So, back to that pinch me moment. Lisa, you have to tell us if you were ever at any point leading this company and you thought about that possibility. Something tells me you were just going straight ahead. But at any point, did that kind of enter, especially when Nvidia, another chip company, was the first to become five trillion dollars?
Well, first I have to say, you know, a big thank you to Madame First Lady for bringing us together in Imperia. I think it's an incredible initiative to have and I have to tell you my personal story with Madame First Lady. She has led many, many initiatives but one in particular that I had an opportunity to be a part of was her AI education initiative. And with all the conversation about AI right now, I have to say it was incredibly impactful to just have her on the stage. So I want to say again thank you for having all of us here.
Now, to your question, Liz, she's a unicorn. First female-led company.
I would say thank you very much for the comments. It's really quite special. But look, I'm an engineer. I started out as an engineer. I went to school for engineering and my whole thing in life was, you know, can I build something that matters? Can I build products that matter? Can I build a company that matters? And that's really what has been driving me when I think about when I wake up in the morning, what I get really excited about is the technology that we're building is making an impact on people's lives. And you know that when you think about the things that you can do in life, that's a pretty exciting thing for me to be able to do. So, the fact that semiconductors and chips are now so front and center, when I started 30 years ago, Liz, nobody talked about chips. People are like, chips? What are chips? Semiconductor chips. And now I think when you think about everything that powers our lives, whether it's the economy or national security, semiconductors are a big piece of that. And so I'm really super lucky to be part of this industry.
Well, how many of us in this audience starting a couple of years ago had to look up GPU, graphic processing units, and CPU? It's a huge difference. AMD does both of them. A lot of other companies just do one or the other and I think that is what your helming of this company has made it so valuable. That said, before we even talk about your journey as a female business leader, give us a sense of your childhood because you came to this country from Taiwan at age... Well, I asked her, I said it was two, right? Age two. She said two, three, I don't remember. But your parents came.
And you ended up in Queens, New York.
Well, yeah. Look, my father came here to the United States, Columbia, for graduate school. He brought the family and, you know, it's like the typical American dream thoughts in the sense that he wanted a better life for his family. And so, yeah, I grew up in New York. I would say as typical Asian parents are, it was, you know, school is very, very important. And so I became very much a math and science person.
But were you expected to get all A's?
I was, but I didn't. Liz, I was like a B+.
I remember watching an episode of Glee where somebody, an Asian student said, 'I got a B.' And they said, 'B? That's an Asian F. It's an Asian F.'
The truth is, I have to say growing up in New York for all of us New Yorkers, it was just a tremendous experience getting to know lots of different people. And from that standpoint, yeah, it taught you something about ambition, to be ambitious.
So at the youngest age that you can remember, when did you realize that you had a penchant for science, for understanding how things mechanically worked?
Well, I have to say that I was pretty curious as a kid and perhaps the one thing that I remember is my brother had this remote controlled car that would be going up and down our hallways and one day it stopped working. And I was like, why did it stop working? It was really unusual. And I actually took it apart and realized that there was a wire that was loose and connected it and it started working again. And I was like, wow, this is really interesting. And I think look, my love is doing things that you can touch and feel. Like the idea that you can build something and you can walk down to the Best Buy and it's sitting there and you can say, 'Hey, I contributed to that product.' Those are the things that I enjoy.
Well, you know, in the 70s growing up, were you cognizant of the fact that when you decided to go into science that you were probably a unicorn in the forest? Very, very rare to see a lot of young girls interested in science and engineering, pulling things apart and putting them back together again.
Well, it turns out that I went to the Bronx High School of Science here in the city and there were other women, Liz. There were other women. Maybe unicorn, I don't know. I would say unicorn. It was certainly the idea what I learned, what my parents always kind of said was like at the end of the day you just have to work hard and be good at what you do. And the beauty of science is it's kind of black and white, like either the thing works or it doesn't work, the product works or it doesn't work, your idea is good or it's not good. And that's kind of the way I've always kind of grown up with this idea of you will be judged on your merits and if you have a good idea, then people will listen to it.
