Morris Chang / Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing

Tom's student Nun-Sen Tsai (welding heat flow thesis) becoming one of Chang's right hands at TSMC, but losing the succession to a Stanford materials-and-business student. Used as the closing example of MIT producing technicians-to-leaders rather than leaders. ## Figures referenced (not cases)

This is one of the wonderful things about an MIT education. We teach you exactly what you need to know about the technology. And then someone from somewhere else is going to run the business. To give you a very specific example: one of my students from Taiwan who did a great thesis in welding heat flow, Nun-Sen Tsai, went on to become — he and one other guy from Stanford were the two right-hand people of Morris Chang. Anybody know who Morris Chang is? I think he's still alive. He founded Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. They are the merchant foundry that grows 80% of all the silicon in the world, and they are now a multi-billion-dollar company. Morris Chang had been at AT&T Bell Labs, and he got some money out of some venture capitalist in Taiwan, and they decided around late 1980s to start this worldwide merchant foundry for growing silicon. Intel, Motorola, anybody you can think of — the Taiwanese were growing silicon cheaper than anybody else. They took over most of the world market for growing the silicon single crystals, and became very wealthy.