S8E5: Lisa Su Is Still Curious About How Things Work

0:09Welcome to View From The Top, the podcast. I'm Michael Liu, an MBA student of the class of 2025. And I'm Michael McDowell, a producer at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Michael, could you please set up today's conversation? Absolutely. I spoke with Lisa Su, who's the chair and CEO of AMD, leading a company through a critical moment in history and really transforming the company over the past 10 years as CEO. She is a first-generation immigrant that grew up in New York and holds multiple degrees, including a PhD from MIT. She spent time in a semiconductor lab, which drew her to the world of semiconductors.

0:49And she speaks about how her passion for solving complex problems led her to a lifelong career as an engineer and now as a leader of a company that's transforming the AI revolution. That's great. And what makes Lisa such a unique leader? Lisa has an incredibly rare balance of managerial capability and problem-solving prowess. She built her career as an engineer, but then pivoted to leading and transforming teams. She really led a huge transformation of AMD, both in terms of their financials, but also their culture. And now she leads an incredibly meritocratic, problem-solving focused organization.

1:33and I'm really impressed at how she's able to balance the two. Your questions were really superb. I thought you drew her out in a remarkable way. How did you develop them? I did a lot of research and I was personally drawn to her story. I've watched a lot of her interviews and I found that she speaks a lot about AMD, not too much about herself and her upbringing. So I really wanted to bring out personal stories that she would be able to share about how her upbringing and her values have evolved over time. And then also tie that back to how she's applying her upbringing and her values in her role as CEO of AMD.

2:11I'm wondering why, and you touched on this a little bit already, but why is it particularly interesting to hear from her now? I think we're at an incredibly important time in terms of the AI arms race. there's a lot of AI infrastructure investment by a lot of tech companies or hyperscalers so-called and I think Lisa is leading AMD to really be an underdog she speaks about it in the interview herself in that they're just focused on producing the best chips and she's not too focused on the competition or trying to be a company that they're not. And I'm really impressed at how her principles have endured whilst making AMD the best company that they can be.

2:59Perfect. Should we play the tape? Let's do it. Welcome to Stanford. Wonderful. It's so great to be here. It is a pleasure and an even greater honor to have you with us here today. Thank you. Many of us have followed your career and your transformation of AMD, and we're excited to get to know you better. So I'd like to cover your upbringing, your leadership and management principles, the current state of AI, and your outlook for the future. How does that sound? That sounds wonderful. Thank you. Great. So you were born in Taiwan and immigrated to New York with your parents at the age of two. What was it like growing up at the nexus of two cultures, and how did your parents influence you?

3:39Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, I was born in Taiwan and my parents, my dad came to the United States for graduate school. So he brought the family with us. And as some of you may imagine, with typical Asian upbringing, it was all about school, more school, how can you do good in those kinds of things. But look, I think I was very lucky because I had the, sort of my parents really encouraged me to always be pretty ambitious and want to do great things. And that's kind of followed me through my life. I'm sure many of us can relate to the schooling pressure. It's school and piano. Right. Those are the two things that most Asian kids have to go through.

4:28Same. And so that ambition then brought you to MIT, where you completed three degrees, an undergraduate, master's, and a PhD. So you're just missing an MBA. That doesn't seem to have held you back, though. Now, what drew you towards a career in semiconductors and building chips as opposed to academia or any other career? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when I was a kid, I was really curious about how things worked. And you would, you know, I would have like my brother would have, you know, sort of his toy remote controlled car would be, you know, going through our hallway and it would stop working.

5:10And I'd be like, why did it stop working? I was just very curious about that. And so I've always wanted to kind of tinker with things. That was what was interesting. So during high school, I was very focused on math and science. And so I went to MIT. And sometimes, and maybe you guys can relate to this, careers are very much by chance. I'd like to think that you planned everything out minute by minute, but it's usually not like that. And so it just happened that in my freshman year, I was looking for a job. Everyone is looking for a part-time job. And the part-time job that I got was working in a semiconductor lab.

