We flew to Taiwan to interview TSMC Founder Morris Chang in a rare English interview. In fact, the last long-form video interview we could find was 17 years ago at the Computer History Museum… conducted by the one-and-only Jensen Huang! This episode came about after asking ourselves a version of the Jeff Bezos “regret minimization” question: what conversations would we most regret not having if the chance passed Acquired by? Dr. Chang was number one on our list, and thanks to a little help from Jensen himself, we’re so happy to make it happen.Dr. Chang shares the stories of a few crucial moments from TSMC’s history which have only been written about in his (currently Chinese-only) memoirs, including how TSMC won Apple’s iPhone and Mac chip business and a 2009 discrepancy with NVIDIA that almost jeopardized their relationship, and the lessons he took from them. We can’t think of a better way to kick off 2025. Please enjoy!Sponsors:Many thanks to our fantastic Spring ‘25 Season partners:J.P. Morgan PaymentsServiceNowFundriseLinks:Worldly Partners’ Multi-Decade TSMC StudyKarina Bao’s writingCarve Outs:AAADefunctlandEverything Everywhere all at OnceAsianometryMore Acquired:Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the SlackSubscribe to ACQ2Check out the latest swag in the ACQ Merch Store!Notes: This episode contains a paid endorsement for Fundrise. All investments can lead to loss. Acquired hosts and guests may hold assets discussed in this episode. This podcast is not investment advice, and is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. You should do your own research and make your own independent decisions when considering any financial transactions.
The podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks. No, no, you said technology. Now we definitely have a cold opening. All right. I guess I really want us to be about technology companies again. Well, this is a technology company. It's a sign. All right, here we go.
Who got the truth? Is it you, is it you, is it you? Who got the truth now, though? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down. Say it straight. Another story on the way.
Welcome to the spring 2025 season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.
I'm David Rosenthal.
And we are your hosts. Today, we have something very special to share with you. After becoming obsessed with semiconductors from our TSMC episode four years ago, David and I wound our way through the rest of the industry, studying fabulous companies like NVIDIA and Qualcomm, architecture companies like Arm, and chip design software companies like Synopsys.
And as we were thinking, what's next in the world of chips unacquired, we threw the Hail Mary. We asked friend of the show, Jensen Huang, if he would ask Dr. Morris Chang, the 93-year-old founder of TSMC, if he would be open to an interview with us.
It is kind of insane and super cool that Jensen made time to help us with this. It's not like he doesn't have a lot of other things going on.
Yes. Well, listeners, it happened. So today's episode is a conversation that we recorded in Taipei last week at Dr. Chang's office. We flew to Taiwan for a 48-hour whirlwind where we spent some time at TSMC's headquarters in Hinshu Science Park, where many of TSMC's fabs are located.
Super cool to see.
Totally. So conveniently, Dr. Chang just published volume two of his autobiography a couple months ago after a 26-year hiatus from volume one. But inconveniently, it is written in traditional Chinese and not published in the Western world.
We managed to get our hands on an unpublished translation of the book to prepare, and what you are about to hear focuses on a few crucial stories from TSMC's history that Dr. Chang shares in his memoir about Apple, NVIDIA, and the birth of the fabless industry.
Yes, and big thank you to Karina Bao, who we were lucky to connect with after we set this up, and who has been translating Morris' memoirs with funding from Tyler Cowen and Emergent Ventures. Right now, the memoirs are not published in English, and we will let you know if and when that happens.
Yep. All right, listeners, you can join our email list at acquired.fm slash email. You'll get an email every time a new episode drops once a month. And this is also where we announce past episode corrections, plus a fun little game where we give hints at what the next episode will be. I always have fun writing those. You do. That's a clear David job.
This episode is presented by our partners at JPMorgan Payments.
Yes, just like how we say every company has a story, every company's story is powered by payments, and JPMorgan Payments is a part of so many of their journeys from seed to IPO and beyond.
Yep. So with that, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies that we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Morris Chang with some of David and my reflections following its conclusion.
we thought as a fun way to start things off would actually be to talk about the man who introduced us. Could you tell us a little bit in your words about your relationship with Jensen and TSMC's special relationship with NVIDIA?
Yeah. It started, my relationship with Jensen, started with a letter that he sent to me I think it was 1997, and the letter was sent through the post office, and I received it in Hsinchu. And the letter said that they were NVIDIA, the company that Jensen was the CEO of, was a small company, but they had developed some technology
really promising chips, but they were looking for a foundry, and they had approached TSMC's San Jose office, but they really got no answer from the San Jose office. would I please contact Jensen because NVIDIA really wanted to do business with PSMC. So I was going to the U.S. in the next week anyway. So the letter, frankly, raised my curiosity and also my
irritated me a little bit because I had always told our salespeople that we should never be negligent in talking to future customers, even if the customer seems to be a very small one.
And at this point, NVIDIA was four years old. They were facing bankruptcy, I think.
Yeah. and they had maybe 50 or 60 employees. So TSMC, I think, at that time already had a few thousand employees. We had exceeded, I remember we had exceeded $1 billion in revenue in 1995, and this was 1997. So we were, relatively speaking, we were a pretty big company here.
Which is very impressive. You were yourself only a 10-year-old company doing over a billion dollars in revenue.
Yeah, right. So the following week, I went to California. And I called him back without advance notice. I called Jensen. I looked up. I think there was a telephone number on the stationery that he sent me the letter on. Jensen himself picked up the phone, and there was a lot of background noise. He was arguing something with his people.
But as soon as I introduced myself, I said, this is Morris Stern. He immediately shouted to those people that were making noises. He said, quiet! Morris Chang is calling me. So I then proceeded to make an appointment with him to visit him, to visit NVIDIA the next day or something like that. And that was our first meeting.
visit the first meeting and he immediately impressed me with his articulateness and also impressed me with his optimism. Well, he was also very frank. He told me that Nvidia was in financial difficulties, but the chip that he wanted now to have foundried would not only... save the company, it will also make NVIDIA a major customer of TSMC. I mean, that was actually quite a bold statement.
We're over a billion dollars now. To be a major customer of ours, he would have to produce revenue for us of at least $50 million a year, okay?
Was that chip the Riva 128?
I forgot the number, but it was a very successful chip. I don't think it was Riva or anything. It was a games chip, of course. It was successful. In fact, his prediction came true. Not only did it solve Nvidia's financial problems, it helped. prevented from being bankrupt, you know. Not only did they do that, it also started to make them a major customer of TSMC.
Within two or three years, they were, they did become one of the biggest five customers of TSMC. Yeah, very successful chip, yeah.
So there was a great partnership forged there. TSMC would fab the chips, would manufacture them. NVIDIA would design them. That is true all the way to today at immense scale. but it hasn't always been easy and it hasn't always been perfect.
And I want to go to this moment in 2009 on the 40 nanometer node where development was slower than TSMC had hoped and it was costing customers like NVIDIA time and money. Can you share the story of how this came to be and how it was resolved?
Well, I decided to... give the CEO job to a potential successor of mine while I will still retain the chairmanship. In Taiwan, usually the chairman is the top man anyway, even though CEO is another person. So the problem you just mentioned happened during the period when someone else was the CEO. Apparently, it was a manufacturing problem. It was also a quality problem.
And it was the quality problem that the CEO first reported to me. But the CEO insisted that our people... We had the Director of Quality insist that we were not, TSMC was not at fault. And so on that basis, on the basis of our quality manager's arguments, he had not offered NVIDIA anything.
Now, as far as the manufacturing problem was concerned, it was a U problem, and everybody was suffering from it. And of course, NVIDIA at that time was perhaps the biggest customer of that node, the 40 nanometer node.
And a yield problem in the context of this industry is when you are trying to make a bunch of very high quality chips, but you just can't get the percentage that actually work up very high. Something like that, yes.
But the problem apparently just continued. And I was, even though I was not the CEO of I was getting a little impatient. And then, of course, some other problems popped up. Other problems than this 40 nanometer NVIDIA problem. So I decided to take the CO position back. So in 2009, I did that. And there were several problems. priority problems that I had to deal with when I took the CEO job back.
And one of them was this continuing problem, continuing argument, controversy with NVIDIA. Anyway, I remember in the first few days after I took back the CEO's ship, I called all the major customers, including Jensen.
And Qualcomm was, I believe, another one.
Oh, yeah. Qualcomm was also, yeah. And Qualcomm, the top customers didn't change very much since then, except for maybe one. Apple. Apple, yeah. Apple came later, yeah. And in my call with Jensen, he was still very friendly with me. But he also reminded me in a very serious tone that we had the quality delivery manufacturing problem on the 40 nanometer.
All right, so I said I knew that, and it's one of my priority problems. Give me a couple weeks, and I will get back with you. And as I said, I did have several problems aside from the 40-nanometer problem. manufacturing problem and the problem with the argument that we were having with Nvidia. Aside from that, we also had the problem of the pricing. It was dropping faster than the cost.
I mean, you don't want to see that. The gross margin percentage kept dropping.
Because you had committed to a schedule of price drops with customers, but you weren't able to drive down your manufacturing costs at the same rate.
All right, so that was one problem. Another problem was the immediate one that triggered me to retake the CEO-ship because the previous CEO had laid off, except he didn't use the term lay off, you know. He used the bad performance review, the worst performance review people, and there were about 600 or 700 of them. And he laid them off on the basis of their poor performance review.
Well, we never did that, you know. I mean, the worst we would do was to put them on, place them on probation for six months. And quite often, you know, at the end of the six months, everybody would go back to his or her old job. And some of them would get... transferred because they were in the wrong jobs, you know. So some of them would get transferred.
But we almost never really fired people even after the probation period.
So under your watch, you never did a layoff, and you never looked at performance reviews, which are meant to help coach people as the means to determine who to layoff.
That's right, yeah. And I actually have told the managers that. And well, in 2008, Of course, there was a financial crisis. And the semiconductor business, in fact, got affected. And our revenue dropped. Our business dropped pretty seriously. I was not a CEO. I was the chairman. But I just knew that anyone...
Any general manager, any CEO, general manager, without very much experience, what he or she would do in a situation like that. It's kind of a knee-jerk kind of reaction. Oh, he says, oh, this is my test. I got to save all the money possible. And I got to, you know, lay off people, you know.
But this is the semiconductor industry, and Moore's Law means no matter what happens, you will always need people.
Well, I know, I know. Well, semiconductor industry. But semiconductor industry people actually think the same way as I described, you know what I mean? They all lay off. They all lay off people, too. I had a lot of experience at Texas Instruments Center. But at Texas Instruments, I was not a CEO. I was just one of the top managers under the CEO level.
