Shelley Rigger

You know, and it's also a very Taiwanese thing to do, right?

To say, I don't need a brand.

I don't need my company to be famous.

I don't need for anybody to say, ooh, that's a TSMC chip in there.

I just need to get really, really good at doing something

And selling a lot of it to customers who they can worry about the marketing and the branding.

And if your CEO gets in trouble, then suddenly nobody wants to buy your stuff.

Like, I don't want to worry about any of that.

I just want to make chips that are going to be great and everybody's going to want them.

And that's actually a really Taiwanese kind of way to look at it.

I don't think it's a sort of deep cultural trait.

I think it's what Taiwanese manufacturers learned from being contract manufacturers for international brands in the early years of their export-oriented manufacturing boom.

So like I said, you heard the brands I listed, Adidas, Schwinn, Mattel.

None of these are Taiwanese, right?

Right.

We never heard of a Taiwanese brand until Acer, Asus, and Giant Bicycles.

So it wasn't something that Taiwanese manufacturers thought they could do or even felt was necessary because they were doing really well doing contract manufacturing, meaning selling to someone else.

Right.

And so I think maybe Morris Chang's mind was available for that concept in a way that someone who came up at Texas Instruments or IBM, their mind was not available for that concept.

Well, I'm going to make it worse for you because it's not just the chips that are made on this tiny island, right?