Taiwan-born Su immigrated to the U.S. as a child. Now she is one of just 26 U.S. self-made women and 26 hired executives to accumulate 10-figure fortunes.
Just two years after joining chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices in 2012, IBM veteran Lisa Su was tapped to take the top job. It was a big promotion for the then 43-year-old, but also a gamble. At the time, the company was floundering. It had laid off around a quarter of its staff and its share price hovered around $2. Patrick Moorhead, a former AMD exec, remembers it as “deader than dead.”
On her second day as CEO, Su stepped up to the microphone during an all-hands call with a message for AMD’s demoralized employees: “I believe that we can build the best,” she told her staff. That message was also step one in her three-pronged plan to fix AMD: Create great products, deepen customer trust and simplify the company. “Three things, just to keep it simple,” she told Forbes in May as part of an in-depth interview. “Because if it’s five or ten, it’s hard.”
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthakroontje/2024/02/07/how-generative-ai-helped-make-amds-lisa-su-a-billionaire/?sh=42657b504dfe
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Just two years after joining chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices in 2012, IBM veteran Lisa Su was tapped to take the top job. It was a big promotion for the then 43-year-old, but also a gamble. At the time, the company was floundering. It had laid off around a quarter of its staff and its share price hovered around $2. Patrick Moorhead, a former AMD exec, remembers it as “deader than dead.”
On her second day as CEO, Su stepped up to the microphone during an all-hands call with a message for AMD’s demoralized employees: “I believe that we can build the best,” she told her staff. That message was also step one in her three-pronged plan to fix AMD: Create great products, deepen customer trust and simplify the company. “Three things, just to keep it simple,” she told Forbes in May as part of an in-depth interview. “Because if it’s five or ten, it’s hard.”
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/samanthakroontje/2024/02/07/how-generative-ai-helped-make-amds-lisa-su-a-billionaire/?sh=42657b504dfe
Forbes Daily Briefing shares the best of Forbes reporting on wealth, business, entrepreneurship, leadership and more. Tune in every day, seven days a week, to hear a new story. Subscribe here: https://art19.com/shows/forbes-daily-briefing
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript
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TechTranscript
00:00 Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Friday, February 9th.
00:05 Today on Forbes, how generative AI helped make AMD's Lisa Su a billionaire.
00:13 Just two years after joining chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, known as AMD, in 2012, IBM
00:19 veteran Lisa Su was tapped to take the top job.
00:23 It was a big promotion for the then 43-year-old, but also a gamble.
00:27 At the time, the company was floundering.
00:30 It had laid off around a quarter of its staff, and its share price hovered around $2.
00:35 Patrick Moorhead, a former AMD executive, remembers it as "deader than dead."
00:43 On her second day as CEO, Su stepped up to the microphone during an all-hands call with
00:48 a message for AMD's demoralized employees, telling her staff, "I believe that we can
00:54 build the best."
00:56 That message was also step one in her three-pronged plan to fix AMD—create great products, deepen
01:03 customer trust, and simplify the company.
01:06 Last May, during an interview with Forbes, she said, "Three things, just to keep it
01:11 simple.
01:12 Because if it's five or ten, it's hard."
01:16 Su had first fallen in love with semiconductors while at MIT.
01:20 Now arriving at AMD, she refocused her engineers on building Intel-beating chips.
01:26 It took a while, but the Taiwan-born engineer's bet eventually paid off.
01:31 In less than a decade, she turned the struggling company into a darling of the chip industry,
01:36 and a $271 billion in-market capitalization enterprise.
01:41 Fast forward to today.
01:43 The tech stock rally of 2024 has made Su, who is the first female chief executive of
01:48 a major semiconductor company, a new billionaire.
01:52 She owns some 4 million shares.
01:54 While that's a tiny 0.2 percent sliver of the company, those shares, along with options
02:00 she's been awarded, account for about three-quarters of her $1.1 billion fortune.
02:05 The remainder comes from the nearly $400 million worth of AMD shares she's sold since 2016,
02:11 before taxes.
02:13 When Forbes featured Su on the cover in May last year, she was worth $740 million.
02:19 AMD's shares have soared by more than 75 percent since then, and by more than a fourth
02:24 since the start of the year.
02:26 That makes Su, who is 54 years old, one of just 26 self-made U.S. women billionaires,
02:32 a group that includes former talk show host and media entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey, Arista
02:37 Networks CEO J. Sri Ullal, and former Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.
02:43 And she's one of just 26 so-called "hired hand" U.S. billionaires, including Ullal
02:47 and Sandberg.
02:50 Su immigrated to New York City from Tainan, Taiwan, when she was three years old with
02:54 her mathematician father and her mother, a bookkeeper turned entrepreneur who launched
02:58 an industrial supplies wholesaler.
03:01 In 2020, she told an interviewer, "I would say I'm a New Yorker at heart."
03:07 She also said she was always somewhat involved in math and science.
03:10 She chose to study electrical engineering at MIT because it seemed to be the hardest
03:14 major, and while there, picked up three degrees in the subject, a bachelor's, master's,
03:19 and a PhD.
03:20 It was during her freshman year at MIT that she first began doing research in a semiconductor
03:25 lab.
03:26 In that same 2020 interview, she said, "I was actually making small devices, and it
03:32 was amazing to me that you could actually do that.
03:34 Since then, semiconductors have been my passion."
03:38 Before joining AMD as a senior vice president and general manager for the company's global
03:42 business, she worked at IBM for 13 years in various engineering roles and then moved to
03:48 Freescale Semiconductor in Austin, Texas, taking on multiple leadership positions, including
03:53 chief technology officer.
03:54 A technically savvy researcher, she focused on developing chips with the highest performance
03:59 processors on the market, ones that could beat out its competitors in multiple criteria.
04:05 For Sue's guidance, AMD engineers took three years of tinkering to create the super-fast
04:10 Zen chip architecture, which it launched in 2017.
04:14 By 2020, that chip design was a market leader in terms of speed, and new business followed.
04:20 AMD has since partnered with NASA, Microsoft, Meta, Lenovo, Oracle, and Dell Technologies.
04:28 If you're interested in learning more about Lisa Sue, be sure to look out for our Forbes
04:32 Talks interview with editor, Cary Dolan.
04:35 For full coverage, check out Samantha Kroonje's piece on Forbes.com.
04:41 This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.
04:43 Thanks for tuning in.
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