And when the company decided to have a layoff, the CEO conferred with the top managers, who included me. And their first reaction was exactly the same. And I'm talking about the company early 70s, their first reaction on who to lay off was exactly the same as what our TSM CCO did in late 2008, 2009, which was, you know, go by performance. Well, now I was the only one at Texas Instruments
in the early 70s that said, no, that would not be a credible way of doing it. People would not respect us if we lay off by performance ratings. And why is that? Because it's very subjective. Performance reviews... The performance ratings are done by everyone's own supervisor. So 700 worst performing people in the company. And who gave the 700 people the bad ratings? 700 supervisors, you know.
Very subjective. It's not something that people will respect. If in a year you have to hire people back and you have to hire the laid off people back, then you shouldn't lay off. Because the lay off, the separation expense is usually half a year, about half a year. And it takes at least half a year to train a person. So if you need the people back, Within a year, you shouldn't lay off.
So what did you do when you came back as CEO, both about the employment issue and about the customer issue?
You mean customer issue being NVIDIA? Yeah. Well, to finish the employment issue, they laid off employees. As I said, there were 700 of them, 600 or 700 of them. came to my home to demonstrate and protest. Now, the company, TSMC, was pre-warned that hundreds of people would appear in front of my home. So they notified the police department in my district. So the police department said,
50, 60 police officers to try to maintain the order. Now, more than 100 protesters appeared. And the neighbors, my neighbors, you know, they had trouble getting in and out. That was only the first time. A month or so later, the problem was still not solved. I was still not the CEO. So they appeared again. Some were protesters.
About 25 of them decided to spend the night, sleep over in the little park that's about a block away from my home. My wife literally didn't sleep that night, you know. She would wake up and went over to that window to take a look to see what was going on. But then, very early the next morning, my wife, six o'clock the next morning, my wife, you know, got up and she took one of the
bodyguards, and went to a neighborhood market and got the Chinese-style breakfast. Chinese bread, you know, fried bread, you know. I don't know whether you ever had it or not. Probably not. Yeah, yeah. Buns, you know, soybean milk. And take enough of that breakfast, enough for 25, 30 people. And back to the park and distribute them to the protesters. And they were thankful, you know. Yeah.
And they actually decided to not go to the president's palace, president's mansion. And they told my wife that they would not do that that day. And all this kind of precipitated my taking back the CEO job. Well, there's another thing. I told the previous CEO before he laid off the 600, 700 people.
I said, if you, because I knew, as I said, I knew that it would be his knee-jerk reaction to confront a crisis such as the crisis we had It would be his knee-jerk reaction to lay off. So I said to him, if you want to lay off, bring her to the board. I'll call a special board meeting. And I knew what I would ask the board to do, which was not to grant the permission.
But he decided to circumvent that, the CEO, because he What he did, he did not consider it to be layoff. It was just punishment for the poor performers. Well, as far as the CEO is concerned, I did keep him. I had more than one nice talk with him. I intended to, and I told him that he was still a potential successor to me.
So I kept him at the same job grade, we have job grades, and the same salary and bonus. But he was now the president of new businesses. And back then, you know, we had high hopes for the so-called new businesses, which was solar cells, and LED.
It's the great irony that your core business of manufacturing integrated circuits ended up becoming the largest market opportunity of all. You didn't need any new businesses.
Ended up the biggest marketing, biggest market opportunity. Why is it so ironic?
Well, it's always interesting to me when companies think, oh, we should look at other new businesses, when in reality, semiconductors became a $600 billion a year market. And solar is a small fraction of that. LEDs are a small fraction of that. You were already in the best market.
I know. And I knew that. I did not really mean, I did not really think that solar or LED would really replace our integrated circuits business. But I knew the integrated circuits business was going to be great, you know. But at that time, which was 2009, at that time, we also thought that solar and LED was going to be very promising. But it didn't work out, of course.
The solar business could have been pretty good, however, China ruined it. They subsidized the hell out of it. And they now control that business, solar cells. the prices were extremely low, still low, still low. So it didn't take off. TSMC service didn't take off. And LED did not take off either because LED, it's not, the market is not as big as solar. However, it's controlled the patents.
are controlled by just a few companies. And they wouldn't let the few companies that control the patents of LED would not let up at all. So a few years later, the CEO that was put on the new businesses decided that his new assignment wasn't working out either, so he quit.
And he's now running MediaTek, is that correct?
He is now a vice chairman and the CEO of MediaTek, yeah.
So coming back to this moment in 2009, you offered to rehire anyone who was laid off that was interested in coming back. And you're setting the new sort of vision and strategy as CEO, or in many ways, returning to the old one. How did you resolve the NVIDIA dispute? Yeah.
In the first four or five weeks after I retook the CEO job, I probably spent almost half of the time on how to resolve the problem with the ambidea. As far as yields were concerned, we were doing our best. Because, you know, we had to do it anyway, you know. NVIDIA was just one of the customers.
Yeah, not just NVIDIA, but Qualcomm and Intel.
Yeah. And it was a very important node. 40 nanometer was a very important node in the progression of Moore's law, you know. Yeah. Only after 40 can we, if we do the 40 well, can we do the 28? 28 was the next one. And I called the salespeople that were in direct, that had been in direct contact with NVIDIA.
And of course, I called everybody that was somehow involved, somewhat involved in the problem. So it was a matter of money. As far as the progress on the manufacturing lines, we were already doing what we could. As I just said, it wasn't just for NVIDIA. It's for TSMC. But NVIDIA, because they had borne the brunt of the the problem, the damage. It's a matter of money. I worked out a number.
I familiarized myself with all aspects of the problem, and then I worked out a number. And I also knew that NVIDIA's customers were after them. They had demands on NVIDIA, too. So I used all the intelligence I could get. And I think it turned out that it was good. So about a month after I retook the CEO job, I sent an email to Jensen. I said, I'm coming to Silicon Valley.
Next week on this date, I will be at your home at 6 o'clock. Let's have just salad and pizza, which was something that we had had many times in the past. Now, immediately he sent back an email. He said, when do we discuss business then?
Did he ask who was going to pay for the pizza and salad?
He didn't ask that. So I anticipated that. So I said, 6.30 we'll start having pizza and salad. Eight o'clock shop, we'll go to your office at your home and we'll discuss business. So on the point of the date, the day I showed up, and we followed a schedule, exactly, you know, 6.30 I showed up. We had a very pleasant pizza and salad. Thing is that, you know, his wife,
Laurie would make the pizza, the salad. And the pizza was delivered from outside. Maybe they made their own pizza, too. I forgot. Would not surprise me. Yeah. Anyway, I had had it many times at his home. All right. So at every car shop, it was I who looked at the watch and said, gentlemen, why don't we go to your study, you know? And I gave him the offer.
It was on the order of a hundred million dollars, right?
Yeah.
And I also said, our offer is effective 48 hours. If you do not, there is not going to be, we're not going to argue. We're not going to bargain. If you don't accept the offer within 48 hours, you will have to go to an arbitrator. which was what he had suggested to the previous CEO anyway, that we go to the arbitrator. But the previous CEO did not even give him a number.
The previous CEO gave him zero.
You probably don't want to go to arbitration with your best customer.
No, I didn't want to. But I had to say that. And because, I mean, that number, the number we offered him was arrived at after, as I said, weeks of work on my part. And I thought it was fair to both sides.
And did Jensen accept the offer?
Yeah, he did. Within two days.
I think it's an amazing example of a situation where you had strong partnership together for many years. You built this close personal relationship such that you could have an hour and a half family dinner and not talk business. You were able to then come up with a large sum of money, over $100 million, settle.
And then since then, there have been many, many, many billions of dollars of business done together. It's a great success of working out your differences.
I know, I liked it too. That's why I included the story in my autobiography.
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After the 40 nanometer node, after you fixed these problems, as you said, the next node was 28 nanometers. And as we understand your story and the company's story, 28 nanometers is when TSMC really started to take the leadership role at the leading edge in the industry. How did you decide to go commit so hard to 28 nanometers after having had all the problems at 40 nanometers?
Well, I had a lot of trouble at TI. My peak job at TI was the head of worldwide semiconductors. TI, of course, had many businesses, defense business, materials and controls business. and also their origin, which was geophysical and so on. But TI's semiconductor business was their biggest, and I was the head of that worldwide semiconductor business.
I wanted, at that time, when I was the head of worldwide semiconductors, our R&D budget was 4.8% of revenue, of our revenue. And I thought it was not enough. I just wanted to raise it to 5.5% of the revenue. But my request was denied every time I raised it. Now, coming back to TSMC. I wanted to set a number a percentage of revenue number.
So we don't have to argue every year how much R&D we should spend. So at about that time, about the time 2008, 2009, when I came back, I just, Almost like, at that time we were running, I think, 6% or 7% a year. But it was negotiated every year between the R&D director and the CEO. So I wanted to stop that. I wanted to make him at ease. He doesn't have to argue. He doesn't have to argue.
to request every year. So I almost just literally picked a number out ahead. We've been running 6% or 7% already. So I said, oh, let's pick 8%. 8% regardless of whether there's a recession or not. And it's just 8% of revenue. And that was the best news, if you ask our R&D director, who was back then, I think, in the second place of R&D.
He would tell you, I mean, he has told me many times in the last 10, 15 years that this was really the best thing that we did for R&D. So they were not concerned, the R&D director was not concerned at all about having his planned budget cut back or whatever. His planned resource, people, allocation, cutback, none of that. So he has been working 8% and so it has been like that.
And that is what propelled our R&D effort.
This period in 2010, it wasn't just ramping the R&D budget. It was also the capital expenditures. You had had almost a decade of $2 to $2.5 billion spent building the fabs every year. And in 2010, you ramped that to almost $6 billion. What was it about the competitive environment, the 28 nanometer node that caused you to push all your chips in on that?
Yeah, I think it was kind of a mutual feeding thing, you know. As I settled the R&D budget at 8% of revenue, I mean, to the satisfaction of the R&D people, they began to have big ideas, you know. They began to be telling me, our 28 is going to be the term they use. And they have used it several times. But the first time I heard them using it is the 28. 28? It's going to be the sweet spot.
It's just like tennis racket, you know. You hit the ball with the sweet spot of your racket. Yeah. Do you play tennis?
I have played tennis. Not well.
Good. I was like you, you know. Like 40 years ago, I was like you. I don't play anymore. But, you know, so I know the feeling of hitting a ball in the sweet spot, you know. 28 nanometer is in the sweet spot. And so I said, why? He, you know, gave me a lot of technical reasons, 20 nanometer. So I decided I would believe him. And he now had the resources to push it, to do it as fast as he could.
So, you know, now the capital spending. Now, of course, back then we had already built up a pretty good infrastructure, organizational infrastructure. We had a pretty good market forecasting And I had set up the business development department, which was like a marketing department. We always had a pretty strong sales effort. But to me, sales effort is just the tactical side with the customers.
Marketing is the strategic side to the outside world now. Now, from all these inputs, the marketing, the business development department, which, as I said, was our strategic marketing group. And from the technical, from the R&D side, that 28 was going to be a sweet spot.
