English articles

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Robin uses ASPEED as an example. Its IPO offer price was NT$110, raising about NT$224 million at a listing market capitalization below NT$2.5 billion. Thirteen years later, its market value had reached NT$352 billion, meaning roughly 99% of its value was created after listing. He sees an IPO as a new starting point. Startups should not become trapped by valuation; choosing good partners and raising growth capital quickly can matter more. He recalls a statistic suggesting that US-listed companies’ pre-IPO valuations averaged less than 4% of their current value. His two lessons are to advance IPO planning promptly and avoid obsessing over every pre-IPO fundraising valuation.

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Robin relays a sports analogy. Taiwan’s national-team players are excellent and hardworking, but results in international competition depend on their capabilities, not spectators’ enthusiasm. Applied to startups, he identifies three questions. Is the field one of Taiwan’s core strengths, given its population of only 23 million? Can a startup assemble a first-team lineup when large companies offer pay of 3–5 million and its own budget is only 1–2 million? And is the best Taiwanese team still among the best when compared internationally? Startup markets can be winner-take-all. Investors resemble spectators: their enthusiasm cannot determine the result.

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Robin believes a combined SpaceX–xAI listing is approaching, with ambitions for a trillion-dollar valuation. SpaceX reportedly has EBITDA of about US$8 billion. He subjectively assumes that depreciation, interest, taxes, and related items account for 60–80%, putting net income at about US$3 billion. With xAI still losing money, he expects the combination to be slightly profitable or slightly loss-making. To support a trillion-dollar market capitalization, he argues, Musk needs an even bigger narrative, including space-based computing centers and an enormous wafer-fab project. He also connects this with Tesla’s trillion-dollar compensation plan. Even assuming US$1 billion in earnings, the implied price-to-earnings ratio would exceed 1,000.

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Listening to VK Technology Reading Time discuss Musk’s Idiot Index—the finished-product price divided by raw-material cost, with a higher ratio supposedly meaning greater stupidity—Robin gets the impression that Musk may not place much value on other people’s expertise. He compares this with Taiwanese business owners who complain that lawyers and accountants charge too much. He juxtaposes another story: an engineer charges 10,000 to fix a machine by drawing a chalk circle, itemizing the bill as 1 for drawing the circle and 9,999 for knowing where to draw it. Professional value comes from years of training, troubleshooting experience, and precise judgment.

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Robin extends the discussion of the relationship between platforms and creators or influencers. A platform is more valuable if it can generate traffic of its own and direct it to creators. If creators bring all the traffic themselves, the platform’s value is mainly functional; it also has a weaker bargaining position, since creators can switch platforms at any time. He cites Facebook, Instagram, PTT, Dcard, MOMO, PChome, and Japan’s Weekly Shonen Jump as platforms with their own traffic. Jump’s loyal readers attract submissions from emerging manga artists, setting a virtuous cycle in motion.

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Robin asks founders to explain their secret advantage and winning strategy, then answer a more concrete question: how much will they personally commit? Will they leave their job or put in their savings? Others are more likely to follow once the founder takes the plunge. The article refers to two approaches: a product far beyond every competitor’s, or a completely different form of innovative value that disrupts a market. Robin says he finds both claims hard to verify. One thing is easier to verify: whether the founder has gone all in first.

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Robin notes that traditional business education emphasizes focus, concentrated resources, simplicity, and doing one thing well. Yet extraordinary mavericks such as Musk and Branson have succeeded across very different industries. Such successes are exceedingly rare. For most founders, he still recommends returning to the textbook: keep things simple, concentrate resources, find a market gap, make a focused breakthrough, and do one thing well at a time. He also previews a discussion of how Branson identifies gaps, competes directly with giants, and manages Virgin Group across roughly 400 businesses.

