It is a mild pet peeve of mine these titles which make it sound like these entrepreneurs weren't doing anything before starting their reputation making companies.
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
The main point I see is the age beyond its background in a "very young oriented" startup community. Just see YC.
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.
> I don't think it is important that he went to MIT or work for a specific company such as TI.
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.
I am not talking about semiconductors in particular but entrepreneurship.
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.
Entrepreneurship in semiconductors is its own world. Perhaps to a lesser degree, pharmaceuticals, but it’s a valid consideration that credentials and background help overcome barriers when needing to raise massive amounts of money to get started.
The funny thing is that in less open societies, connections are almost everything in entrepreneurship, off course it also means you need to know how to leverage it.
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.
Very hot take for these types of forums, but credentials and connections matter a lot. Maybe they matter less the closer you get to America, but having a degree from MIT or equivalent, opens up enormous doors in the East. So, I would argue, if he “just had the knowledge” the odds would be against him.
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.
My argument was to balance against the age because it is purely neglected in the startup community. Connections and trust could be built around the world, including the United States.
> 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.
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.
I don't think GP is saying that a clueless nobody could just "wing it", but that there are plenty of good engineering schools that aren't MIT. You won't get the same connections as you would at MIT, but you still learn all about the Shockley Ideal Diode Equation.
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.
Hopefully a channel like Asianometry can shed more light on the political nuances that helped them and why such a thing could not happen in other countries. The blank check, fast decision making and having the right limited geography and talent had to be leveraged, and good leadership was the catalyst needed.
There's something that always amuses me about these articles, in that I think they serve as some sort of inspiration porn for people who are getting older but aren't successful. Look! A 55 year old did this! You can, too.
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.
> I'm not sure why I feel this way. I feel very strongly that people can reinvent themselves.
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."
I much prefer this to the typical path of the celebrated founder:
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
Statistically, the smartest person in a cohort of five million has an IQ of roughly 180. Above-average 45 year olds are not competing with 20 year olds with IQ's of 180. They may cooperate, but they tend to work in different problem spaces, much like how a streetball player isn't in direct competition with LeBron James even though they're both basketball players.
IQ as commonly indicated includes an age adjustment, so in this case their IQs would be similar before adjustment. They would be cooperating with each other usually, not competing.
I got fit after 40 and my fitness level keeps increasing now that I'm nearing 50, endurance sports are now part of my life.
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 :).
And still you are so insecure that you have to brag about how "the most beautiful women" have their eyes on you. It's not radical change, I think professionals call it midlife crisis. ;)
I’m rooting for the guy you replied to, sorry. Turning around a condition of obesity and required medication into cardiovascular fitness at the age of 40 is radical. The self-worship is a bit unnecessary, sure, but it’s not like his positive self-image comes at your expense by telling you that you have no discipline—in fact the whole comment ends with a motivational note. The interpretation of malice, especially by quoting the part on attracting women, is what reeks of insecurity, really.
Cynically you can see that as bragging, but it's just common sense if you dig into it.
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.
The fact that we have a phrase (mid-life crisis) for radical change later in life, should clue people into the fact that some significant portion of older people are capable of change. Most new businesses in the US are started by people over 40 is another hint.
Since when did doing endurance sports start making people "look like a model"? As someone from an endurance sports background who went more into HIIT/weightlifting/martial-arts, doing insane long distances and endurance events make you really lean and skinny, but they don't make you look like a model, and being really lean doesn't tend to attract women (in my experience).
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.
There are also plenty of examples of folks coming from nothing as well. Ray Kroc [1] worked a variety of odd jobs, his final one was a door to door milkshake mixer salesman before discovering/founding McDonalds, at 52. Looking at the most successful, it seems like the greatest common denominator is simply having a very good/novel idea, and generally also a silver tongue.
> if you want to be successful when you're older, it helps to try and be successful when you're younger.
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.
No doubt about it, but the article is talking about a hypersuccessful megacompany (that manufactures 60% the world's microchips) compared to other megacompanies in tech. I'd also point out that we are talking about hardware which is always, always harder than software. Show me a famous purely hardware company founded by a 19 year old college drop out.
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.
> David: This may be the craziest part about the whole TSMC founding story. I'm 99.9% sure, Ben, you do not know this. Do you know what the pre-money valuation was on TSMC?
> 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.
I wonder if there are few things going on here. If TSMC was a success then he would be well enough rewarded and not everyone wants to be a billionaire. Then there is the reduced influence from having no equity. I guess if Chang was dependent on government support and confident in his ability to influence government then having some equity makes little difference?
The ageism in this industry is so profound that this kind of thing is somehow either surprising or notable to people. In serious engineering professions, industry and life experience and age are considered pre-reqs to advancement. And it used to be like this in computing, too.
The Taiwanese government funded the project and certainly contributed to unblock problems, but why are you singling out in this case the importance of funding and who are the investors in detriment of who is actually making things possible?
The govt gave an already successful man to jump start their tech .. hmm not to big of a stretch .. he got handed a blank check to do what he built his whole life todo .
