Lisa Su: The Personal Mission Driving the Next Era of AI

This week I have something special for you…I released this episode last season but think it deserves another post. Wayne Dai builds his company around a simple order: customers first, employees second, owners last. He is the founder, chairman and CEO of VeriSilicon, a Shanghai chip design company, and he told me how a childhood in Shanghai, a computer lab at Berkeley and a professor’s life shaped the way he treats people. Along the way he talks about why he is against the “996” work schedule, how he hires, and what a toy that tells stories offline says about where AI is going. From farm work in Shanghai to a Berkeley computer lab Wayne grew up in Shanghai near the end of the Cultural Revolution, the oldest of three kids who were sent to school together and learned to be independent early. As a child he swam across the Huangpu River, and since his parents had to sign a permission slip, he signed for them. Before the national exam resumed, he spent three years doing farm work on Chongming Island. When he reached the United States, he had never seen a computer. He chose computer science, he says, mainly for the job: someone told him physics might leave him teaching high school. At Berkeley he and his brother and sister were, in his words, among the first students from mainland China there. He met his wife in the computer lab, and his brother and sister and their spouses all ended up in computer science and semiconductors too. The professor who ran a small company At UC Santa Cruz, Wayne says, a professor in the United States runs something close to a small business. You raise your own funding, you pay your students, and you have six years to earn tenure. Half of the money you bring in goes to the school. The part that stuck with him is picking the right problem. He told his students to choose a topic that will matter when they graduate four or five years later, not the one that is hot today. Solve the first 20 percent of a new problem, he says, and you have solved 80 percent of it. He applied the same instinct when he left campus to build VeriSilicon, and for years he commuted between California and China while still supervising more than ten PhD students. The FCS Rule: Fair, Care, Share Wayne describes VeriSilicon’s culture in three words. Fair: his receptionist and his driver have stock options, which he says is unusual in China. Care: the company cares about employees’ kids, and he says some children tell their parents not to leave. Share: senior people mentor the young ones, so fresh graduates grow fast. He is also against the “996” schedule (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week). From day one, he says, he did not want people missing the years when their kids are three and five. The company has a family day and a summer school, and its New Year party draws about 3,000 people with their families. It started in 2008, when many companies cancelled their holiday parties and he told everyone to bring their kids, with an iPod shuffle for each child as a gift. Integrity first, capability third When Wayne hires, his order is integrity first, attitude second and capability third, because capability can be taught. The process is demanding: from about 10,000 people who take a written exam, around 1,500 are interviewed. Each goes through six rounds, including a technical round, two with HR (one fully in English, since 30 to 40 percent of the business is outside China), and a final interview with him. He has a theory about teams too: start with an A team and it will hire A people, start with B and it will hire C. If the A people leave, he says, that means you are a B and have to change. His CEO shorthand is the same idea in order: C is customer, E is employees, and the owners come last. AI, small models and the big picture Wayne ran an experiment this year: a three-day design contest in which two teams knew AI very well but nothing about chips. They had to use AI tools to do the work. The first results were wrong, and the teams struggled, bu

There is one piece of technology inside nearly every smartphone, PC, car, and AI system on the planet — and most people have no idea it exists. In this episode of A Bit Personal, Jodi Shelton sits down with Rene Haas, CEO of Arm Holdings, to talk about the architecture quietly running the modern world. Rene took the helm at Arm in 2022 after a career that wound through Tensilica, Scintera Networks, and NVIDIA, arriving at the company just as it was preparing for one of the most closely watched IPOs in tech history. We talk about what it took to lead Arm through that transition, what it means to run a business whose designs sit underneath the entire semiconductor industry rather than compete directly in it, and how the explosion of AI has reshaped what customers and investors expect from Arm next. Rene opens up about the bets that shaped his career before Arm, what he's learned about leading a company everyone depends on but few people can name, and how he thinks about Arm's role as the industry's balance of power keeps shifting. This is a conversation about architecture, influence, and what it takes to lead from underneath the products the world actually sees. This video is sponsored by Morgan Stanley.

Christophe Fouquet runs the company that builds the only machines able to print the most advanced AI chips, and when I asked how he handles the pressure, he told me he mostly does not feel it. I sat down with the ASML CEO in the Netherlands for A Bit Personal, and our conversation kept coming back to a few plain ideas: stay curious, take real risks, tell each other the truth, and go home at night. Here is what stayed with me, followed by some reading if you want to go further. If you’re curious about the process of building these chips, I like this video from CNBC that takes you through exactly how it works. This episode is proudly sponsored by J.P. Morgan and Keyser

In this episode of A Bit Personal, Jodi Shelton sits down with Dr. Leo Li, CEO & Chairman of Blue Ocean Smart System (HK) Limited, a titan of the semiconductor industry and a pivotal figure in the globalization of the chip ecosystem. As the first chairman of the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) from mainland China, Leo has spent his career at the intersection of two worlds, leading massive growth and fostering international collaboration. While the industry often focuses on technical specifications, Leo joins us to share the human side of his legacy. He reflects on the "builder’s DNA" he forged working on farms, the resilience required to hold 14 patents, and the leadership philosophy that drove Spreadtrum from $70M to $2B in revenue.

In this special bonus episode of A Bit Personal, Jodi Shelton sits down with Zak Dychtwald, author of Young China and a leading expert on the country’s modern evolution. While the semiconductor world is often viewed through the lens of policy and hardware, Zak helps us understand the story driving China’s massive bet on AI and silicon.Zak examines China’s “90s generation,” a demographic wave of 400 million that global companies can no longer afford to misunderstand.