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The excerpts trace private equity’s ‘vulture’ reputation to deals such as KKR’s acquisition of RJR Nabisco, then present counterarguments: acquisitions by competitors often cause more job losses; private-equity-backed companies perform better after returning to public markets than other newly listed firms; and their bankruptcy rates are comparable with those of other companies. Robin adds Taiwanese examples—Fusheng, Nien Made, and Primax—and recalls participating in Fusheng’s return to the public market. He closes by hoping for more responsible capital markets that pay greater attention to labor, the environment, social issues, and diverse values, and contribute to sustainability.

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Robin looks back to 2004–2005: offered a choice between Dangdang and JD.com, most investors would have chosen Dangdang. It was founded earlier, received US$11 million from Tiger, and became profitable early, but then slowed new investment. JD.com started later and expanded aggressively under Richard Liu, repeatedly encountering working-capital problems. By the time Dangdang went private in 2016, its market capitalization was only US$530 million; the gap with JD.com later exceeded a hundredfold. Robin’s conclusion is that a company’s greatest risk is refusing to take any risk, and its scale depends on its CEO’s vision and courage.

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Robin identifies five reasons large technology companies struggle to enter completely unfamiliar fields: they fail to see an opportunity, dismiss it, fail to understand it, and then run out of time; they cannot afford to lose, since public companies cannot tolerate falling revenue; new projects struggle to obtain internal resources; talented employees can move internally and rarely choose marginal projects; and the CEO’s attention is scarce. He uses Skype as an example: it challenged telecom giants with voice over Internet Protocol and a new business model, before Microsoft acquired it for US$8.5 billion.

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Robin reads Wang Zhiren (王志仁)’s article about how he would rescue PChome if he were Hung-Tze Jan, then quotes the closing passages of American venture capitalist Fred Wilson’s ‘Staying Positive’: leaders must bring optimism and positive energy, and focus on building and shipping. He notes that MOMO, backed by Fubon Financial and Taiwan Mobile, had roughly fifteen times PChome’s market capitalization and 2.5 times its revenue. Against a competitor on a different scale, strategy, tactics, and execution all need reexamination. Entrepreneurs must remain optimistic and keep exploring new problems and markets.

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Robin argues that if a product has been on the market for six months or a year without a positive response, it may solve a nice-to-have problem rather than a must-have one. A technical breakthrough that improves performance or reduces cost by only 10–20% can also meet a weak need: customers may prefer established partners with stronger relationships, distribution, and commercial terms. He argues that a benefit exceeding tenfold, demonstrable with real commercial data, can turn it into a must-have. He also cautions founders against prioritizing social contributions before understanding their business model. First establish the customer’s decision-making priorities.

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Robin discusses Silicon Valley 101, S3E89, which looks at falling technology stocks from Wall Street investors’ perspective. At the time covered by the episode, Meta’s shares fell about 20% as it insisted on investing in the metaverse, while Intel’s rose about 10% after it announced capital-spending cuts. Robin makes two observations. Wall Street investors often look less than a year ahead, whereas venture capitalists look three to five years ahead. In a strong economy, Wall Street can think long term like VC; when conditions reverse, VC can become more like Wall Street, emphasizing profitability, free cash flow, and survival.

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The opening passage relays Naval’s view that direction matters more than speed: choosing the right direction at each fork matters far more than the effort spent moving forward. Robin adds that good choices test both long-term judgment and the ability to take risks. Would a Google employee have left for Facebook when it had fewer than 100 employees? Would a Facebook employee have joined Stripe when it had only a few dozen? Would you leave school to start a company? He uses these forks in the road to invite readers to examine their own choices.

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The opening excerpts discuss Paul Graham and the YC model: make something people want, an internal benchmark of 10% weekly growth, an emphasis on frugality, and the scale advantages of an alumni network. Robin adds that many Taiwanese startups feel they cannot expand without more funding. Founders should nevertheless calculate each stage’s capital needs carefully. Money arriving too easily can be the beginning of disaster; concentrating on using every dollar well is a key to success. He also cites Frank Lloyd Wright’s observation that humanity’s finest building achievements came when constraints were greatest.

