Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, I appreciate you were saying that. We open sourced the models, we open sourced the weights, we open sourced the data, we open sourced how we created it. Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. It’s really incredible. You’re originally from Taiwan and have a close relationship with TSMC. So I have to ask TSMC I think also is a legendary company in terms of the engineering teams, in terms of the incredible engineering work that they do. What do you understand about TSMC culture and their approach that explains how they’re able to achieve this singular unmatched success in everything they’re doing with semiconductors? You know, first of all, the deepest misunderstanding about TSMC is that their technology is all they have. That somehow they have a really great transistor, and if somebody shows up another transistor, game over. It’s the technology and, of course, you know, I don’t mean just the transistor, the metallization systems, the packaging, the 3D packaging, the silicon photonics, the, you know, all of the technology that they have. That technology is really what makes the company special. Their technology makes the company special. But their ability to orchestrate the demands, the dynamic demands of hundreds of companies in the world as they’re moving up, shifting out, you know, increasing, decreasing, pushing out, pulling in, changing from customer to customer, wafer starting, wafer stopping, emergency wafer starts, you know, all of this dynamics of the world’s complexity as the world is shape-shifting all the time, and somehow they’re running a factory with high throughput, high yields, really great costs, excellent customer service. They take their promises seriously. They, when your wafer—because they know that they’re helping you run your company—when the wafers were promised to show up, the wafers show up, you know, so that you could run your company appropriately. And so their system, their manufacturing system is completely miraculous, I would say. Then the second thing is their culture. This culture is simultaneously technology focused on one hand, advancing technology; simultaneously customer service oriented on the other hand. A lot of companies are very customer service oriented, but they’re not very technology excellent. They’re not at the bleeding edge of technology. There are a lot of companies who are tech, at the bleeding edge of technology, but they’re not the best customer service oriented company. And so it just depends on somehow they’ve, they’ve balanced these two and they’re world-class at both. And then probably the third thing is the technology that I most value in them that they created this, you know, this, this intangible called trust. I trust them to put my company on top of them. That’s a very big deal.…

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