Morris Chang, every mention
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tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone David Rosenthal 161Ben Gilbert 27John Bathgate 2Brinton Johns 2Michael Lewis 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Morris Chang comes up
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis) · Acquired
- ▶ 6:53 Michael Lewis I think it might have been the Morris Chang, uh, episode.
- ▶ 1:55:04 Ben Gilbert We were sitting down with Morris Chang, and he was talking about TSMC, and he told us that one of the ways that they aired was trying to exit the integrated circuit market, or diversify from that market, and go into solar.
- ▶ 2:25:54 David Rosenthal Uh, the other one, um, Morris Chang's Autobiography.
- ▶ 2:45:06 Ben Gilbert You'll notice that this was not just David and I setting up a few cameras like we've done with Steve Ballmer or Morris Chang.
Indian Premier League Cricket (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 4:16:12 David Rosenthal I mean, I guess Morris Chang and TSMC too, although Morris over time did get quite a significant stake in TSMC through equity grants and Dee, I think got paid quite a bit at Visa too.
Rolex (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 0:22 Ben Gilbert Well, fun fact for listeners, the watch that David is wearing is the one that I was wearing during the Morris Chang interview.
- ▶ 3:14:37 David Rosenthal He's the Morris Chang of Omega.
- ▶ 3:22:44 David Rosenthal But they also were like Jensen or, or, or Morris were like, well, yeah, I bet the company, but I knew I'd be right.
- ▶ 3:59:09 David Rosenthal And now is a good time, I think, to bring up, there's one more piece of Rolex, the corporation, uh, and the story, which for the longest time, I think both of us were totally puzzled by, and when we were in Taipei to interview Morris in…
TSMC · Acquired
- ▶ 2:56 David Rosenthal Morris Chang is
- ▶ 4:51 David Rosenthal Okay, speaking of, we start in Ningbo, China, in July, 1931, just about one year after Warren Edward Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and there are going to be quite a few parallels here as we go through this episode, but in July,…
- ▶ 5:49 Ben Gilbert China scale is ridiculous, but certainly wasn't eight million people when Morris was born in 1931.
- ▶ 5:59 David Rosenthal So Morris's father was a county official and later became a bank manager.
- ▶ 6:27 David Rosenthal Then when he was six, the Second Sino-Japanese War breaks out, and Morris and his mom flee the main part of China to Hong Kong, and they go to live in Hong Kong for a few years to escape the air raids and the fighting.
- ▶ 6:56 David Rosenthal And Morris talks about this.
- ▶ 7:29 David Rosenthal Morris, before he turns 18, he has lived through three major wars.
- ▶ 7:39 David Rosenthal So, the next year, in 1949, which is the same year as the establishment of the PRC, the People's Republic of China, Morris turns 18, and with the help of an uncle that he has in Boston, his life completely changes.
- ▶ 8:07 David Rosenthal Morris says much later, my reaction entering Harvard was sheer ecstasy, almost disbelief.
- ▶ 8:57 David Rosenthal So Morris loved it.
- ▶ 9:47 David Rosenthal As we will see, as we will go along, Morris is much more than a finance professional.
- ▶ 10:07 David Rosenthal Which Morris does.
- ▶ 10:17 David Rosenthal So, Morris, our man, has learned the ways of the world.
- ▶ 11:20 David Rosenthal So, after he gets his master's in the three years, Morris wants to stay and do a PhD, fully complete his technical training, but he ends up failing his qualifying exams twice.
- ▶ 11:36 Ben Gilbert And listen to every footage that Morris has ever spoken that has been released publicly to prepare for this.
- ▶ 12:36 Ben Gilbert I'm also sure you can find plenty of data to refute that, but yes, this gives you a sense of who Morris is.
- ▶ 13:13 David Rosenthal Like it's not really on anybody's radar screen, especially Morris's that you're going to go enter the tech industry.
- ▶ 14:03 David Rosenthal And legend has it that Morris asked Ford to beat Sylvania's offer.
- ▶ 14:15 David Rosenthal But, you know, Morris, he's great.
- ▶ 15:30 David Rosenthal Morris, he's on the grind.