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The opening excerpts relay Buffett’s and Munger’s advice to ordinary people: keep cash available, earn more than you spend, and invest in your earning power. Robin adds three reminders for founders. First, maintain cash reserves, which can help you outlast competitors in difficult periods. Second, earn more than you spend; seeking more investors otherwise brings mounting pressure. Third, invest in your own and your team’s ability to learn, grow, and earn, building a moat around the business. He also emphasizes that health matters most.

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The opening section presents nine suggestions from Master60’s summary of Burn the Boats, including trusting your intuition, turning anxiety into fuel, and embracing crises. Robin adds that the biggest challenges for university professors starting businesses are commitment and the option of retreating. Many want to stay at the university to retain resources and the value of their title. Yet entrepreneurship brings distractions and hesitation; cutting off retreat and committing fully may improve the chance of success. He illustrates this with Xiang Yu’s destruction of cooking pots and boats at the Battle of Julu.

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The opening section reprints a Liepin WeChat article about bosses making grand promises to employees and how employees can recognize and respond to them. Robin adds that early-stage investors also hear founders describe grand visions, missions, and ambitions every day. Investors need to do their own homework and test whether those dreams are feasible, rather than accepting only the founder’s account or rushing into a decision out of FOMO. Nor should they become so conservative that they miss opportunities: sometimes belief must come before seeing.

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Robin observes that May and June are shareholder-meeting season, yet Taiwanese companies generally do not take the preparation of their operating reports—the counterpart to overseas shareholder letters—seriously enough. Leaders of great companies abroad value this annual opportunity to report directly to shareholders in writing. He argues that Taiwan still has a long way to go in corporate governance and can start by taking shareholder reporting more seriously. The closing excerpts describe good shareholder letters: treating readers as business partners, speaking candidly, and emphasizing long-term thinking.

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The opening excerpts from Touzi Yilei discuss working with larger trends, drawing on remarks attributed to Lei Jun, Zhang Ruimin, and Huang Mingduan (黃明端), and caution against glorifying a CEO’s individual capabilities. Robin adds a founder’s perspective. Investors assess industry size, but founders can begin with a small niche, concentrate resources, and aim to dominate a specific segment. They should choose something they love enough to spend ten or twenty years building. There can be tension between that passion and choosing a large market. His advice: be yourself, build for your ideals and dreams, and do not start a company merely to raise money or please investors.

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The opening excerpts describe Wang Xing setting benchmark targets for Meituan by looking to Taobao’s growth trajectory. They also relay a saying within Meituan: greater confidence in the future brings greater patience with the present. Robin adds that finding a benchmark company helps a startup position itself, much as sailors first locate the North Star when navigating at night. A benchmark makes it easier for investors and employees to imagine what the future could look like. Then comes the work of pursuing the dream practically, taking each step firmly and moving forward with conviction.

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Robin notes that family businesses add an emotional dimension to conventional management theory. Emotion can strengthen unity, as illustrated by the story of Japanese warlord Mori Motonari and his three arrows, yet it can also be central to a family business’s breakup. Citing the then-current Taishan family dispute, he calls emotion the hardest issue to resolve. The closing excerpts organize family conflict into four quadrants—emotional, material, structural, and external relationships—and define a family business as one in which the family is the largest single owner and usually holds more than 20% of the equity.

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The opening reprint from Wan Weigang describes entrepreneurs as people who create surprises. Robin contrasts two investment approaches. Some Silicon Valley investors deliberately seek ideas that sound outrageous and astonishing, pursuing power-law outcomes: one investment out of a hundred succeeds, the other ninety-nine fail, but the winner returns 10,000 times the investment. He adds that there may not be many such investors. Most Taiwanese investors, by contrast, examine feasibility and prospects carefully, point by point. Yet when everything can be calculated clearly and no fog remains, the truly extraordinary, enduring investments often stay out of reach.

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The opening excerpts describe entrepreneurship as a combination of passion and ability. Founders who began at the same starting line and spent fifteen to twenty years doing one thing well may already have taken their companies public; those who chase a new trend every few years may never build anything substantial. Over the long term, founder and business are closely connected. Robin compares building a company with growing a tree: a seedling does not become a towering tree in three or five years. It takes time, patience, and staying rooted. To persist for twenty years, you must love the work—and only you truly know whether you are the right person for it.

