Johns: Intel should have adopted ARM's IP licensing model for mobile chips
Brinton Johns · Complexity Investing & Semiconductors with NZS Capital (Extended Cut) · Acquired · Nov 3, 2021 · at 25:28
Brinton Johns (NZS Capital) evaluates historical strategy mistakes made by Intel during the mobile semiconductor transition.
0:00 / 0:14exact quote · 14.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“They came down, they came out with a cheaper version of it, but in reality, that's not what they should have done. They should have, you know, actually embraced a totally different business model like arm dead. We're just, they were just selling IP and enabling a whole ecosystem. Instead of trying to take all the profits for themselves.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Brinton Johns
Johns: Major technological shifts require vertical integration rather than horizontal efficiency
“When technology changes, like, I just didn't have a concept for the smartphone. So technology was about to change quite a bit. And in that change, you really want to be vertically integrated because you're not pushing efficiency. You're pushing sort of product…”
Johns: Leaving money on the table maximizes long-term total value
“When you leave money on the table, what you're doing is you're creating goodwill for your customers and you're buying the company duration, which is oftentimes the way to maximize total value, right?”
Johns: Emergent behavior makes exact future predictions useless
“We don't know how the future is going to unfold because the system is interacting together, and it creates what's called emergent behavior, and emergent behavior makes predicting useless in most cases, and we can have guidelines and heuristics, and those are a…”
Johns: Investing should prioritize biological resilience over predicting the future
“You know, it's really more about resilience than it is about predicting the future. And it's about adaptability. Like biology doesn't really care that much about the future. They care about adapting to this wide range of futures, right? Like my bees don't real…”
Johns: Investment 'conviction' is just a synonym for overconfidence and sunk-cost bias
“We use conviction as a synonym for overconfidence. I think that's what Really is the right way to, that's the right way to think about it. Conviction for us means, hey, I've done a ton of work, so I've got a lot of sunk costs, which means I've got bias, and I …”