- ▶ 15:32 David Rosenthal He gets posted as a junior engineer at Slovenia's Ipswich, Massachusetts plant.
- ▶ 15:43 David Rosenthal So remember, Morris is a mechanical engineer.
- ▶ 15:45 David Rosenthal He doesn't know anything about electrical engineering, but he's working in this new semiconductor division.
- ▶ 15:51 David Rosenthal So after work, he's living in a hotel, by the way.
- ▶ 15:53 David Rosenthal He doesn't even get an apartment.
- ▶ 15:57 David Rosenthal He goes home, back to the hotel from work, and he studies the best textbook that he can find about electrical engineering, which is entitled Electrons and Holes in Semiconductors with Applications to Transistor Electronics, written just…
- ▶ 16:50 David Rosenthal So Morris is just studying the Shockley textbook in his hotel room, but like he's not a college
- ▶ 16:56 David Rosenthal and he doesn't have any teachers.
- ▶ 16:58 David Rosenthal But he's very resourceful.
- ▶ 17:00 David Rosenthal So he figures out that one of the senior engineers at the plant is kind of an alcoholic and hits up the hotel bar almost every night.
- ▶ 17:08 David Rosenthal So what Morris does is he comes home from work in the early evening,
- ▶ 17:13 David Rosenthal He studies in his room for a couple hours, and then later at night when the older colleague shows up at the bar, Morris goes down to the bar not to drink, but he brings the textbook and he asks the guy, he's like, I don't understand this,…
- ▶ 17:31 David Rosenthal Here's the quote he says later.
- ▶ 17:45 David Rosenthal Morris is like rolling hard.
- ▶ 17:47 David Rosenthal He's burning the candle at both ends working and at the bar, but not drinking, uh, learning.
- ▶ 17:54 David Rosenthal But as he like is learning the industry and coming up to speed, it becomes pretty clear to him that if he really wants to go places in this new emerging industry, Sylvania, not really the right bus to be on, so to speak.
- ▶ 18:14 David Rosenthal Morris says the moment when this crystallized for him was, there was a talk that a senior manager at Sylvania gave at the plant, and the quote that the senior manager said that stuck with Morris for the rest of his life was, we at Sylvania…
- ▶ 18:35 David Rosenthal So Morris was like, damn, I gotta get the hell out of here.
- ▶ 18:41 David Rosenthal So like Don, Morris leaves Sylvania for greener pastures.
- ▶ 23:59 David Rosenthal When did Morris Chang join Texas Instruments?
- ▶ 24:16 David Rosenthal Yeah, Morris obviously wasn't working directly with Jack on inventing the IC, but this gives you a sense.
- ▶ 24:29 David Rosenthal So Morris gets assigned as his first project to a sort of problem child within TI.
- ▶ 25:51 David Rosenthal Almost everything coming off the line fails at TI when Morris shows up.
- ▶ 25:57 David Rosenthal So, Morris would say about this later, quote, the supervisor was concerned, the operators were concerned, everybody was concerned.
- ▶ 26:07 David Rosenthal So Morris, remember, he's a mechanical engineer by training.
- ▶ 26:38 David Rosenthal They write, suddenly even TI president Pat Haggerty knew Morris's name.
- ▶ 26:43 David Rosenthal IBM thought Chang had just gotten lucky, but when the company, IBM, sent engineers down to talk to him, Morris described the theories he'd been testing and explained why his experimental process worked.
- ▶ 27:22 David Rosenthal Very, very highly of Morris.
- ▶ 27:44 David Rosenthal And what's Morris making a year?
- ▶ 27:52 David Rosenthal So Morris goes to Stanford, but he's now like a pig in mud.
- ▶ 28:07 David Rosenthal John's like, Morris, tell the students, how did you finish your PhD in two and a half years?
- ▶ 28:11 David Rosenthal Morris is like, I don't know, I was focused.
- ▶ 30:06 David Rosenthal But anyway, so Morris, he's coming up, he's learning, like literally as this whole industry is getting developed, he's right there.
