I’m a big Karl Popper fan. Coming from scientific & engineering training, going through entrepreneurship and then switching to the dark side that’s called venture capital investment, today I hold this quote of his dear to my heart: “Science may be described as the art of systematic oversimplification.” ― Karl Popper…

New just came out that Sequoia and Paradigm bought $1.15B worth of stakes from Citadel Securities, founded by hedge fund giant Ken Griffin. In light of the recent move by Sequoia to a one-fund model, most journalists see this as a natural move for the now SEC-registered asset management company…

In my blogpost back in June 2021 « Capital is not the problem in building semiconductor fabs », I pointed out that access to highly skilled labors/slaves was a more critical issue than capital in the semiconductor industry today. Recently the Wall Street Journal finally ran a piece « Chip…

Another point in the fantastic podcast about Morris & TSMC by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal at Acquired that could be a bit better thought through was the question about how TSMC plans to finance its capex. Back in April, TSMC announced that it would spend at least $100B in…

[Edit 2021/9/22: I have left Taiwan for too long that I forgot that there’s another weird thing called “stock dividends” as opposed to “cash dividends”. This contributed to the growth of total outstanding shares similar to the US stock-splitting. I’ll update the paragraphs below to reflect this. …

It’s been a while since I wrote about the S-1 forms of any startups. Not that I didn’t continue to read them during my breakfasts. It ‘s just that I haven’t seen anything to write home about. TOAST’s, however, is kind of interesting, as it brings up my age-old question…

In financial journalism, there’s this tradition for the journalists to disclose whether he/she is personally long or short the stocks mentioned in the articles. The idea is to let the readers know whether his/her views on these stocks could be biased due to personal interest involved. It is also claimed…

Many governments today talk about semiconductor as a national security matter and are hoping to provide financial incentives in hope of TSMC building (and operating) fabs in their countries. So far TSMC only committed to Arizona and expressed interest in building fabs in Kumamoto, Japan — at least in public…

Today our portfolio company Gideon Brothers announced their $31M Series A, led by Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT) and joined by DB Schenker, Prologis Ventures and Rite-Hite. Since our first investment in Gideon Brothers in 2018, I’ve worked very closely with co-founder/CEO Matija Kopić and the team to tackle their challenges…