5:47And so I had to put on a bunny suit for the first time. And I was basically doing grunt work for a graduate student and running some of his experiments. And I thought it was so amazing that you could actually put on sort of a tiny little chip so much power. And at that time, it wasn't anything like it is today. But that's kind of how I fell in love with semiconductors. And it just became the thing that I ended up doing throughout my undergraduate and graduate career. I love that. And so you continue to pursue that passion. Upon graduation, you joined Texas Instruments and then IBM, where you rose up the ranks to become director of emerging products.

6:31Following that, you then joined Freescale Semiconductor as CTO. So how did you manage the transition from being an engineer focused on building products to then becoming a people manager? Well, it sounds like you have studied my resume to great extent. So thank you for that. You know, sort of leaving graduate school with a PhD, you know, one has to decide what do you want to do, whether you, you know, in my case, it was whether I wanted to go into industry or, you know, whether I wanted to be a professor in academia. And I can say for sure that I thought being a professor was actually going to be very hard.

7:17The idea of always being on the cutting edge of research and that kind of thing. So I didn't think that was going to be my superpower. I thought that building products and working on real world things, like what I've enjoyed the most in in what I do is like the the work that we're we're doing with chips and and products like you can actually go and you can walk down to Best Buy and see some of the products that that we build or you can walk into Lawrence Livermore National Labs and you know look at big supercomputers but you can actually see and and feel and touch those types of things So yeah, I think those are the reasons that I first got into engineering.

7:59And to your question of engineering versus business or engineering versus people management, again, I'd like to say that I grew up at IBM. That was the place where I spent a good part of my... I was at Texas Instruments for a little less than a year. But frankly, I live in Texas now. But the first time I lived in Texas was, whatever, 30 plus years ago. Texas wasn't for me at that point in time so I moved back to New York where my parents and my family were and I was at IBM for about 13 years or so and what I like to believe is the ability to kind of learn at each step was what really helped me in my career and so you know the nice thing about about my early career is I was lucky enough to have you know bosses who asked me all the time I'm like, what do you want to be when you grow up?

8:54And I was like, I don't know. Let me think about what do I want to be when I grow up. And the opportunity to manage people or manage projects was very interesting because I viewed, hey, as one person, as a researcher, you could get so much done. But hey, if you have a little team of 10 people, you can actually get so much more done. And if it gets to 50 people or 100 people, so much more. So yes, there was a lot of, let's call it learning on the job. but that was what I was able to do in that period of time. And I will say, for the record, I've always thought I should get an MBA. And I just ran out of time, right?

9:36Like you have to schedule two years in your life to get an MBA, and at some point you become too old to get an MBA. So it was, I'm sorry, John Carter, did I say that? Is that okay for me to say? So the truth is there was just a lot of on-the-job training. And the beauty of career development is when you get a chance to try something new and learn, whether it's people management or business or managing larger projects, I had a lot of opportunities to learn. Great. Well, I think it's never too late when we'd love to have you. And I think it's rare to see someone with mastery of both building products and people management.

10:17And those are two really difficult problems. You've said yourself that you like hard problems. So what's your approach to solving hard problems and how do you push through in the face of setbacks? Well, I think the most important thing for all of us is to have a deep curiosity of just solving problems. That's my view of the world. When I think about in the early part of my career, some of the most difficult things, like the first product I ever worked on was a product that was a microprocessor. And we were just about to announce the processor. And nothing worked. I mean, the chip did not work.

11:02We didn't know why it didn't work, but the company was about to announce it. And you think, oh, that's terrible. That's very stressful. But actually what it is is it allows you to really galvanize teams on really opening up every ounce of creativity you have to figure out, okay, how are we going to figure out why is this not working and how do we bring it, move the projects forward? And so that's what I view as the beauty of hard problems. Like, you can work on anything in life. But when you work on a really hard problem or in a company context, when you work on, let's call it the most important projects, you can garner an incredible amount of just resources, creativity, focus that will allow you to do something that you wouldn't imagine possible.