I decided that, and I quote Shakespeare in my autobiography, that there's a tide in the affairs of man, which taken at its flood leads on to fortune. I decided that. This was 28 nanometer was going to be our tide. Our next tide anyway. There will be others. Seven nanometer was another, was the next sweet spot, the Andean people told me. And again, you know, reminded myself of,
Shakespeare, you know.
Taking it at the flood.
Taking it at the flood, yeah. So, I mean, that took, however, you know. I mean, setting the R&D at 8% did not invite any opposition from the board. But suddenly, increasing capital spending threefold, I think, did invite a lot of questions from the board. Our practice in the board meetings, because back then, or even now, most of the directors are from overseas. US and England.
And we would email the agenda to them two weeks before the board meeting. Then the night before the board meeting, I would invite the independent directors to dinner. And that dinner, the conversation at that dinner was not on record. So the independent directors, actually three quarters of our directors were independent, are independent directors.
Anyway, so in the night before and the evening before the meeting, they had the opportunity to ask me questions if they had any. But on this matter of vastly increased capital spending, they didn't even wait until they got to that point.
Because this was effectively betting a huge amount of the company's cash on this node, this process, this generation.
Yeah. And so they called the chief general counsel. The general counsel is also the secretary to the board. They called him, at that time he was an American, the general counselor was an American, and said, we want to talk to the chairman. We don't like this idea at all. Anyway, so I talked to them on the phone. about a week or so before the board meeting.
And, all right, you know, this is something that, of course, I told them what I have now just told you, inputs from market forecast, inputs from our R&D, inputs from our business department, the new business department. And of course, you know, they didn't believe it. You really can't convince anybody on something like this.
So at the end, I had to say, well, look, I heard you, but I am still the guy that's responsible for the operation of the company. So you need to let me go ahead with this one. So they were satisfied with that.
And what was the result? What happened around this era of 28 nanometer that created so much demand?
Oh, I think you know the result. That was good.
And that was the smartphone era coincided with 28 nanometer. Yeah, yeah. When the business development group was looking at this, and you were looking at this, did you see how big smartphones were going to become and the immense opportunity that that would unlock for you?
No, I didn't. Maybe the business development guy, that was another interesting story. Yeah, maybe he knew, maybe he, or at least I now hope, and I of course hoped at that time too, that he had a more detailed visibility than I did. But I mean, of course, this was not the only, it was not the only input, you know. I had a few other advisors too, yeah.
So that takes us to Apple. Could you share with us how you end up meeting Apple?
Yeah. But before we do that, let me offer how we made CC, actually, the business development director. Ah, the current CEO. The current CEO. The current chairman and CEO. When Rick was the CEO between 205 and 209, he had split operations into two groups, advanced technology and mainstream technology. And C.C. was the head of the mainstream. actually really, I should say, the lesser one.
And Mark Liu was the head of the advanced. And each group had a small business department section, maybe 30 or 40 people each. All right, so I came back to be the CEO, and I never thought the split up of two groups was a good idea anyway. In fact, back in 1996, The president, he was not a CEO, but he was the president. We didn't have the CEO title back in 1996.
But the president, who was American. Don Brooks? Yeah, right. He wanted to... He got a little, I think, he got a little tired of running this company. He was going to be here for only a year at first, but he winded up, he ended up spending six, seven years in Taiwan. Towards the end, he was getting a little tired of running this thing. And he thought that he would do it like TI, for instance.
TI had a germanium transistor department, silicon transistor department, integrated circuit, bipolar integrated circuit, MOS integrated circuit, you know. It's the divisional org structure instead of a functional org structure. Right, right, yeah. But I really did not think that the foundry business, TSM Seasprings, was suitable for the divisional structure.
Because, you know, we have almost the same group of customers. how do you divide up the group, divide up the company if you want the so-called divisional structure? Well, You know, Don Brooks was going to divide it by a fab, you know. My goodness, you know. The customers moved from one fab to another. The same customers, you know.
Not to mention TSMC has 21, 22 fabs now. And so what, are you going to have 22 divisions?
Back then, of course, he only had three or four fabs, you know. Back then, yeah. But he was not convinced. He kept arguing. And I said, look, why don't we get a consultant? McKinsey. McKinsey. Why don't we get McKinsey? Okay. So we got McKinsey in.
And McKinsey, after a month or two, two months actually, and a couple million dollars, I guess, told us the same answer, you know, that functional is best. And then Don Brooks said, Well, tell me one company, one big company that's functionalized. And McKinsey immediately answered Boeing, which is a good answer, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Except it's not true. Boeing has commercial and government companies.
Well, they probably have commercial and government, but they don't have 707, 747, 757. You know, they don't divide. And if we divide up by fab, it would be like dividing up 707 from 757, 737, you know. Well, anyway. Don Brooks' attempt was in 1996. And, well, by 2005, Rick Tsai, you know, decided to tread the same ground. And he did. This time, you know, I didn't stop him.
My idea, my principle, I was... the chairman and not the CEO was, well, sometimes you have to let the CEO make his own mistakes and learn from them, you know. Of course, not if the whole company is going down the drain. So you have to interfere then, but only then. Well, anyway. So that was the background. Two groups, when I came back to be the CEO, the advanced group and mainstream group.
And each group had a small business development section, 30 or 40 people. I think advanced has had more, a bigger group than mainstream. All right. So I wanted to combine the two operation groups. And I also wanted a real marketing. And I didn't call it marketing because I decided to use business development in English because it has a good translation in Chinese. All right.
Now I've decided to combine the two operations. Now, back in 2009, when I decided to combine the two groups, I think the advanced group had something like 10,000 employees. And the mainstream group had a little less, but also seven or 8,000 employees.
And the mainstream group, just because we haven't explained this concept yet, is taking those older fabs that have the higher nanometer nodes, and they're finding customers that don't necessarily need the leading edge to automotive parts or its CMOS sensors for cameras, and finding customers to keep the utilization high on those older fabs from previous generations.
Yeah, right. But also... Quite often, the same customers use both mainstream and advanced technologies now. Take Qualcomm. I'm quite sure that they use the most advanced, or even Apple, I think they use Qualcomm.
Yeah, if you think about all the chips in an iPhone, the A16 Pro is built on the leading edge, but there are many, many other chips in there.
Yeah, right. So you combine to one business development organization, 80-ish people.
Yeah, we had... Mark Liu in charge of the advance and C.C. Wei in charge of the, the question is, you know, who's going to be in charge of what, you know, the combined, or do you need only one for the combined operations? You need only one person. The truth is that we had a lot of operational talents,
Operation meaning manufacturing and taking the developed technology from R&D, you know, and converting it into mass production. Really a lot of talents there. But business development or marketing there. And neither Mark Norris, nor CC had any real previous experience in marketing business development. So that was my main worry. We need, we combine the two groups, we need a combined,
operations manager, but even more importantly in my mind, we needed a combined market business development manager. So I first offered the marketing business development job to the guy who was in the bigger job, advanced technology market. And I explained to him that I did not think he had had any significant marketing experience in the past.
And this would, this new job, if he takes it, would give him the opportunity of of being professing in that area. But he declined it. He said, my goodness, I have 10,000 people reporting to me now. You want me to take a job that has only 60, 70 people in it?
That was the end of that conversation. And your goal was for him to become a well-rounded executive in hopes of leading the company after he sort of did that tour of duty. And I explained to him that, yeah. Not to mention it's a very important 60 or 70 people. They're responsible for finding all the next business.
I know, I know.
Actually, back in my mind, I was thinking of... The time when Kissinger was Nixon's national security advisor and somebody else, whose name I have even forgotten, was the Secretary of State. And Kissinger probably had a couple hundred people reporting to him. Whereas the Secretary of State had thousands of people all over the world reporting to him. And who had more power?
Kissinger. Certainly not the name who you've forgotten.
And before this period, You were doing the business development and marketing for the company, right? You were the one finding the NVIDIAs, the Jensen's, the Broadcoms, the next great customers and great markets for you.
That's right. That's right.
I was. You were always on a plane meeting with the current top 15 customers and trying to find the next top 15. Yeah.
Except for those four years when I was not the CEO. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah, but you were right. I was on the plane most of the time visiting customers. That was my pleasure. I really liked it. Well, anyway. So, I then, of course, offered the business development job to C.C. And he accepted it. I mean, I thought he accepted it. even delightfully, you know? Yeah.
So he's now the chairman and CEO of TSMC. Yeah. So this had just happened and you came home from a board meeting. We understand one evening.
That's right. The board meeting had ended and it was, uh, six o'clock or later. And, uh, I went home. This was Taipei. We had our board meetings back at that time in, in fact, here. Have you ever seen my conference room? Yes, across the hall. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, we had all our board meetings in Taipei in that conference room. Anyway, it was 6.30 also when I got home, and I think...
My wife knew that I would not be home until around 6.30 because as soon as I, she actually, she met me at the door, which wasn't very often. But this time she had something to tell me. That's why she met me at the door. She said, Terry Gao called in the afternoon. and said he was coming to dinner. And who is Terry Gao for listeners?
Terry Gao is a relative, is actually a second cousin of Sophie's. Sophie's my wife. And they share the same grandparents. That's what makes them second cousins, I think, yeah.
And for our Western listeners who this won't be obvious to, Terry Gao is the founder and CEO of Foxconn.
Right. Terry Gao is a second cousin of Sophie's, and he was also at that time the chairman of Foxconn.
Hanhai, which is Foxconn to American listeners.
The name slipped my mind for a second. Hanhai, which is a very important supplier to Apple. And a pretty big company. And in fact, Terry Gao is reputed to be one of the richest men in Taiwan. Hmm. And she said, Sophie is lovely, but she doesn't know too much of my business. I don't think she understood the significance of Terry Gao coming to dinner, bringing a vice president from Apple.
I don't think she quite understood, quite very, she didn't really, she wasn't very interested either in the significance of that.
And you had been trying for months, strategizing with the business development team, how do we go win Apple's business? The smart, the iPhone seems to be working.
Yeah, I've been strategizing, well, strategizing is probably two things. strong a word. I mean, just thinking. Also knowing that we just can't do anything about it. Apple is a very close-mouthed company. If you try to talk to them, if you offer your service, they will just tell you to go away. They will come to see you when they are ready. That's what I knew about Apple, even then.
And I know the same thing now, you know. All right, so 8 o'clock. Now, Sophie did know that I would not be home until after 6 o'clock. So she had told Terry that, and Terry had set the time of their arrival at 8 o'clock. So 8 o'clock was a bit late for my dinner, but I said, what the heck, we'll wait. All right. So they showed up. I didn't ask her. Sophie just said, a vice president.
And I just thought to myself, it wouldn't be just an ordinary vice president. Yeah, so. Because, you know, there was no reason for to just bring any Apple vice president to my home. It must be something special. It must be someone special for TSMC. All right, so Jeff Williams came. He was not just a vice president. He was the chief operating officer of Apple.
