Interview with David Sun from Kingston Technology

More than that, but I'm talking about shipment of the server by May 30th. I think the 30th is the... already at least equal to total last year. You know, iPhone, you just use iPhone, right? You have all these apps people download, download, download. When you do all these apps, they have to have a server to offload, to get the buy-sell, buy-sell. So they just enter Google. It's amazing how much server they... Which proportion of memory is for Intel or Mac? I don't know. Data available? Sorry, we follow whoever. We are very flexible. I think the percentage will be the same as whatever the CPU. I think basically they all have 16 slots or they have 32 slots. ARM is obsolete? I don't know.

How Kingston started? By luck. Yeah, 1987. I'll give a short version, but I can tell you personally later if you want an hour. Pure luck. In 1987, I had nothing to do. My partner and I sold our previous company in 1985-86, worked there for two years, then resigned. We had nothing to do. Long story short, we put the money in the stock market and lost everything on Black Monday in 1987. We didn't go broke, but lost 80% of what we earned. So we needed to start again. Then a friend called me and said, 'David, you're an engineer. Yesterday memory was $200, today it's $600. Come over and see.' At that time, memory was one chip at a time put in a socket. He showed me a module like this, said it was 256K, why is it $600? I had no idea; I'd never seen a chip on a module. That was the evolution of technology. I looked and said I don't know. I found out it's a chip on a PCB. It's simple. Instead of chips flat, they put them vertically to shrink the motherboard. So I said, 'Let me do it for you.' I soldered it and gave it to him. He asked how much, I said no charge, maybe $100 because it took me 10 minutes. He needed two, I built two. That guy was a dealer. He started breaking the market by selling at $200 instead of $600. All the dealers only sold PCs, so they didn't care about memory. They spread the word. People started calling me. I sold at $225, then $250, then $450. I sold thousands and made so much money on that stupid thing. It was so easy. I hired my son, who was in seventh grade, to solder them. I paid him 50 cents each. He loved it. Every day I had 20 pieces. I had to deliver because I needed cash. I sold at $450 with $200 cost. I made more money on one gigabyte. Today, after 23 years, we still do the same thing. It was pure luck. We had a monopoly for four or five years because no engineer wanted to do something that easy. There's no engineering involved. You can't build a bad memory module if you buy good chips and put them on a little PCB. That's all. Pure luck.