11:59and that's what I believe is the most important thing managers do or leaders do. What leaders do is they actually bring teams together to do something that nobody thought was possible and that's what I enjoy about the world that we're in is that you're working on problems that are super interesting and quite impactful to the industry and you're also working on something that someone hasn't done before. I love that. I think that's something we can all take away, looking for the hardest problems and finding the creativity and focus to solve them. Now, at the GSB, we learn a lot about hiring and retaining great talent.

12:39But something that is less spoken about is recognizing underestimated talent. So, Lisa, have you ever made a bet on someone that's been historically overlooked? And how did that go? Well, I like to say that, you know again our job as leaders is to give people opportunities you can't guarantee anybody's success but you certainly can help identify you know sort of the the people who have a lot of potential and I'm also a big believer in that you know leadership is something that you learn and something that you train it's not something that you're born with you actually you learn experience, you know, through lots and lots of different experiences.

13:22And so, yes, like, hey, somebody took a chance on me, right? Somebody decided, you know, when I was a kid that I should, you know, get these different experiences. You know, probably the most intimidating experience that I had was, you know, I was at IBM maybe about five years, which is, you know, relatively sort of still new in my career. I was working on interesting projects. I had done a few interesting projects. And one day I got a call and said, hey, can you come down to Armand? We'd like you to meet Lou Gerstner. And Lou Gerstner was the chair and CEO of AMD at the time. And I'm like, why?

14:04Why would you want to talk to me? That was a very weird thing. And they're like, yes, yes, we would like you to be his technical assistant. So my job was to actually teach Lou about technology. He was not a technical person, but he was running a technical company. And he wanted to learn about some of the latest and greatest technology things. And I was like, wow, I didn't realize this is what I went to school for. But the truth was, it was an opportunity for me to observe what life was like, you know, as the top of, you know, company of global scale and size. And I learned so much just from observing.

14:48And so I view that as somebody took a chance on me. And I still view that as one of the sort of the most impactful experiences of my career in terms of just understanding what life would be like as a CEO. And so, you know, it's our jobs as leaders to take chances on people as well. And that usually means that you put somebody in a job that you're not 100 % sure that they can do, but you surround them with lots and lots of support so that they can be successful. And yeah, that is part of, you know, a real important part of team development, people development. The other thing is, you know, just doing lots of different things, like being able to, you know, every couple of years, take on a different experience.

15:35with every experience you learn so much. So many different experiences help really round out the overall career capabilities. It's really interesting you say that. At the GSB, we learn that leadership is something that can be trained in a set of behaviors rather than something you're inherently born with. So it's really reassuring. Now, one more point on your resume, but it's the last one, I promise. Now, following Freescale Semiconductor, you then joined AMD, as senior vice president, helping the company expand beyond PC into gaming and embedded devices. Within two years, you were then appointed CEO of the company.

16:15So bring us back to the moment when you got the call from the board. How did it feel? And how did you do it? Yeah. So yeah, good, good, good question. Let me kind of give you the context, right? If I give you the context, I kind of was a self-proclaimed semiconductor person. This was going to be my profession of my career. I had a great run at Freescale Semiconductor. It was my first opportunity in the C-suite. So I was CTO of the company, and then I ran one of the larger businesses. And then I was like, hey, I need to try something different. And I joined AMD. And many people said at the time, like, why would you join AMD?

16:59Like, what would make you join AMD? I actually had mentors in my career saying, you know, I don't think that that's a good move, Lisa. And like, I was very puzzled. I didn't understand. Why would anybody say that? I thought AMD was a very interesting company. But it was a company that had sort of a track record of not perfect execution. There were years that AMD did very well. There were years that AMD didn't do very well. And as a result, it was always viewed as, hey, interesting, but not one of the top companies out there. And I viewed it as, hey, look, what was important to me was to lead a company that mattered, like a company that would matter in the industry.

