Dr. Morris Chang
speaker
200 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Dr. Morris Chang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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.
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.
Unlikely in your opinion?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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