And Jeff was a pretty straightforward person. He didn't spend much time in ordinary chit chats.
there wasn't the same pizza and salad, uh, period before.
It wasn't, but it wasn't formal either. You know, uh, my, my wife, Sophie just added, and we, we, we have a cook, you know, we, we had a cook, uh, and, uh, pretty good cook. Uh, uh, so, uh, Sophie just told the cook to add a few dishes, uh, She's a Chinese cook. She doesn't do any Western food. And, you know, Terry obviously, she grew up on Chinese food.
And I would imagine that the apple guy that he bought would also like Chinese food. Anyway, so she just asked the cook to cook a few more dishes But, you know, it wasn't important. The food was not important. Either the quantity or the quality was not important. Because almost Jeff almost immediately started his pitch, you know. Almost as soon as he sat down to dinner.
And what is the pitch from someone like Jeff Williams like? We...
would like you to foundry our waivers." Something like that, pretty straightforward. I mean, so I listened. That night, I think Jeff talked to Maybe 80%, and I talked 20%. If you don't count the relative-to-relative talk between Sophie and Terry, which was not very much either.
And Jeff had proposed economic terms at this first dinner, right? Right.
No, nothing so concrete. Okay. He just said that we would let you have 40% gross margin. And I think, I didn't say anything. I didn't answer him. I didn't respond to that. But our margin at that time was already 45%. And I was trying to put it up to 50%. It was an announced effort in the company to push the gross margin. And I had that effort for many years after I came back to be the CEO.
And I really didn't even succeed even at my retirement. Now, of course, what happened later was that there was COVID and so on. And also, we began to have leadership, technology leadership. So, our margin, you know. jumped up to over 50%. But when I retired, I was still short of 50%, slightly short of 50%. I was almost there when I retired.
In technology leadership, you're saying that around this time, the 28 nanometer node, you were... You're talking about 2010? Yes. You were still among a select few at the leading edge, but there was fierce competition. Whereas once you got to seven nanometers or so, that's when you really... You are neglecting.
I think when you said that, you were neglecting Intel. Yeah. At 28 nanometers, we were very definitely the leader among foundries. Yeah. And maybe among a few other companies, such as Texas Instruments and so on. But not Intel, okay.
And Apple was considering Intel.
No, Apple... was not actively considering Intel. That came later. But I'm quite sure we'll have time to cover that.
Well, take us there now. So after November of 2010, you had the initial conversation with Jeff Williams.
Yeah. He said that he would let us at 40%. And my thought was, my goodness, we're already at 45%. But I also thought that he was trying to be generous when he said that he would let us have 40%. And I also thought to myself, well, now it's not this dinner. It's not the time to go into a pricing discussion. We have a lot of other things to discuss.
28?
Nope. What node do you want? 20, he said. Now, that was a surprise to me. And frankly, it was also a disappointment because the most slow progression after 28 was going to be 16. Now, Apple, Jeff Williams, wanted 20.
A half-step.
A half-step. But a half-step is a detour, you know. My thought at the dinner there was that we would have to spend effort on the 20. which of course would help us on the natural next note, which was 16. But still, it was a detour from 28, you know. From 28, if we could go directly to, if R&D would directly go to 16, it would be less time than the first do 20 and then.
No, the point is that back then, R&D did not have enough resources to do two nodes at the same time. Later, we did.
Later, we did. So you have this conundrum where this is right after you had just spent $6 billion in CapEx the previous year going all in on 28 nanometers. You're asking Apple, which could be your biggest customer ever, this is for 28, right? And you hear back, no, we want you to go do something that you're not planning on spending any money on and have this huge distraction.
And you're, of course, left with this question, is it worth it to land Apple as a customer?
It wasn't that serious. It wasn't that serious. Because when we figured a very big market, 428, and therefore, when we planned to increase vastly our capital spending, we didn't have Apple in mind. We didn't include Apple. Apple came strictly as a present surprise. Anyway, for the company in total, but not for 28. We didn't include Apple in our 28 planning.
But it's still the question of are you willing to go do this huge distraction and spend on the order of $10 billion over the next few years doing 20 nanometer for Apple when you weren't planning on doing 20 nanometer at all?
That's right. That is where our connection with Goldman Sachs came in. Remember, I planted a lot of seeds when I ran TSMC. I knew that one of these days we would probably need top-level investment bank advice. So we established a good relationship with Goldman Sachs very early in our existence. I was, in fact, a board director of Goldman Sachs. Did you know that? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
We did the ADR with Goldman Sachs, which opened up a good relationship with Goldman Sachs.
It was your New York public listing of the stock.
Yeah, ADI is American Deposit Receipts. It's New York. It's a separate market. In fact, right now, the TSMC price, ADR price is... has a 20% premium over. Really? Oh, wow. However, you know, you need TSMC board permission to convert your shares to ADR. Otherwise, you'd be able to arbitrage? Yeah. We don't want that. So, as I said, as I was saying, the board has to approve any conversion of...
ordinary Taiwan TSMC stock to ADRs. And the board does not give such permission. Easily anyway, okay, yeah.
So you had planted this seed with Goldman Sachs when you knew you would need them.
Right. This was very early in our history. Now, we need funds. I mean, this Apple thing came after we had already decided to increase capital spending. And now, you know, Apple requires even more capital spending. And we have to figure out where the cash is going to come from. So, you know, there were several possibilities, of course. We're paying a dividend, not a very big dividend,
back then, but a modest dividend. We could cut that dividend. And then we also could sell stock, you know, new stock offering, either in Taiwan or in the US. We have the ADRs, you know. Or we can borrow money. Corporate bonds, you know.
Or you could only fill part of Apple's order.
Right. And in fact, we did that. You know, we first did our financial planning. And we decided not to cut dividend. We decided not to sell new stock. We decided to just borrow. And this was also with consultation with Goldman Sachs. We chose borrowing. How much? I looked at the numbers and just as you said, I decided to take half of what Apple said. What Apple said they needed.
Is this common, by the way? It seems like it would be in a customer's interest to come to you and say, I need to buy zillions of chips from you. I need all your wafers because they have no skin in the game of you spending all the money.
I know. I know. Well, back in the 90s, in the first, let's say, 15 years, first 10, 12, 15 years ago, of our existence, we were short of capacity almost all the time. And what you just said happened all the time. And so we figured out that we will require a deposit from the customer, and we'll even confiscate the deposit if the time comes for him to take the wafers and he doesn't.
And everybody delights in the word confiscate. It was first used by me. I told the salespeople in San Jose, I said, tell the customer that we need a deposit from them because just as you said, It's our money, and it's only their words. They may not want the wafers when the time comes. And I told the salesman, tell the customer they will confiscate the deposit.
And the salesman never heard anything like that before. And so they were in uproar. In happiness, you know, I mean, now, you know, they could actually stand up and tell the customer that we might even confiscate your money. But of course, it really, we never confiscated any money. No, it did happen quite often.
Particularly in the 2000, we had, I think it was called an internet recession, I think. Because internet was, you know, people were starting companies called pets.com or something, you know. Yeah.
Anyway, so we had the recession. Which trickled all the way back to semiconductors. TSMC's revenues, it was four years after the dot-com bubble, before they were back at those rates. Yeah. It was almost four years, yeah.
I remember it recovered only in 2003. It started in 2001, the first quarter of 2001, and it recovered in the third quarter of 2003. So it was three years. Three years. 2001, 2002, the third, fourth quarter of 2003. Three years. Anyway, the customer, quite a few customers had placed deposits to anticipate normal good times during those years. And we did build the plant. In fact, we bought.
we purchased, or I should say, yeah, we bought a couple of other companies. And so their plants, their fabs became ours. And the customer didn't need the wafers anymore, didn't need the outputs of those fabs anymore. And we didn't, confiscate their deposits. But we let them delay, you know, demand. And eventually, every one of them, they all used up their deposits.
But, you know, that would come, you know. And so then back to, at this point, early 2011 with Apple, you go to them and say, we are prepared to serve half the number that you told us.
Well, first, of course, the new or relatively new business development director, C.C., he had the privilege of first telling the lower level purchasing people at Apple. And he got a response back. You must be crazy, you know. So C.C. did not comment on that. At least he said he didn't comment on that. He brought it back to me. And then I went to Apple, myself, and talked to Jeff Williams.
So I said to him, we have to issue corporate bonds. I think I used the word prudent. After all the prudent financial planning, we decided that we would take half of what you asked for. He was very quiet about it. He only made one suggestion. He said, well, I think you can eliminate your dividend. You know, your shareholders will understand that. I said, well, no, I don't think I'll.
Well, the fact is, I had looked into that. I mean, that's also a reason for, you know, having a high-level consulting firm. advice. About one-third of our investors or shareholders are very seriously interested in the dividends. So if we do what the Jeff Williams said, our stock is going to drop like hell, you know. Trigger a sell-off. Right.
Anyway, but when I talked to Jeff Williams, and I went to see him in – What's the place? Cupertino. Yeah, Cupertino. I mean, he took it fairly willingly, you know. No big problem at all. The only suggestion that he made was the elimination of dividend, you know. And I said no. And he then let it just lie there, you know. Okay, but then that issue was settled.
I mean, how much demand we would take and how we would get. We still had to borrow billions of dollars, even with half of the demand.
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So this really was, especially after the investment in 28 nanometers that depleted your reserves, this is a bet the company move. You're taking on a bunch of debt to go build the fabs to make this happen.
Yeah, I know. Bet the company, but I didn't think I would lose. You sound like Jensen. That's exactly what Jensen said. All right, but I think that the financial discussion with Apple had already happened when Apple... when Jeff Williams called me in February of 2011. And he said, it was a very short conversation. He said, we need to...
pause our discussions for two months because the highest level of Intel has approached Tim Cook and has asked Tim Cook to consider Intel.
And at this time, Intel was the major supplier for all Macs. Apple's Mac line was all Intel.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That wasn't an issue, of course. I mean, in February of 2011, Jeff Williams was talking about the iPhone, yeah.
But they had a close existing relationship.
Yeah. I don't know what relationship. really have. Well, it must be close. So that was all he said. I wasn't all that worried because in 2011, Intel was no longer a name that you would, when you hear it, you would stand up and bow, you know? Interesting. I mean... Heck, you know, in the 90s, in the late 20th century, I mean, they were a name in semiconductors.
When you hear it, of course, I'm exaggerating the situation.
Moore's Law. I mean, it's their intel.
Yeah, intel. If you hear their name, if you hear that they are in competition with you, you know, my goodness, you'll be... trembling with fear, you know.
I mean, this is why you started TSMC as a pure play foundry business, because you didn't want to compete head to head. You said we should not be an integrated design manufacturer of the design of the chips and the manufacturing. We have to compete on a different vector because we'll never catch intel.
I didn't say that we never catch him. Fair enough.
Look where we are in 2025.