17:45And I felt I am a little bit biased here, but processors are kind of the brains of most things. The idea that semiconductors are now important. 30 years ago, semiconductors were not quite as important. People were like, what's a semiconductor? Why is that important? Now nobody doubts why semiconductors are so important, whether you're talking about businesses, economies, national security, all of those things. So that's why I joined AMD. And the opportunity at that time was an industry that was going through just a ton of transition. So, you know, if you think about the tech world, there are these large transitions, whether you're talking about the Internet era or you're talking about, you know, mainframe going to PCs or you're talking about PCs going to mobile.

18:35Like all of these major transitions means there's a different set of winners and there are also going to be some losers. And at the time, this was back in 2012, 2013, 2014, this was the time when PCs were viewed as potentially being losers, when mobile was becoming very prominent. And that's where AMD was. So we were kind of at a crossroads, frankly. We were at a crossroads for a company that was in transition. The industry was in transition. The company was in transition. And the leadership was in transition. So I joined in 2012 to run the business units. There was no concept of business units, P &Ls, those kinds of things.

19:18So there was a lot of transformation to be done there. I had a great partner as CTO. Mark Papermaster has been my partner on this journey. And I became COO in 2014. So I thought, hey, that's great. You know, like, this is wonderful. I'm getting to run larger pieces of the company. and I was surprised that six months after I became COO, I got a call from our chairman of the board, and he said, it's time, Lisa. And I'm like, really? Like, that seems really kind of quick, you know? And look, I think the moral of the story is, you never know, like you can't plan these things to any precision, but what was clear, was that we had to transition some of our strategy as a company and we were ready for you know the change and and I was very honored to be asked to be CEO and you know it was never a doubt that this was like my dream job so my dream job you know going to school and you know through all these years was to have the opportunity to lead a semiconductor company and now I had that opportunity.

20:36So that was back in October 2014 and something that I remember very well. Well, it definitely wasn't easy when you joined the helm. The company was at the brink of bankruptcy and the share price was hovering at around $3. Under your leadership, at its peak, AMD's shares topped$200. So how did you balance between defensive leadership, which involved cost cutting and focusing on the core, with offensive leadership, which involved diversifying product lines and taking bolder bets? Yeah, well, I think it's fairly clear in tech. There's no such thing as, you know, cutting yourself to be a winner. of course balance sheets are very important and P &Ls are very important but what was really important I think for us it was to decide what do we want to be when we grow up what does great look like and for us it was deciding what was important one of the things that I like to say about the semiconductor industry or technology in general is the decisions that we make today you will really see the impact like three to five years down the road.

21:55It is all about making the right bets and for AMD at the time you know as I said we were at a crossroads and we were needing to make a decision of what do we want to be when we grow up. At the time the most interesting sector frankly was mobile like you know smartphones were taking off everyone was like you know Lisa why aren't we building mobile chips and we thought about it actually we sized it We looked at it. We spent quite a bit of time looking at it. And we realized that, yes, that is a good business, but that actually is not a good business for us because that's not fundamentally what we are best at.

22:32Fundamentally, what we were best at, what I believed we could be best at, is building the highest performance computing out there. It was a bet on high-performance computing. And there are many reasons for that. You can look at what your competition looks like. You can look at what the technology landscape looks like. You can look at where you think the markets are going. But if I kind of summarize, there's probably a few basic things. You want to make sure that, as a company, that you're in markets that are large enough, especially picking markets where you see there is you know sort of industry transformations coming industry inflections coming and then where you know the company has some secret sauce and so our secret sauce was we knew how to build high performance computers and I knew that you know my job as a CEO at the time was to lay out that vision but then also give our team enough time to fully realize that vision, because nothing changes quickly.

23:39We had to set the expectation, like, look, this is going to take three to five years. It's going to take us three product generations. We actually had to start from scratch our products, but we knew exactly where we wanted to go. And at the time, there was a big industry inflection coming, which was Moore's law was slowing down. All of you have probably heard about Moore's law. Moore's Law was the idea that you can basically continuing to double the amount of capability, reduce the price every two years. Moore's Law was essentially slowing down and there was gonna be new technologies that would make a difference, and that's what we were gonna bet on in terms of going forward.

