Co-founder of Teradyne, which he built with fellow MIT alumnus Nick DeWolf into one of the largest players in the global automatic test equipment (ATE) market, d'Arbeloff helped create a multi-billion dollar Boston, Massachusetts-based manufacturer of ATE 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 d'Arbeloff 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 - d'Arbeloff 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, d'Arbeloff 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 d'Arbeloff knew he could develop better ones.