Okay, yeah. Anyway, so I, of course, had to accept Jeff Williams' request. All right. But again, as I just told you, I wasn't all that worried because I reviewed in my mind all the characteristics that Apple is looking for in a supplier company. Technology, at that time, we thought we were almost at par with Intel. Almost. In fact, I think I thought we were at par with Intel at that time.
Manufacturing, I thought we were better than Intel. And customer trust, we thought that our customers trusted us more than Intel's customers, customers Intel. So, I wasn't too worried. But then indeed, and I also thought that when Jeff Williams told me the highest level of Intel, I thought he was talking about somebody like Andy Grove, who was retired of course.
But it turned out that he was only talking about the CEO of Intel at that time. Yeah. But I knew that only later.
Would that have been Bob Swan or Paul Ottolini?
No, it was the Italian guy. Ottolini. Paul Ottolini. Ottolini. Got it.
Yeah. So today, Intel doesn't make the chips in the iPhone. What happened?
And in fact, TSMC makes all of Apple's chips.
Yeah. All right. I wasn't too worried, but it still was in my mind. So a month passed. I think it was about the middle of February when Jeff called to tell me to pause for two months. So almost exactly a month later, March, middle of March sometime, I decided that I would pay them a visit. and ask them what's going on, any progress. So I emailed Jeff and asked for an appointment.
I said I was coming to the Silicon Valley anyway, which was pretty normal. and stop in at your place on such and such a day. Is that okay? And Jeff replied by saying that, yeah, come here, but I won't be here. I have asked Tim Cook to see you. I mean, this freedom, Jeff's freedom of delegating his boss to see a visitor, it was a privilege that I seldom had in my career, you know.
Yeah, normally someone says someone on my team will see you, not my boss will see you.
I know, I know. It was usually that way. It was usually the other way. But in this case, it was Jeff S., Well, anyway, so I showed up and Tim was very nice to me and took me to lunch or to the cafeteria, I guess, where there was a lot of food. We each picked our food and carried our tray back to his office, you know.
And anyway, he told me, there's nothing to worry about because Intel just does not know how to be a fountain. That's a very short, but a very satisfactory answer to me.
What is your interpretation of the meaning behind that statement?
I was explaining to you that we had on technology, on manufacturing. Subconsciously, I think, I interpreted Jeff's explanation to me to be the third one, customer trust. I mean, they were always very superior, you know, Intel. Before this Apple thing, Apple and we, before Apple became our customer, I knew a lot of Intel's customers in Taiwan. You know, all the PC makers are Intel's customers.
None of them liked Intel. None of them. Intel always acted like they were the only guy. They were the only guy for the microprocessors.
And that's for their microprocessor business, but here we're talking about the foundry business where TSMC, at their extreme core, does not compete with customers. And even if Intel is trying to do business in good faith... They do have the conflict where they also design chips, which is competing with Apple's chip designers or NVIDIA's chip designers or any other.
Yeah, but I really don't think Tim meant that. I think he meant that the customer asks a lot of things. We have learned to respond to every request. Some of them were crazy. Some of them were irrational. We had to respond to each request courteously, which we do. Intel has never done that. Intel, I mean, I said I knew a lot of customers of Intel's here in Taiwan.
And none of them, they all wished that there were another supplier. None of them either trusted Intel or liked Intel.
So to finish the Apple story, the short answer is it worked on 20 nanometer. Were there any trade-offs where pursuing 20 nanometer and spending the billions of dollars cost TSMC in any way?
Well, it might have cost, but yeah, the story certainly does not end here. All right, so there was pricing. Everything was not easy. Pricing, and Jeff came himself, and we talked about pricing. And we, of course, we had done our homework also on the cost and what kind of price we would accept. But Jeff came and he told us just a number, you know. Well, he gave us his reasoning.
He had to make his component costs meet a certain goal also, yeah. But anyway, that was settled. And Jeff said, ah. And when the pricing was settled, I said, let's go out to dinner. go to a Taipei three-star restaurant for dinner. And Jeff jokingly said, ah, if you didn't like the pricing, we will probably be going to a McDonald's. Which was never in my mind, but he said that.
Could you tell us a little more about what goes into considerations around pricing? I imagine things like the yields you think you'll be able to get hugely impact that.
Sure. The cost, yeah. But the main thing that goes into pricing, of course, is the cost. And then the second thing is, of course… whether your desired price will be accepted by the customer.
One thing that has occurred to me is TSMC now gets mid-50% gross margins, call it 55%, 57%, higher than your time. But many of your customers have 70%, 80% gross margins.
Yeah.
TSMC is creating a lot of value. The designer is creating a lot of value. How do you sort of sort out who gets to capture the value?
Well, I don't get the privilege of sorting it out now, you know. CC, CC way, I think, has the pressure and the duty of sorting that out. Yeah. Well, I mean, as a general principle, you know… you try to find a kind of a middle ground, which is different for every CEO. Even though every CEO who wants to protect his reputation, every CEO says, ah, I worry about the long range.
But in truth, not everyone does. So it's a very personal how to sort these things out. I think it's a very personal issue. Now, for a lot of CEOs, there's really no choice. You have to, as a supplier, you have to accept a certain price. If it's a commodity particularly, you know. We have not finished with Apple yet.
Please, let's finish Apple.
Yeah. Now, I think you were asking whether there was any… Trade-offs. Trade-offs. Well, the trade-off, there was a pretty significant, serious trade-off. And that was a detour that I said we took at that time back in the… 2011, 2012 time, our R&D was not strong enough to do two nodes at the same time. Now we are, but back then we weren't.
So the trade-off of accepting the 20-node technology was that we delayed our 16-node And then Samsung came up with the 16. They had lost the 20 business, you know. So they were ahead of us in the 16 nanometer development. Because they got to skip 20. Yeah, because they didn't get the 20, okay. They need to develop 20. So I got a shock. I mean, it was a real shock.
when I heard that Apple had placed their first orders of 16-worth Samsung. Now, that was a real shock. We invested so much, even though we took only half of their original demand. It was still tens of billions of dollars, I think. And we were counting on it being at least 80, 90% of the equipment being converted to 16. And now, if Apple went to Samsung for the 16, where did that leave us?
Do you understand what I'm saying? Oh, yes.
It sounds horrible. I would feel like I got tricked. Yeah.
Well, I wouldn't say that, okay, but I was really shocked. So I emailed Jeff Williams right away, and I said, you know, we invested in all this equipment, and we were counting on you to take the, 16 from us. But now, you know, we found out you were buying 16, the first 16, anyway, from Samsung. So Jeff replied immediately, don't worry, I'll be here, I'll be there, I'll be in Hsinchu next week.
and explain to you. So that made me, that relieved me a little, but certainly not completely. But next week, he did show up, and he explained to us. He said, well, as soon as you are ready, when you are 16, who will buy from you? Who will buy all of you? the needs from you when you're ready. Now, of course, that completely relieves me because that's what we're supposed to do anyway, you know.
So indeed, what he said was true. We developed, we had our own 16, about half a year later, and most of Apple's 60 nanometer requirements still belonged to us. Yeah, most, yeah.
I can imagine the shock that you must have had. At the same time, this also, again, just illustrates the brilliance of TSMC and the pure play foundry business model. Samsung is Apple's chief competitor. Yeah.
I know. I know. It was, I said in the autobiography, you know, I mean, sitting in Hsinchu, Being in the foundry business, I actually see a lot of things before they actually happen. So let me tell you the IBM Qualcomm story.
Please.
Now, Qualcomm, we consider Qualcomm to be a prime company. candidate to be our customer. We really wanted Qualcomm because we knew they were a technology house. What year was this? This was way back, you know, when we started in the 90s anyway.
And they were part of that initial wave of fabulous companies.
Yes. They started, Irwin Jacobs started Qualcomm actually before I started Qualcomm. TSMC. TSMC started in 1987. Qualcomm, I think, was a few years before that. So we are in the 90s, early 90s, all the way up to 1997 maybe. 96, 97, all the way up to the latter part of the 90s. We wanted a to be a customer. And I saw their operations VP.
That's what they call, that's what our customers call their purchasing people. Operations VP, operations senior VP. And I saw him often. And he was always pretty polite, but he gave us very little business. And I also knew that his main foundry was IBM. Now, sometime in the later 90s, I forgot whether it was 97 or 98, suddenly, he started, first he started to tell me that he would use us now.
He didn't even tell me who our competitor was, who our competitor had been, but I kind of knew that it was IBM from other sources of intelligence. And our business with Qualcomm, the business that Qualcomm gave us, pretty rapidly increased after that, after 97, 98 period. So I immediately knew that IBM Semiconductor was in trouble. Because, I mean, they had their own fabs and so on.
But their main business was really supplying to Qualcomm and a few other very small companies, very small, fabulous companies. So I immediately knew IBM was in trouble because they were losing Qualcomm. All right, so the next step that IBM took was not a surprise to me.
The next step they took was to ask us, TSMC, to co-develop the next generation of technology, which is 0.13 micron, 130 nanometer. In 1999. And since I anticipated that, it was no problem at all for us to refuse the... And in fact, even if I didn't anticipate that, we would never, never have accepted that kind of code development. I mean, IBM was still, you know...
they still consider themselves to be the senior partner in any partnership they establish. The senior partner. So we were, the company that co-developed something with them would send its engineers to IBM, you know. And when we do that, we lose our ability to develop our own processes. We'll have to depend on this co-development thing.
And the co-development thing is going to have a lot of difficulties, you know. Heck, you know, our people, you know, will be in a different culture. So we declined without having to think about it at all. We declined the IBM office. And IBM, in fact, was quite angry, you know. I mean, they thought we were still a small Taiwan backward place, you know.
It's a Taiwan company, and they are going to pick IBM. So they immediately went to UMC. And UMC accepted it. only to regret seriously their acceptance a few years later.
And UMC, at that point in time, was it fair to call it a peer of TSMC here in Taiwan in terms of volume and size? Not by 1999. They were already smaller?
Smaller. They were smaller already, yeah. That's what I meant when I said that sitting here at the Foundry, I can see some things like this IBM thing.
This might be a good time to go back to the learning curve. Speaking about the importance of owning your own technology and process at the leading edge and controlling your own destiny, you develop the learning curve
I really did not devolve. I certainly did not initiate it. I think I had a role at TI. I had a role in refining it to the point where a semiconductor company can use it effectively. That's my role.
Yeah.
So how would you explain it to a novice? Well, explaining the learning curve theory is simple. But one would be foolish if one just takes the simple explanation and thinks that that's all it is. The simple explanation of learning curve is that as you make more of one thing, anything, Actually, it started with refrigerators and the cost. If a company makes more cost, then it's cost.
per car, unit cost goes down. That's why it's also called experience curve. You gain more experience, you become more efficient. That's a simple explanation. But if one just takes that simple explanation and thinks that's all it is about, then you really haven't Learn anything. All right. Anyway, the learning curve. Well, Bruce Henderson, who is now considered the father of strategies.
Founded Boston Consulting Group.