24:21So I think the key with any, you know, people call it a turnaround. Yes, maybe. I call it more you have to kind of see where the future is going and try to align your resources and your focus with where the future is going. Right. And other than a technological change, there was also a cultural shift within the company. Were there any key decisions you made that helped change AMD's internal mindset from being an underdog to an industry leader? Yeah, I think the key thing with any company culture or any team culture is it's not necessarily what you write down, but it's actually what people see and feel every day in terms of day-to-day operation.

25:07And so from the AMD culture standpoint, what I'd like to believe is that everybody in the company is here because we love pushing the bleeding edge of technology. Like, if you want to join AMD, that's why you join, is because, you know, you want to be at the cutting edge of technology. You're probably going to work harder than most. You're probably going to take a good amount of risk on how you get that done. But I also believe very much in a learning culture, which is we learn from everything that we do. Actually, we learn more from our mistakes than we learn from our successes, because with every product launch, we can say, hey, we could have done that a little bit better.

25:48with every new generation, we think about, you know, what will I want to do differently in the future? And that's very much, you know, who we are. I think we are a learning culture. We are a very collaborative culture. But at the end of the day, we'd like to win. And it's about having, you know, the best technology and the best products out there. Thank you.

26:37to be with the government. But the government then, on its part, has to create accountability for all people. These things have real consequences for the welfare of countries and the people that live in them. Join me, Kevin Kuhl, for If Then, a podcast from Stanford GSP, where we explore the forces, transforming business and society today. Find If Then on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

27:18Now, I want to shift over to talking a bit about the industry and AI. The semiconductor industry is as much a geopolitical story as it is a technological one. So how do you navigate an environment where policy decisions such as tariffs, chip subsidies, and export controls can make or break an industry leader? Well, I think we have to. The world has changed. The world has changed in a way that we're in an industry where having the best technology can make such a difference. And like I said, it can make a difference in terms of getting a competitive edge in companies, and it can make a difference about competitive edge in countries.

28:04And so it's just part of the industry that we're in. I think the key is to have very good clarity on, we are a US company. Clearly, there have been a lot of conversations and discussions over the last five, seven, eight years in terms of just how important the technology is and ensuring that the technology isn't used for, let's call it, not the purposes that are aligned with U.S. interests. But I also think the market is super large, and there's a way to really balance both, and that's what we try to do. I'd like to say we are a global company in the sense that we operate across every part of the world, But as it relates to critical technology, we're very much focused on ensuring that we're compliant with all of the U.S.

29:00regulations. And in some sense, I'd like to view it as we are a very interested party in helping understand what is the best way to satisfy both interests. And that's what we do. So seeing it as an opportunity as well. I like that. Yes, it's really, really important to have your voice heard, particularly in an area that is so complicated. It's really hard to figure out where the boundaries should be, and companies need to step up and be part of that conversation. Now, AMD has doubled down on inference rather than training, expecting inference to make up the majority of AI workloads for the future.

29:39So could you walk us through what the key technological and market signals have been that has led A &D towards that decision? And maybe for those of us that are less well-versed in what training and inference is, maybe perhaps it would trouble you to explain that. Yeah, and again, maybe let me take a step back and just give a little bit of a landscape of where we are in technology today. It is an incredibly exciting time in technology today. Like, if you had asked me five years ago the rate and pace of AI adoption that we've seen over the last 18 months, I mean, it's extraordinary. I mean, this is, like, the most important sort of technology advance of the last, you know, 50-plus years.

30:19And what's different about it is so many people can be touched by it. And that's kind of what generative AI has done, right? AI has been around forever. It's been around for the longest time. but it was actually pretty hard to really get AI into our business flows. That's kind of what's different today is that now you can see how AI can be adopted in many different ways. So this comment about training versus inference, look, I'm actually a believer in there's no one type of AI. You're going to see AI permeate every part of our lives, whether you talk about the largest cloud environments, which are important today, or you talk about your environments at the edge when you think about industrial AI or robotics, or you think about personal AI, AI PCs, AI in your phones.