TSMC was founded by Morris Chang when he was 55 years old
wsj.com
wsj.com
He had already gotten a masters at MIT and a phd from Stanford. From his Wikipedia:
During his 25-year career (1958–1983) at Texas Instruments, he rose up in the ranks to become the group vice president responsible for TI's worldwide semiconductor business.[13] In the late 1970s, when TI's focus turned to calculators, digital watches and home computers, Chang felt like his career focused on semiconductors was at a dead end at TI.[2]
Chang left TI and later became president and chief operating officer of General Instrument Corporation (1984–1985).[14]
So he was already running massive companies by that point anyway haha
It's like learning how many people 55 are meeting online and getting married, or starting an exercise program and doing some event, etc.
someone is setting an example, and this documents it.
It is obvious that you cannot build a company such as TSMC coming from nowhere. I don't think it is important that he went to MIT or work for a specific company such as TI. He could study and work in less known places but could had the knowledge, drive and was in the right place to start a business. He is an entrepreneur.
Paul Graham tried to add a bit of nuance to your point in a recent essay[1]: "The empirical evidence is clear on this. If you look at where the largest numbers of successful startups come from, it's pretty much the same as the list of the most selective universities.
I don't think it's the prestigious names of these universities that cause more good startups to come out of them. Nor do I think it's because the quality of the teaching is better. What's driving this is simply the difficulty of getting in. You have to be pretty smart and determined to get into MIT or Cambridge, so if you do manage to get in, you'll find the other students include a lot of smart and determined people."
Also check out the footnote he wrote for the above paragraph. Not that we all take pg's word as startup gospel, but his main point is that connections matter much more than the (final degree) credential.
America is the most successful entrepreneurial country. full stop.
Neither Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak (at "that" time), Zuckerberg (also, at "that" time), Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and many that are funded by Peter Thiel had undergraduate degrees.
There is a bias and/or cultural regarding entrepreneurship. There is an spectrum between "lifestyle business" and PG/YC definition of a startup. You can be very successful with a company in between and it could perfectly considered a startup or an small and medium-sized entreprises.
I don't see how the alternative could realistically work. The options are limited. You need very specific type of connections, network, and background for this.
Maybe it didn't have to be this combination specifically but there are very few alternatives that position you for this opportunity. TSMC isn't something you can bootstrap or hack together as an entrepreneur.
That's where big name schools come into play. It's not about the knowledge. It's the networking, recognition, and connections. Connections are a very scarce resource just like gold is.
Hiroshi Yamauchi moved Nintendo to playing cards to electronics on its middle forties. Going to the south and taking away age, Argentina created several unicorns: Auth0, MercadoLibre, Uala, and Satellogic. Galperin studied in USA but Eugenio Pace only studied in Argentina and worked at Microsoft, part in USA. Satellogic founders don't have undegraduate degrees.
On this argument I departed from the idea about age and/or studies and/or previous connections and/or place. It is indisputable that US is the top entrepreneurial country in the world and the one with the most opportunities but to learn the entrepreneurial subject (the top topic in YC/HN) itself you can see further.
Not necessarily a positive thing, because it is the same group of politico-business class that capture the same ideas and innovations for themselves. If you have ever seen Shark tank India you will understand what I am saying.
In that respect US Silicon Valley culture seemed like a breath of fresh air, however I feel there are only certain specific combinations of history, economics and culture that enabled this. I doubt it is really possible to bootstrap new crazy ideas easily, one because incumbents are not as laggards as before.
I don't think your take is grounded in reality. The man lived through the tech sector age, and was right there at the exec table of a company that represented the semiconductor industry. For that to happen, he had to build up his academic background.
This isn't something a clueless tech bro is able to get right by winging it on the fly and delivering TEDx talks. You need to know what you are doing, and what you need to have in place.
Taiwanese government gave Morris Chang blank check to build Taiwanese chip industry and provided 48 percent of the funding. Li Kwoh-ting (economist and politician, "Father of Taiwan's Economic Miracle") transformed Taiwan from agricultural society into tech-giant. Without Li, there would be no TSMC. Early on Taiwanese government decided to focus on two areas: plastics and electronics. Both paid off, but electronics really took off.
[1] https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/Chip-War/Chris-Mill...