Yeah, he was the founder of Boston Consulting Group. And now, you know, I mean, there's a branch in business economics that's called competitive strategy or something. Competitive strategy, I guess. And Michael Porter was at one time considered a big figure in this competitive strategy. I mean, he wrote three or four books, big books, 700 pages each. I have all of them.
His original competitive strategy memo, I think it's like 20 pages, is still some of the best business writing ever. Whose? Michael Porter. Oh. who was a director of TSMC at one point, right?
Yeah. I had a story about him in my autobiography, too, which, because of time, we probably won't go into. Not Michael Porter. But Bruce Henderson, we will talk about him. He is now considered to be the father of the competitive strategy. He came to Texas Instruments one day in, I think around 1970, or I should say he first called the T.I.
CEO, Mark Sheppard, and told him that Boston Consulting Group, he had founded the Boston Consulting Group, and we have BCG has a experience curve theory that would benefit semiconductor industry. And TI was the largest company in the semiconductor industry then, and would mark Shepard like a presentation of this theory. Mark Shepard said yes.
So Bruce Henderson brought Bill Bang, you probably know that name, with him and came to Dallas and made a presentation. And Mark Shepard invited the COO and me to attend the presentation. And it was a very eloquent presentation because, you know, Bruce Henderson was a very eloquent man. And Bill Bain was on the side, apparently Bruce Henderson's protégé.
Anyway, Mark Shepard was impressed and he decided that TI would work with BCG on this learning curve theory. And Bruce Henderson then assigned Bill Bang to work most of the time at TI, you know, most of my, like, three days a week. And Mark Hibbert assigned me as TI's guy. So Bill Bain and I became partners. And I assigned Bill Bain a small office very close to my house.
office at TI in the same building and small office because he needed a lot of things from me. He needed permission to get our costs, our prices. We had a lot of families of integrated circuits and transistors. I mean, he had a lot of requests. So it was easier if he was nearby. And every time when he arrived at some interesting, useful conclusions, he would also discuss them with me.
So we had a very pleasant association for, I would think, two years, maybe even more. And he would, you know, fly to Dallas every Monday and go back to Boston either Wednesday night or Thursday night and of course every time he went back to Boston it would be to tell Bruce Henderson what he had done that week so this happened this went on for I think two years.
And then finally, Bill Bang came to see me one day. And it was in those two years that I absorbed a lot of learning curve stuff, which I used up to now. I found that highly fruitful. Just as a thinking tool.
It seems so fundamental to the industry that you want to get through the low volume period as fast as you can. Ideally, you spend no time in the low volume period. And it seems like over time... all the returns in the industry, the winner is the one with all the volume because they'll just have the lowest prices.
And there's a flywheel where once you have the lowest prices, you get all the business, then you can reinvest that in the next node. I couldn't have told you that TSMC was going to be the winner, but once you internalize the learning curve and globalization, you can sort of intuit that in the future there will be one winner in semiconductor manufacturing.
But one day, after a couple of years, Bill Bang came to me in Dallas. He said, you are the first one I tell this to outside the Boston Consulting Group. I am leaving Boston Consulting Group to start my own consulting company. So I said, why? I said, you know, obviously Bruce Henderson thinks very highly of you. And Bill Bain said, yes, but there is the world's imperative.
That's the first time I heard that term, you know, world's imperative. He meant for him personally. Yeah, for him personally. Well, anyway, that was that.
All right, listeners, now is a great time to thank friend of the show, Fundrise. We've gotten to know Fundrise's CEO, Ben Miller, and the folks there quite well over the last several years, and they're huge acquired listeners just like all of you.
And since we first worked together three years ago, Fundrise itself has gone through quite a transformation. Long-time listeners may remember that they have a growth stage venture that they actually first launched here via an acquired sponsorship back in 2022. At the time, Fundrise was primarily known as the U.S. 's largest real estate investment platform for retail investors.
And it wasn't necessarily obvious that Ben, Fundrise Ben that is, that his kind of crazy idea to bring their model to venture capital would work.
Well, fast forward to today, and incredibly, they have demonstrated they could break into the venture industry in a big way. Ben Miller and Fundrise have invested in Databricks, Anthropic, Canva, Anduril, Ramp, and fellow friends of the show, Vanta, and also Service Titan, which just went public in December in a successful IPO.
Yep. It's genuinely awesome what Fundrise has done here, which is something that many have tried over the years, but no one else has actually been able to accomplish in venture. They've taken a retail platform that any American can invest in and gotten pre-IPO access to some of the best private companies in the world.
It's democratized access to all the value creation that otherwise has been locked in these private companies over the last decade plus as these growth companies are delaying IPOs and staying private longer.
Yep. So when the ServiceTitan IPO happened, thanks to Fundrise, tens of thousands of regular investors got to celebrate alongside the VCs, LPs, and employees.
Yep. We'll be talking about Fundrise all season long, and you can go check out the full portfolio that Ben and the Fundrise team are building at Fundrise.com slash venture. And if you're a growth stage founder looking for a great Series C or later investor, just get in touch and tell them that Ben and David sent you.
As our time comes toward a close, one question David and I wanted to ask you is, TSMC is essentially the only trillion-dollar company in the world not on the West Coast of the United States. It is this incredibly important thing in the world. It's this unlikely success of grand scale.
Unlikely in your opinion?
I mean, you started it when you were 56. Yeah, yeah.
There are many things. I'm not going to argue with you. I merely ask as a point of curiosity. I didn't realize. I didn't think it was that unlikely. Well, it did exceed my expectations. TSMC's size and importance exceeded my expectations, but not by an order of magnitude.
Wasn't the original plan to stop building after Fab 2? No, that was never.
That was only the very initial plan. We were never going to stop there. I mean, we were just talking about learning. You know that. How could we plan to stop? If I didn't know anything about learning curve, I would say, yeah, maybe we'll stop after two perhaps, you know. But I was a serious student of learning curve. And I would never stop at just two perhaps.
Here's why I say unlikely success. There were so many reasons why the original incarnation of TSMC was kind of a bad business. Fabless was not a thing yet. And so all of your initial customers were the integrated device manufacturers, the Intels of the world, and you were taking their worst excess
you were their second source supplier for manufacturing on the stuff that they didn't want to make on their own. Did you see Fabless coming, or was that a very lucky thing?
No, I saw it coming. And in fact, I just had dinner, oh, two months ago, at dinner with the first guy, Gordon Campbell, Gordy Campbell. Have you heard his name? Mm-hmm. Anyway, Cordy Campbell came to see me in General Instruments in my final months at General Instruments. He came to see me. He did not know that I was leaving. Frankly, I did not know when I saw him that I was leaving yet.
But the reason he came to see me at General Instruments was that he wanted to Funding, he wanted investment from General Instruments. $50 million, he said. He wanted to start a new company. $50 million. So I said, do you have a business plan? No, it's all in my head. So I said, well, I need at least a business plan. I mean, I have to go to the board of General Instruments.
So he said, all right, I'll send it to you within three weeks. Three weeks later, there was no business plan, and I was interested because I knew that he had a good reputation of starting companies. So I called him, and he said, ah, Morris, I'm sorry I didn't send you anything because I don't need you anymore. I said, how come? He said, I don't need $50 million anymore.
I need only $5 million, and $5 million I can gather up very easily. I said, why do you need only $5 million? He said, I'm not going to build a fab. See? That was the start for me. that there will be fabulous companies. Another guy came to General Instruments and said he had already started a company, which was called Atmel, A-T-M-E-L. And they did not have any fabs.
And this guy wanted General Instruments to make the wafers for them. And back then, General Instrument had empty fabs. So I said, I told the semiconductor manager of General Instrument, I said, go ahead and work with him.
Don Valentine, who I'm sure you knew. Yeah, I knew him. He had a great, great quote when asked about starting Sequoia. And he said, well, I had an advantage. I knew the future. And it sounds like you knew the future too.
Well, at least I had a glimpse of it, you know. So, Atmel, you know, and they were still fighting. I mean, Atmel, he wanted the fab to be run his way. Now, of course, the General Instrument Semiconductor Manager wanted to run the fab his way, you know. General Instrument owned the fab anyway, for heaven's sake, you know.
So that was just a very early situation in which the difficulty and the advantage of running a foundry business already appeared. The difficulty was, you know, you have to satisfy a lot of customers, you know. And everyone, you know, wanted the factory to run his way, you know. But you can only run FAP one way, you know, which will satisfy more or less all the customers.
And the advantage, of course, is you have a lot of customers. Well, we can't thank you enough, Dr. Chang.
Dr. Chang, thank you.
All right. Very good. It was my pleasure. Even though it's the first time in a long, long time that I have talked so long.
We appreciate it.
Thank you for doing it with us. All right, listeners. Well, David and I are coming at you now from our home studios back in Seattle and San Francisco. And we wanted to do a little post-game on that interview. A little bit of analysis, kind of our conclusions, the things that are still sitting with us a few days later after we've crossed the ocean. And David, this felt essential to me because...
It felt like we were just recording history there with Morris. I didn't want to interrupt him to try to like make a business model point or it just kind of felt like we should let him talk and then we could do our part after.
Yeah, totally. And fortunately, we have a model for doing analysis at the end of story, which is our playbook. So let's do it.
Okay, so the first thing that I can't shake that just keeps sitting with me is this idea that is genius in hindsight of not competing with your customers being the dedicated pure play foundry, which we actually saw in the TSMC Museum of Innovation. They have Morris's original pitch, like his original slide deck.
His original business plan that he pitched to the Taiwanese government.
government and then to investors there's like two different versions of this extremely simple pitch deck and one of the bullet points it's right in there of be a dedicated pure play foundry at the time i get the sense it was actually much more about what can we win at versus what will be the most important and valuable semiconductor company in the world in the future
At the time, they didn't have the capabilities, certainly not TSMC, and it didn't exist in Taiwan to be able to design chips and products. So it was impossible for them to compete with customers. This was all they could do.
Right. It crossed Morris's mind for sure. Hey, we could compete with Intel. But then he scrapped that. I get the sense because the thing that they were good at was this manufacturing angle. And it's almost like an accident of history. The PurePlay foundry ended up being... the best way to do this.
I guess best as evaluated on market cap versus other foundries and integrated device manufacturers such as Intel.
Well, and best that this is the path that has led them to being essentially alone operating at the leading edge. They have surpassed technology-wise all of the other integrated and quasi-integrated chip foundries out there.
Yeah, I guess that's my first thing. You can connect the dots looking backwards, as Steve Jobs said in that famous quote, but forwards is difficult.
This... primarily, I think, was the main reason why TSMC has worked so well.
That they don't compete with customers.
They are truly the only foundry at the leading edge that does not in any way compete with their customers. They don't have their own end product division. They don't design their own chips. It is truly they only serve their customers and they do not compete at any other part of the value chain with them. Right.
