ” Nicholas noted.

Still, by all accounts, Nicholas’ ways were extreme.

There was the time in 1998, for instance, when Broadcom was about to go public and Stacey was pregnant. The couple decided -- mutually, Henry said-- to induce the birth so that he could leave in time for a financial roadshow.

Then there was the episode in 2000 when the couple celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary in Hawaii -- three years late. While there, an important business deal intruded. “It wasn’t that I canceled our romantic dinner,” Nicholas said. “I invited the executive staff of the company to join us.”

But in many ways, it was the little moments, as much as the big ones, that seemed to cut deepest. At his son’s baseball games, Nicholas would have his cellphone pressed to his ear on a call “and before you know it the game’s over, Stacey’s [mad], the kids are disappointed,” recounted Chris Berman, a close friend who lives a couple of blocks away. “It was like his family was a department and Stacey was a department; he’d check in with Stacey to make sure the department was OK.”

The Nicholases wed in 1987, after the two had met at satellite maker TRW Inc., where they both worked. He has a doctorate in electrical engineering; she has a master’s degree in the same field. “She is so smart. We’d talk about 1.2-micron CMOS design rules,” Nicholas said, referring to transistor architecture on computer chips.

These days, the man whom friends call Nick is more apt to talk about other things.

He gushes over the way his 5-year-old daughter handles a skateboard, trumpets the fact that his 7-year-old son can make an NBA three-point shot and loves to tell how his 10-year-old boy snared the lead role in “The Music Man.”

“Quite frankly, it’s amazing,” said Henry Samueli, who co-founded Broadcom with Nicholas in 1991. “I know him so well, I couldn’t imagine this transition. Even in the tone of his voice, he’s calmer, happier.”

Berman, the neighbor, agrees. “We all went skiing for two weeks during the holidays, and Nick was there the entire time,” he said. “Fourteen days Henry Nicholas was there, eating dinner with the kids, skiing with the kids -- a normal human.”

Nicholas said he had no plans to go back into the business world. The only company where he’d ever consider working, he said, was Broadcom -- and only then with his family’s full approval. Meanwhile, he pledges to keep pressing ahead on his latest project: spending time with his wife and kids, and enriching his home life.

As long as he keeps tackling it with the same doggedness once displayed in the executive suite, friends are convinced that he’ll get there. “That’s what made Broadcom a great company,” Samueli said. “He apparently made the decision that his No. 1 goal was pulling his family back together. Once he puts his mind to something, there’s no stopping him.”