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As the fourth quarter of 2023 begins, Robin suggests reviewing the decisions and actions of the first three quarters. Were they coherent, consistent, and directed toward an established destination, or was each day a series of improvised responses? If events, problems, and new customers arrive entirely at random, he argues, strategy and goal-setting are probably at fault. The closing excerpts from Ning Xiangdong explain that strategy must express a goal and a direction, so that actions remain coherent and team members work in coordination.

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Robin recounts turning points in Morris Chang’s life: not being admitted to MIT’s doctoral program, moving to Stanford for a doctorate in electrical engineering, becoming a senior executive at Texas Instruments, then leaving after a missed promotion and disagreement over the foundry idea. Later, Sun Yun-suan invited him to lead Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute, and he founded TSMC at 56. Robin’s point is that if any link in that chain had been different, today’s TSMC might not exist. A succession of apparent setbacks helped create the figure known as the godfather of semiconductors.

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The opening excerpts from 36 Rules for Entrepreneurs (a descriptive translation of 創業36條軍規) discuss developing managers: founders should personally set hiring standards and oversee selection, promote from the front line, avoid blind faith in outside experts, and maintain clear rewards and consequences. Robin adds that founders should invest time in selecting people because they best understand the team’s needs at its current stage. Managers who have worked their way up from the front line tend to have stronger bonds and commitment. Do not assume outsiders are always better: the most suitable people may already be nearby. Beyond the founder, VCs look for a solid team with strong execution capabilities.

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The opening excerpts describe foresight as the habit of looking ahead and preparing a Plan B for everything. Robin adds that Plan B is neither retreat nor surrender, but the operational flexibility needed to respond to change. Many founders have only one solution and rely on fundraising whenever problems arise. Yet fundraising itself is often the biggest problem. He has seen a company rely entirely on raising money, fail to do so, and enter dissolution and liquidation. In his view, preparing alternatives is also a measure of management capability.

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The opening transcription from 科技早知道 discusses OpenAI’s GPT Store and related initiatives. If OpenAI builds every platform layer itself, it may reduce the space available to startups built on its technology. Robin’s personal impression is that the pursuit of technical breakthroughs and commercialization has taken OpenAI further from its founding intentions. Beyond the CEO’s direction, a company needs counterbalancing forces, especially when AI may materially affect society and human safety. A closed ecosystem that tries to do everything leaves less room for entrepreneurs within it.

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The opening excerpts urge startups to be extremely cautious about bringing in strategic investors, especially when their related businesses overlap with the startup’s core business. Robin adds that a large corporate investor offers reputation, money, and apparent resources, but those resources may not actually be available. Each business unit has its own profit targets. A startup may also be labeled as having chosen sides, end up serving the group’s strategy, or face intervention in its management. He recommends a mix of strategic and financial investors to create balance and preserve room for the startup.

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Robin imagines opening a restaurant to outdo the one next door by offering an enormous menu. More than 90% of the dishes go unordered, while even the few specialties may not be done well. Startup teams can fall into the same trap, trying to make an all-encompassing product that becomes a jumble with no competitive strength in any one area. Slow performance and a poor user experience then drive users away. He argues that good product development depends much more on subtraction: clearly identifying and retaining the functions users need most urgently.

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Robin notes that TSMC’s market capitalization was about 18.93 trillion, versus 6.18 trillion for 815 Taipei Exchange-listed companies combined—roughly three times as much. One company represented about 30% of exchange market value. He sees a power-law pattern, citing an early YC observation that its top investment returned more than investments two through two hundred combined. He outlines two views: diversify to reduce overconcentration and ‘Dutch disease,’ or focus scarce talent and resources on one globally competitive strength. He favors focus but worries about a generational technological shift making semiconductors suddenly less important, drawing an analogy with artificially produced spice in Dune.

