Dylan Patel: belief

Transcript context

…It's because it's very compartmentalized. Back in the 2000s, before SMIC got big, it was actually much more open and more flat. After that, after Liang Mong Song and after all the Samsung issues and after SMIC's rise, you literally saw— You should tell that story, actually, about the TSMC guy that went to Samsung and SMIC and all that. I think you should tell that story. There are two stories. There's a guy who ran a semiconductor company in Taiwan called Worldwide Semiconductor. This guy, Richard Chang, was very religious. All the TSMC people are pretty religious. He particularly was very fervent and wanted to bring religion to China. So after he sold his company to TSMC—which was a huge coup for TSMC—he worked there for about eight or nine months and then went back to China. Back then, the relations between China and Taiwan were much more different. So he goes over to Shanghai and they say, “We'll give you a bunch of money." Richard Chang basically recruits a whole conga line of Taiwanese who just get on the plane and fly over. Generally that’s actually true of a lot of the acceleration points within China’s semiconductor industry. It’s from talent flowing from Taiwan. The second story is about Liang Mong Song. Liang Mong Song is a nut. I’ve not met him. I’ve met people who worked with him and they say he is a nut. He's probably on the spectrum. He doesn't care about people, business, or anything. He wants to take it to the limit. That’s the only thing he cares about. He worked at TSMC, a literal genius with 300 patents or whatever, 285. He works his way all the way to the top tier and then one day he loses out on some power game within TSMC and gets demoted.…

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