Okay, so if you're asking yourself, how did the world arrange itself in this way such that you could have a trillion-dollar company that doesn't do any design, that doesn't do any architecture, that doesn't do any EDA tools like cadence or synopsis? So they're not NVIDIA. They're not ARM. They're not cadence synopsis. They're not ASML. They're not their own equipment vendor. So what enabled this?
One of the things that I think is underappreciated, and we didn't talk that much about with Morris, but the rise of ARM. If you try to play forward a world where Intel and the x86 architecture had maintained its dominance, you wouldn't have had this... window, this opportunity for the value chain to sort of rearrange itself.
But the fact that there was an architecture, as we talked about on our ACQ2 episode with Rene from ARM,
this architecture that became dominant in phones and then computers and then servers and now is coupled with all these AI chips, you open the door to have a dedicated foundry for ARM chips in a way where if it had stayed x86, it's not like you could start a new foundry for all the fabulous x86 companies. For the longest time, Intel was the only x86 company.
And then AMD, of course, is the second source. And AMD is a TSMC customers. That's sort of the one edge case. It's like, well, there is AMD that designs x86 chips that TSMC manufactures, but that's not the common case of the way it would have gone in an x86-dominated world. It would have been fully integrated Intel.
Yeah, I mean, one super straightforward and enormous example of this just as apple like if arm hadn't become such a viable cpu architecture platform and apple hadn't standardized you know their apple silicon on arm probably Intel would be making all of the chips that go into your iPhone, all the leading edge chips that go into your iPhone. Like, they already had the Intel relationship.
Macs were running on x86 Intel chips.
Yeah, you have to keep peeling the onion because this, of course, supposes that Intel actually could have gotten their act together and made a chip... for mobile phones that was performant but maybe all the baggage from x86 actually prevented them from structurally doing that it wasn't like a competency thing it was like a that it never could have happened that x86 could run on phones yeah
I think all this is true. But if ARM hadn't existed, there would have been nowhere else for this vector of innovation to go.
Right. The point that we're driving at here is this world where there's a standalone architecture company, there's a standalone big manufacturing company, there are standalone EDA companies, there are standalone designers, you know, Apple, NVIDIA. In a large part, that's due to ARM. Yes, and ARM and TSMC are sort of like coupled at the hip of history of how this came to be.
In fact, didn't you find that a bunch of these were started within 12 months of each other?
Yes, totally. The mid to late 80s were like an absolute golden period for all these companies getting started. Not only TSMC, ARM, Synopsys, Cadence, and ASML all founded right within a couple years of each other. Which brings us to Hinshu Science Park.
Going there in person, we talked about this on our original TSMC episode that, you know, even if you wanted to, you couldn't airlift TSMC and this capability out of Taiwan and recreate it somewhere else.
Yeah, we talked about that as if we knew it in sort of an abstract way. This was very different driving around the science park feeling it in a physical way.
the entire ecosystem. It's like if Silicon Valley were all in one, you know, kind of government-sponsored, you know, industrial park, which it sort of was. It was Silicon Valley, you know, as we talked about in our Lockheed Martin episode.
Oh, the early Lockheed, yeah.
Yeah, the early Lockheed years. But that's what it's like today. It's all right there. It's not just TSMC that's there. It's all of their partners. It's all of their customers, you know, We're driving by and this is a cadence building there and that's a synopsis building there and that's an arm building there. There's Qualcomm. There's MediaTek right there, headquartered right there.
Right across the street, the craziest thing to me, we saw there are two universities that are just like there.
In the science park.
Yes, like that are cranking out PhDs every year that are just getting absorbed right there in the ecosystem. I mean, this would be like if there were two universities on the NVIDIA campus.
The thing that really jumped out to me is you always hear people talk about how integrated this ecosystem is with each other, that Synopsys has to be closely tied with TSMC to understand what the next node will look like so that they can make it easy for people who are using Synopsys' tools to design chips to...
actually manufacture using TSMC's process, you kind of get the sense of, oh, I see, because they all are walking across the street to each other and having this extremely close communication.
Not to mention, David, both of our flight experiences kind of felt like, oh, these are a bunch of chip design fabless companies that are making the pilgrimage over to Taiwan to meet with people in this ecosystem. Yeah.
My plane felt like the semiconductor version of the tech buses that go from San Francisco down to Silicon Valley every day. The backpacks that I saw on the plane, like there's a Google backpack, there's an Amazon backpack, there's an Arm backpack, there's a Marvell backpack.
Yeah, which does raise the point of this Arizona fab and the sort of outside of Taiwan fabs. You know, why is TSMC doing it? Because it's not their leading edge. It's not big volumes. It's not leveraging this really close geographic ecosystem that they have. I believe there's three science parks in Taiwan. We saw the original, but there's one that's even bigger.
I think it's the Tainan one in the south. But it just kind of becomes clear that there are customers and government reasons to build fabs in other countries.
You're not going to be able to recreate the magic of that ecosystem physically instantiated right there.
Yeah. It would take decades to recreate the ecosystem that they have in the science parks.
Which is, you know, funny on that front, you and I were saying as we were driving around there, this has got to be the single most successful government-funded industry initiative of all time, like anywhere in the world.
At least to spur innovation with this particular of a mandate.
Totally. The land-grant universities here in America. But this was like a rifle shot. We are going to spur semiconductor industry innovation in this industrial park in this location.
And it worked. And there you have one of the 10 most valuable companies in the world and the only, I guess, one of two trillion-dollar companies that are not on the West Coast of the United States. I would say it worked. It worked. It worked. And the scale too, we drove by a construction site where it looked like a quarter of the building was done.
This is where they're making the two nanometer process, which presumably will be in the next iPhone. It's not like anyone said anything about that, but geez, I wonder after five nanometer and then N3E and N3P, when they have this two nanometer process, I wonder what they're going to make on that. Lots of NVIDIA GPUs and lots of iPhone chips. Massive building.
Phase one was open, which I think is a quarter of the building. But then there's three other phases for this two nanometer facility that are not even ready for prime time yet. But I think they're actually doing the small production runs, getting ready to ramp in the second half of this year on the two nanometer process.
Like you said, the scale of the physical buildings of these fabs smacked me in the face. I felt like I was looking at a sphinx in Egypt. I mean, like, it's huge. It's like many football fields of size, like, you know, just per phase of the fab. These are enormous buildings.
Yep. Okay, so back to things I've been noodling on since the conversation with Dr. Chang. I felt a little bit bad for saying, hey, your original business plan was kind of a bad one that basically taking the excess capacity from Intel and other IDMs and giving them a place to manufacture their least critical, least leading edge, least interesting chips. But that is true.
I mean, he believed that Fabless was going to be a thing, but for the first, I don't know, at least five years, The only real business that they had was IDMs who were willing to say, how cheap can you give me some of your manufacturing capacity? And it's not strategic at all, but here you go. Here's some revenue.
This is a major difference in Intel's fab strategy versus TSMC. is constantly taking their existing fab footprint and repurposing it and upgrading it for the leading edge, which, you know, on the one hand is great. It's utilizing their assets, you know, for the most valuable, highest valuable products.
On the other hand, though, they then lose the manufacturing capabilities for older process node generations. And it's not like demand goes away for those chips and those products. It does. It just does slowly. It does slowly. Yeah. And I mean, like replacement parts is a great example.
Like, you know, there are technology systems and products, you know, manufacturing things, even automobiles built 10, 20, 30 years ago that have specific chips that were made with old process technology that when they break and they need replacing, like you need those exact same chips. So this is the business that TSMC started in.
Right. So that is the fundamental philosophical difference is I think fab. Fab 1 belonged to ITRI, the government where Morris was president of that organization before taking the helm at TSMC. Fabs 2 and 3 were the first TSMC-specific fabs that they built, and they're still running. from the late eighties.
And in addition to the old replacement parts, there are still applications for older nodes. If you're in this, this world of, you know, 40 nanometers and up and, you know, one micron, and I don't know all the names of the previous generations, but the, the less high resolution etching on silicon, uh, CMOS sensors are great examples of that.
The cameras that we're talking into right now that have these great Sony sensors, those don't require a two nanometer process, but they do require etching the same way that you would etch a chip. And so that's a specialty use case of TSMC's older fabs, which by the way, on an accounting basis are fully depreciated. So they're almost like free to run.
Right, right. All the capital expenditure. Now there's maintenance capex that needs to go into it, of course, but like... The initial capex, yes, fully depreciated. You're just getting like essentially very, very high margin dollars out of those old fabs. Right.
And it's not that it's a better or worse decision than what Intel has historically decided to do, but it is a different one. Intel is going to keep closing the old stuff so they can own a smaller footprint and keep all the equipment and everything focused on making the latest and greatest. Just not what TSMC does.
Totally. Totally.
But that point of, I'm obsessed with this idea that, it was funny that Morris went on the record and said, no, I knew, I knew Fabulous was coming. And he had a couple of great anecdotes about that, which is funny because in older interviews, sometimes he goes, oh, the timing was a little lucky on when Fabulous happened.
But I think he even said to Jensen, in the first few years of TSMC, growth wasn't very high because we were waiting for the customers to emerge. But it really is this idea that he saw the future and, He made a bet, and he did kind of a crappy business to build up competency, capability, volume. Capacity. Yeah, exactly.
To build up literal fabs.
Right, to be there when the fabless revolution happened. And I don't know, you know, I think he, yeah, I think he was within 12 months of when he thought it would happen. But it is crazy that when, especially in his memoir, you're reading the story about the early customers, year five, year six, year seven, the majority of the business is still not fabulous.
It's someone else's, you know, worst orders.
Which that actually gets to the heart of learning curve pricing that we spoke about with Morris.
We brought it up sort of like tangentially with him, but it's probably worth dwelling on what is the learning curve?
Yeah, the core insight of the learning curve from BCG, Bill Bain, and Bain and Morris that they all developed together.
Which, by the way, how crazy is it that the founders of BCG and Bain are the ones who sort of co-developed this, or at least named it and formalized it with Morris when he was at TI? Yeah.
Totally. The insight is that like the goal that you are playing for is to be the largest volume player kind of at the end of the game. So if you take that as a given of like, if we get to be the largest volume player, this is a fixed cost business. This is a scale economies business. We can spread that fixed costs over the maximum number of customers.
Thank you.
We accelerate the pricing to where we think it will get to at the end of the game. So that's why doing these price cuts and also starting low with your prices. Like you can even start unprofitable with your prices in the early days in a given node generation because the goal is crowd out the competition, become the industry dominant number one player, get all the customers.
Once you aggregate that demand, then you get the scale and then you can get the economies of scale pricing. Yeah. But just like get to that as fast as possible is the name of the game.
Yeah, it works backwards from... It actually involves a lot of market sizing. At maturity on this node, what do we think demand will be for, you know, call it 40 nanometer? How many orders of...
individual chips will there be in 40 nanometer okay well to have the cheapest price for customers we need to do the biggest ordering and so then it's just a matter of like how fast can we get into volume production yep Everyone sort of intuitively grasps this, oh, economies of scale.