- ▶ 30:31 David Rosenthal So Morris notices what they're doing, setting up these new plants for all these successive new methodologies and processes of manufacturing, you know, at this point, integrated circuits in silicon and pumping out these chips.
- ▶ 31:10 David Rosenthal Morris realizes he's like, that's not actually optimal to do that because as evidenced by his first big win at TI with the IBM line,
- ▶ 32:31 David Rosenthal So, Morris is thinking about this.
- ▶ 32:49 David Rosenthal Well, so here's Morris's quote about this.
- ▶ 33:36 David Rosenthal This is right when Intel's getting founded, so screw Fairchild, screw National, screw, like, TI is kicking all of their butts, and it's thanks to Morris.
- ▶ 36:16 David Rosenthal So on the back of this, Morris gets promoted to VP at TI, one level below the CEO, running the entire semiconductor business.
- ▶ 36:48 David Rosenthal Three different viewpoints, as far as I could identify on what happens next to Morris at TI.
- ▶ 37:19 David Rosenthal Two, second point, which Morris totally acknowledges, TI was a really big company, the semiconductor division.
- ▶ 37:52 David Rosenthal And they're like, oh, Morris is a great manager.
- ▶ 38:00 David Rosenthal Here's Morris's quote on this.
- ▶ 38:31 David Rosenthal Not Morris' strong suit.
- ▶ 39:02 David Rosenthal How much of this is Morris's fault versus his successor?
- ▶ 39:06 David Rosenthal But while Morris was definitely responsible for making TI Semiconductor a powerhouse,
- ▶ 40:11 David Rosenthal And you know, the culture at TI, as shown by Morris's experience, was not like Trader Estate, Silicon Valley, you leave.
- ▶ 40:34 David Rosenthal In 1980, so Morris has already transitioned to consumer products.
- ▶ 41:14 David Rosenthal So Skunk Works project and TI, you know, a couple of years earlier under Morris would have been an obvious candidate.
- ▶ 42:02 David Rosenthal Now, okay, is that Morse's fault?
- ▶ 42:04 David Rosenthal Is that not Morse?
- ▶ 42:43 David Rosenthal He's still regarded super highly in the industry, though, in the semiconductor industry, so people start calling him with opportunities.
- ▶ 42:49 Ben Gilbert And he wants to be a CEO.
- ▶ 42:50 Ben Gilbert I mean, that's what's on his mind.
- ▶ 42:52 David Rosenthal He wanted to be CEO of TI.
- ▶ 42:54 David Rosenthal Like, he wants to be CEO.
- ▶ 42:55 David Rosenthal But he whittles it down to two opportunities he's going to consider.
- ▶ 43:07 David Rosenthal It was based in New York, in Manhattan, in New York City, actually, to go be their COO, the number two there, with an understanding that, like, hey, if things go well in a couple of years, you'll replace the CEO, become the CEO there.
- ▶ 43:22 David Rosenthal So he was weighing the two, I don't know where or how, I couldn't find that out, but he was weighing these two opportunities.
- ▶ 43:28 David Rosenthal The VC idea's gonna come back up in a big way in a second, but obviously he goes with General Instruments, GI.
- ▶ 43:35 David Rosenthal A, his dream is to be CEO.
- ▶ 43:38 David Rosenthal B, he's got this chip on his shoulder from the way TI ended, so.
- ▶ 43:44 David Rosenthal So he goes off to New York, you know, he leaves Texas, lives in Manhattan,
- ▶ 44:23 David Rosenthal Definitely not Morris's cup of tea.
- ▶ 44:25 David Rosenthal So he only stays there a year.
- ▶ 44:29 David Rosenthal So he resigns again.
- ▶ 44:30 David Rosenthal So within less than 18 months, he's had two major setbacks.
- ▶ 44:38 David Rosenthal Basically, you know, his dream is over.
- ▶ 44:39 David Rosenthal Like, here's the quote from him.
- ▶ 44:40 David Rosenthal He says, after these two setbacks at TI and GI, I did not think that my aspiration to be the CEO of a major US company was in the cards.
- ▶ 44:49 David Rosenthal Well, turns out he was right.
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