Morris Chang failed his PhD exam twice, then built TSMC

Transcript

This guy failed his PhD exam twice then built a $2 trillion chip company, Meet Morris Chang. In 1955, MIT posts the results of its PhD exam and Morris looks for his name. It isn't there for the second time, and there's no third try. So he takes a job on a factory line making transistors, a word he's never heard. To get up to speed, he teaches himself the physics at night, sometimes two pages in evening. At Texas Instruments, almost every transistor he makes for IBM breaks. He works until midnight for four months, until his line beats IBM's own factory. Then at 52 after rising to run Texas Instruments chips, he's sidelined and quits with nothing lined up. At 54, Taiwan asked him to build a chip company for a fraction of his old pay. So in 1987, he starts TSMC, a factory that builds chips for other chip companies. The problem is, every chip company makes its own, so nobody needs him. And for four years, TSMC barely survives. But it never sells its own chips, so customers trust it with their designs. Now anyone can start a chip company without a $100 million factory, and hundreds do. Business picks up, and TSMC pours its profits into the most advanced chips. So Apple's iPhone chips and Nvidia's AI chips are made there. And 39 years later, the factory nobody needed is worth $2 trillion.

Transcribed automatically from the video, so small errors are possible.