You ended up going to MIT. Let's fast forward to that first job or the second job at Texas Instruments, one of the first mini calculator makers. That's what I remember. They made those handheld calculators. But what was your first job there? And how excited, how daunted were you? There are a lot of people who anticipate that women, and it's not necessarily true today because there are so many gutsy young little girls out there, but that women get that first opportunity and they're concerned about making a mistake. Were you?
So I have to say the way I first got into semiconductors was actually in college. My very first summer job was in an undergraduate research group where I was working in a semiconductor lab for the first time. I didn't know what semiconductors were but I needed a job and it paid like I don't know $5 an hour or something and I did grunt work for a graduate student who was building things and that was how I first got into semiconductors. After that I was like, oh, I love this thing. I'm going to keep doing this thing. But to your question, I think that's true. I think we're all of this nature of we want to be good at what we do and you may not necessarily know the answer, actually most of the time you don't know the answer. And so I actually spent, I was at TI and then I spent a good part of my career at IBM and for those first few years at IBM I was like the youngest person in the room, yes I was a woman, there weren't that many, and I felt like what could I contribute to a 300,000 person company, like what could little old me do? And it turned out that pretty much people need good ideas. And actually if you're new and young and you actually don't know what you can't do, you can come up with some pretty cool ideas. And I have to say I was lucky. I talk a lot about, you know, luck is a lot of what makes a career. I was lucky in the sense that I had bosses who allowed me to really contribute with, let's call it, good ideas to important projects.
I know you say luck, but there was something, an aura or some type of feeling you must have given off whether it was a confidence. Share what you would recommend to women in this room who might not be at the pinnacle of where they want to be, but want to make sure that people see them, whether they're male managers or female managers above them, that people see them as candidates. You in the past I was told, 'Oh, you wanted that show. Why didn't you raise your hand?'
Well, I have to say the best advice I've ever been given in my career was very early in my career. And one of my mentors said, 'Hey, Lisa, you should run towards the hardest problems.' And I'm like, well, I don't know what does that mean? And I guess the best advice I would give and I think it's something that I followed is you can be actually really ambitious with what you're capable of and actually raise your hand and volunteer for some of the hardest problems because it turns out that you're going to work hard at whatever you end up doing. But you might as well work hard on something that's really important and that's really challenging that people don't know the answer to. You may not know the answer either. But you will learn an incredible amount in that period of time. And as you do that, people recognize great people, especially if you're willing to volunteer. And that's something that has stuck with me, frankly, like people have said like, why are you doing that? That's like so hard. And I'm like, well, actually, I think that's actually really interesting. And I can make a difference there.
Well, here's something very hard that Lisa did. 14 years ago, Advanced Micro Devices was, you know, that dorm poster. I always think about this. And it shows a Doberman pincher and then a little tiny Chihuahua yanking at the leash with these little teeth that are bearing. And it says, 'It's not the size of the dog in the fight. It's the size of the fight in the dog.' Well, AMD was even smaller than the Chihuahua. It's probably a little baby Chihuahua compared to Intel, which had 80% market share at the time. Intel was the big gigantic global behemoth. Remember Intel inside? Actually, it's now more AMD inside, but 14 years ago, you ran toward the hard thing. That company was not in good shape. And in fact, a couple years later, you were offered the CEO job. It was near bankruptcy. So, when somebody, male or female, is asked to fix something like that, how do you go about doing that? That's a huge Leviathan task.
I don't know if I would agree, like your visual is quite something there, but look, what I would say is I trained to lead a semiconductor company, right? That was like sort of my dream job. And when you think about dream jobs, you're like, I want to lead a company that matters. I want to be a part of a company that matters. And I believed semiconductors were important. I believed there were very few semiconductor companies in the United States that could do high performance chips. I believed high performance chips were important. And so this notion of was it in good shape or bad shape? Yes, you're right. We had some issues that we needed to deal with, but I was like, hey, this is like my dream job is to be part of a company that can truly make a difference. And so joining AMD was that. I was named CEO a couple years later. It was probably earlier than I would have originally thought, but hey, it was a wonderful opportunity.