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Robin argues that Taiwan’s digital and software startups lack a process of branching out. PayPal has generated a large network of startups and investments, potentially spanning thousands of companies and dozens or hundreds of unicorns. Taiwan’s hardware sector has similar networks: Acer gave rise to BenQ, Wistron, ASUS, and others, while ITRI generated many listed companies. Yet Trend Micro, founded in 1988, remains Taiwan’s most influential software company without producing a comparable cluster. 91APP and Appier, described here as having listed only four or five years earlier, have not yet generated enough surrounding startups. Taiwan needs companies or accelerators such as PayPal, Palantir, or YC that continually give rise to new ventures.

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Robin argues that output per employee is central to pay differences: Taiwan’s technology sector generates much more per person than its service industries. Recalling his first job at an accounting firm, he notes that Taiwanese auditors faced additional regulatory work and documentation. An audit requiring three people abroad might take five or six in Taiwan, while clients resisted higher fees. He cites output per employee of roughly 10–20 million in export manufacturing, over 30 million at TSMC, and around 1 million in domestic services. Comparing starting compensation for TSMC engineers with a senior executive’s pay at a state-owned bank, he emphasizes the difference between serving global markets and serving only Taiwan.

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Robin responds to the debate over ‘founder mode.’ A founder’s management capacity is finite. As an organization grows to hundreds or thousands, layers of managers each communicating only with the few dozen people below them can soon disconnect the founder from markets, customers, and the organization itself. He cites Steve Jobs’s annual skip-level meetings with one hundred key people from across the company—not the one hundred most senior. Direct contact across levels helps founders understand frontline conditions, communicate their thinking, and selectively engage in detailed management.

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Robin argues that strong vertical integration can create major competitive advantages but also tightly links every stage: one lagging element can affect the entire company. He uses Intel’s then-current restructuring debate as an example. Intel’s semiconductor dominance came from both IC design and wafer manufacturing; its decline reflects those capabilities no longer working together well enough. Managers may assume that a longer operating chain offers more profit opportunities. Yet one troubled link can stall the chain, hurting competitiveness, profits, and cash flow.

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Robin recalls Intel’s US$300 billion market capitalization in 2000—six times TSMC’s and sixty times NVIDIA’s—versus roughly one-eighth of TSMC’s and less than one-thirtieth of NVIDIA’s at the time of writing. Seeking cash, Intel was considering selling Altera, acquired for US$16.7 billion in 2015. He reviews three CEOs: Krzanich’s rejection of first-generation ASML EUV and repeated 10-nanometer delays; Swan’s missed OpenAI investment and attempt to work with TSMC despite internal opposition; and Gelsinger’s IDM 2.0 and major factory expansion. He highlights vertical-integration risks while noting Intel’s design strength and US government support.

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The opening excerpts from Wu Jun warn against abandoning your strengths to chase trends. They cite Buffett on keeping well-performing holdings and Eric Schmidt on reinvesting in a rapidly growing core business. Robin adds that Taiwanese startups often rush to open second and third fronts before securing the first. They may still be overtaken or replaced. If the first market offers substantial room and the startup’s share remains low, establish a firm footing before taking another step.

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Robin argues that cash-flow management matters to every company. Large businesses cutting staff after overhiring before the pandemic are considering cash flow as well as focus and efficiency. For startups, running out of cash often means the end. But managing cash does not mean refusing to spend. Sometimes frugality is essential; sometimes a rare market opening requires expansion or even a calculated gamble. A startup that plays only safe cards is unlikely to overtake incumbents. Founders need exceptional insight and judgment about timing—to create miracles rather than wait for them.

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After seeing a Taiwanese startup group discuss the value of exhibiting at Meet Taipei, Robin describes it as a startup carnival that offers visibility in the Asia-Pacific region and a stage for new companies. It can also encourage public and government support for entrepreneurship. He suggests established, larger startups can leave places for ventures only one or two years old. Exhibitors should talk with investors, report progress, seek integration opportunities, and visit overseas startups’ booths. After eleven editions, the event itself should also seek new directions and continue influencing policy and resource allocation.