But the implications across your whole business, your pricing strategy, the way, like strategic finance, how do you, when do you decide to take on debt? When do you not? When do you decide to take on more shareholders?
It's this incredible orchestration to make it happen. You know, it's almost Costco-like in the ballet that has to go into this.
Right. I mean, the example from Apple, we are about to go get the absolute whale customer and we have to balance... taking on all of their order, which the learning curve would tell you, you want to get the deepest down the learning curve possible. We should go take all their order.
But that kind of exposes you to existential risk in your business when you're not within spitting distance of doing that volume on your own. So is it really worth betting the entire company
You got to be so precise and accurate in your forecasting of the ultimate market demand, which means the ultimate demand for your customers' products, which in the Apple case means ultimately forecasting accurately how many customers are going to buy the next generation iPhone in order to run your business.
Right. Or in NVIDIA's case, how big is AI going to be? This is kind of a crazy thing for a manufacturer to have to do, to have that crystal ball into the end market markets, their customers' markets. But they really do need to make bets on how big those markets are going to be. Yep.
Because if you're off by 5%, 10%, that's going to tank your entire profitability for that node generation, which is going to tank your free cash flow, which is going to mean you can't play the game in the next turn.
To this point, though, if you actually are good at all of this and you are good at forecasting and the execution is flawless, once you internalize the learning curve... The story of TSMC goes from one where it's surprising and unlikely and it becomes an inevitability. Of course, the company that is taking on all the orders to have the lowest prices is
Of course, this will be the end state of this industry is to have a dominant player.
Like right now it costs, I don't know, on the order of $20 billion to build a new fab. Eventually it will cost $40 billion, $80 billion, $100 billion. How many players are really going to be left standing with the ability to deploy $100 billion to build a building with some machines in it? This market has natural monopoly characteristics.
Yep, yep. And that's just the CapEx side of the equation, right? as we talked about with Dr. Chang, there's also the R&D side of the equation that needs to go into creating the next process node that can be built on that CapEx.
Yeah, it is crazy that if you just look at every year, the CapEx versus the net income of this company, they basically spend all the money, not all the money, but their CapEx grows in a very similar way. If you look at the bar graph, to their net income from the year. And so that is even before R&D, David, to your point.
If they're looking around at competitors at other foundries and saying, okay, how much can we invest? They can invest more than anyone else because they have the most volume. And then on top of that, they are also spending in a separate bucket of R&D on the technology for their manufacturing processes. And that's how you get co-ops, which is the technology that they use for packaging for AI chips.
That's their, you know, proprietary thing, which by the way, once you have proprietary packaging, then it's even harder for customers to go and double-source, double-manufacture elsewhere. They have a similar technology for packaging of mobile chips that doesn't use CoaS.
But it seems like this is a market where those in the lead are only going to get further in the lead over time, absent some big strategic mishaps or some big execution mistakes.
Yep, totally. And then I think the last playbook theme here for me and for us is just that Moore's Law is undefeated. I mean, at the end of the day, back from starting all the way back Morris's career at TI and being a contemporary of Jack Kilby and Bob Noyce, the invention of the integrated circuit. Once the integrated circuit was invented...
The compounding growth of that industry is all that mattered. Everything else is just downstream of the fact that the world is going to demand more computing at this monotonic, exponentially increasing pace every 18 to 24 months. And of course, the technical definition of Moore's Law expired a long time ago, but spiritually...
The world demands roughly 2x the computing power that it had two years ago every two years. And that has continued for 50, 60 years at this point and shows no signs of slowing down.
And as a result... Well, no signs of slowing down except that they keep hitting theoretical physics limits.
Well, I said the demand side of the equation shows no signs of slowing down.
Well, sure. But the demand side is far more than 2x. Moore's law has always been about how much can happen on the innovation side of getting better at design and manufacturing. And that is getting harder than ever because we're having to like call more things Moore's law. You know, packaging was never a part of the original Moore's law. and software improvements and proprietary interconnects.
My point is that it's a self-reinforcing system. As long as the demand is there that the world wants twice as much compute as it had yesterday, there are going to be market incentives to drive the supply side. And that is why people work so hard to make it happen.
All right, here's the stat. Since TSMC was founded in 1987, the world's semiconductor market has grown from $26 billion to $527 billion last year. So they wrote a ridiculous tailwind. Ridiculous tailwind, yep. A ridiculous tailwind where, as the industry reorganized away from the vertical integration of the Intel world, you could build a trillion-dollar value foundry. Yep.
The scale of the numbers are so staggering. I keep thinking about the fact that they can go spend $20 billion to build a building, and the stuff that they spit out is so valuable that that $20 billion was a profitable investment in a matter of, I don't know how many years, if it's three, five, seven, whatever the payback period is. They know for sure...
that it's a worthwhile investment to do that. The whole thing comes down to, oh my God, silicon has become really valuable. Integrated circuits are the fabric of our world today.
Well, Ben, what an amazing experience. So glad we did this. Went to Taiwan, got to see this in person, got to spend this special time with Dr. Chang. What a great way to start the year. Should we do carve-outs?
Carve-outs. All right, I have two. One is kind of hilarious. I can't believe it's 2025 and this is my recommendation. For anyone who's not a AAA member, I highly recommend it. I had a spectacular AAA experience where I went to fill up the air in my tires before a road trip And I went to the gas station and there was something wrong at my local gas station with their pump.
And I ended up draining the air in my tires to an unsafe level. And so the car was actually not drivable away from this gas station. I was like, crap, I can't even go get the other car. And I had my baby in the backseat, and my wife and I were trying to figure out what to do. And we're like, do we have to call a tow truck to tow us?
And so I signed up for AAA while I'm just sitting there in the gas station parking lot. And within, I think, an hour, hour and a half, they had a mobile tire inflator installed. on a long weekend, like a holiday weekend when other people aren't working, drive out and fill up the air in my tire so we could be quickly on our way, not ruin the weekend. Amazing.
And it was like a hundred bucks or something. It's really not a bad price. And you get, this was a hundred bucks to become a member or whatever it is, 150. And then the service is actually free for something as trivial as this. And you get three of them a year. Wow. So I'll take it. It was a phenomenal experience. All right. Triple A. Here we go.
My second one is a YouTube channel called Defunctland. You and I were talking about this.
Oh, yes. This is so good. You turned me on to this.
Yeah, it is an entire YouTube channel that I actually haven't watched in a while, but I only remembered it from our conversation and now I need to go back and watch older ones that talks about defunct theme parks. So if you like Acquired and you wish you had something, you know, Acquired-like that's kind of visual, that's about history and intellectual property and people trying crazy stuff,
Some of the most crazy entrepreneurs and executives within companies decided to build theme parks. And it is very fun to see the weird old Nickelodeon hotels or Action Park in, I think it's New Jersey, the wildly unsafe park from the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
Man, those were the days.
Yes. You could get lost for hours and hours and hours watching Defunctland. So I highly recommend the YouTube channel.
I'm really glad that you and I grew up as kids in the era where we could still take unreasonable amounts of risk and nobody thought that there was anything wrong with that. Yes. My carve-out, speaking of it being 2025, how are we talking about this? On the plane, on the way over to Taipei, I finally watched Everything Everywhere all at once for the first time.
I can't believe I hadn't seen it before. But, you know, two kids under three and a half, not a lot of time for movies. It's so good. It's so good. I think this was your carve out when it came out a couple years ago. Just so, so, so good. Truly enjoyed it. Lived up to the hype. Deserves every award that it won.
All right. Well, we've got some thank yous to folks who helped us prepare for this episode. So first to our sponsors, JP Morgan Payments, our presenting partner, ServiceNow and Fundrise. You can click the links in the show to learn more. And then some special shout outs to Art DeGias, the co-founder and executive chair of Synopsys. Had a great conversation with us.
Well, first publicly with Sassine Ghazi, the current CEO of Synopsys on an ACQ2 episode a little while back. And then we chatted to prep for this episode and basically asked the question, what should we be asking Dr. Chang about? We got some similar notes from Rene Haas, who is the CEO of Arm.
Great conversation with Sir Peter Bonfield, a current TSMC board member and former CEO of British Telecom. David, I know you've got a few also.
Also to Wally Rines, the former CEO of Mentor Graphics. Wally is a legend in the semiconductor industry, almost on par with Dr. Cheng. They were contemporaries at TI back in the day. And to John Bathgate and Britton Johns from NZS Capital, our go-to...
folks on anything semiconductors they were I think they were more excited even more excited than we were that we were doing this so that we got to talk to them about it yes also past acquired guests I think that episode holds up really well where we did you know semiconductor and complexity theory with them Totally.
And actually, John is the one originally who explained to me how EUV lasers work, which is still one of the most impressive accomplishments in human history. To John from the Asianometry YouTube channel. This is just an incredible channel all about semiconductors and about... how all of this stuff works.
I mean, I learned so much about CMOS sensors, about how they make the actual silicon wafers themselves. That's a sophisticated process before the etching even starts. He's just got some awesome, awesome videos on the Asianometry YouTube channel and very kindly bought David and I dinner and hung out with us the night before the interview, which was very fun to do in Taipei. Very fun.
Also to Tim Culpin, a former Bloomberg journalist who now has a substack called Culpium. Also gave us some great topics to chat about. And lastly, as always, to Arvind Navaratnam at Worldly Partners. He did a great, great write-up on TSMC that he'll be posting publicly soon. right before we post this episode so you all can see it.
It was great last-minute prep for me after reading the memoir to get someone else's take on what makes this company so special. And actually, some of the stats that we threw out in our playbook came straight out of his write-up. So if you want more and kind of a more analytical view of how did TSMC become TSMC, he's got a great study on that that we'll link to in the show notes. So...
If you like this episode, go check out other Semiconductor episodes. NVIDIA, we've got four of them at this point. One of them is an interview with Jensen, and then we've got the whole history of the company across three different episodes. We did a great live episode several years ago on Qualcomm, which I think is a sleeper pick.
That's right. That's right. Total sleeper pick. Amazing story. Erwin Jacobs, one of the greatest entrepreneurs in American history.
Yes. And our diving into how CDMA works was one of the most fun technical explanations I've ever done on an Acquired episode. So if you want to understand how all of our cell phones work, go check out the Qualcomm episode. Or of course, if you did not last week, listen to the TSMC Remastered episode. I don't know how you got this far without listening to that, but you should go listen to that.
After this episode, check out ACQ2. We've been talking about this episode with Synopsys. There's one with Rene Haas from Arm Holdings that we did. It's our most recent episode, so it's spectacular. And if you're interested in semis, go check that out. Come talk about this episode with us in the Slack, acquire.fm slash slack.
And if you want to know when a future episode drops, you can find out, sign up at acquire.fm slash email, and you'll also get episode corrections and hints at what the next episode will be. So with that, listeners, we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.