Ah - computer fans! They are everywhere in Taiwan, I've seen them on food carts for ventilation ;)
But then you dig in, and you see that they were high powered execs before, or they had founded companies that were mid-level successes.
I'm not sure why I feel this way. I feel very strongly that people can reinvent themselves. But I think there's some important context that's often skipped over: if you want to be successful when you're older, it helps to try and be successful when you're younger.
Me ! The obese slob on a bunch of pills for heart and kidney conditions and getting ready to die. All it took was to accidentally meet the person who showed me the way.
After dozens of mountain peaks climbed, thousands of km ridden on the bike and buckets of sweat left in yoga classes, I now look like a model and I have women's eyes on me each time I look around. The most beautiful too, because they know what it takes.
Radical change is possible and from what I've seen, some people just take a bit longer to wake up to their true potential.
Believing that you have what it takes is all it takes :).
The ones that are not fit are intimidated and look away, because they stand no chance (I know because I was like that too). The 'beautiful' ones are the ones that do the hard work to stay in shape, so they know and are interested in people who do the same.
The term 'midlife crisis' is ridiculous tbh, forget it, there's no crisis, it's called growing up and becoming a man.
Brutal and spot on tho. (especially after reading their reply to yours)
Again, based solely on experience, quality women aren't actually indexing on men's bodies, it's a plus only. But for those women who are over-indexing on men's bodies, they prefer muscle size (up to a point) along with being "ripped", i.e. cut, visibile muscles. But again, I would emphasize, when women (or men) select the opposite where looks/body is the primary differentiator, they tend to be shallow across the board.
I'd turn it the other way around. These inspirational stories tend to be extremely biased towards young, no-career, highly-driven, high-hope types who had a hail Mary shot that they took and paid off in someway or another.
It also doesn't help that most of these success stories are self-promotion pieces that overblow the success angle even when it's a miserable easily avoidable failure.
In that sense, it's a breath of fresh air to see a success story that focuses on someone who went for a masters, followed by a PhD, followed by a long career in a growing sector climbing the corporate ladder up to the very top, followed by leading multiple companies, and finally creating the company that disrupts a market. We already have too many stories on random clueless individuals hitting the jackpot due to sheer luck in a once in a lifetime shot, and there is absolutely no value in life lessons that boil down to "do like me, and buy the winning lottery ticket."
1) Be young 2) Go to Stanford / MIT / Harvard 3) Drop out after freshman autumn 4) Get ludicrous funding via family connections 5) Crash & burn because you're about as knowledgeable as one would expect a kid fresh out of high school to be
The smartest and wisest in a cohort of several million could easily be on par with a moderately above average 45 year old.
Sure it’s unusual for folks to bet on a moderately average 45 year old, but not that unusual. I would say that it’s mostly earned.
Of course there are those, not as capable, taking loans from rich relatives, but I doubt they make up the majority of cases.
It's more like: If you weren't successful yet, there's usually a reason why, and that reason usually doesn't disappear. People and situations can change, but big changes are statistically unlikely, which is why historical performance is predictive.
But on an individual level, if the reasons for lack of success are addressed, the past becomes much less predictive of the future, because the underlying causal factors that generate outcomes have changed. That person may as well be a different person at that point.
Research: The Average Age of a Successful Startup Founder Is 45 https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-succes...
discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18212409
That’s not something you’re going to hear from someone in their 20s or 30s, even a few decades ago. This is an attitude that you develop as you get older and become more experienced. It also helps if you’ve already checked a lot of boxes along the way (family, success, and so on).
Sure, Chang was the right person at the right place at the right time, but TSMC could only be built by someone in their 50s. Someone who understood from experience that the work is more important than the accolades because they lived it.
Incredible story end to end.
> Ben: No, I couldn't find that anywhere.
> David: It was $0. Morris Chang got no equity. Zero.
> Ben: So 100% of the company was owned by the investors?
> David: Fifty percent by the government and the other 50% were owned by the investors. Morris got nothing.
> Ben: And just got to keep his salary.
> David: He was a government employee.
> Ben: Wow.
> David: There by the grace of the government.
> Ben: Oh my God.
> David: Isn't that unbelievable? This is so the opposite of Silicon Valley.
It's gotten worse over the last 20 years.