When Lisa Su grew to become CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) a decade in the past, it hardly resembled a multibillion-dollar firm.
AMD inventory was languishing round $3 per share. The firm had lower about 25% of its workers, according to Time. But underneath Su’s management, the chipmaker has flourished: Today, AMD has a market cap of $205.95 billion and its inventory trades at roughly $127 per share.
Su was named Time’s CEO of the Year for 2024 on Tuesday, and the 55-year-old’s web price has soared alongside AMD’s success — as much as $1.3 billion, Forbes estimated in April. For comparability, Su was paid a base wage of $1 million and a performance-based bonus of $1.2 million in 2014 when she took over as CEO, the Seattle Times reported in 2020.
Born in Taiwan, Su immigrated to the U.S. along with her dad and mom at age 3 so her father, a mathematician, might attend graduate college in New York. Growing up, “my father used to quiz me with math tables on the eating room desk,” she informed Forbes final 12 months. “That’s how I first acquired into math.”
Su wasn’t initially fascinated with following her father’s footsteps right into a STEM profession. As a youngster, she dreamed of changing into a live performance pianist, she stated: “I wasn’t adequate to do this, so I grew to become an engineer.”
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She earned bachelor’s, grasp’s and doctoral levels in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and spent her early profession working in quite a lot of roles at Texas Instruments and IBM within the Nineties — each big tech firms, throughout that period.
“I used to be actually fortunate early in my profession,” Su informed Time. “Every two years, I did a special factor.”
In 2012, Su was employed at AMD as a senior vice chairman and common supervisor of the corporate’s world enterprise items, based on her LinkedIn profile. Two years later, she ascended to the CEO position, changing into the primary girl to steer AMD for the reason that firm’s founding in 1969.
“I felt like I used to be in coaching for the chance to do one thing significant within the semiconductor trade,” she stated. “And AMD was my shot.”
Playing the lengthy recreation
Su is certainly one of few Fortune 500 CEOs with a PhD. Her engineering background helped her spearhead among the technological improvements — together with a brand new sooner CPU chip for computer systems — that drove AMD’s current success.
Friends and colleagues describe her as a “shrewd strategist,” and he or she typically holds meetings on weekends and expects employees to work past midnight, Time reported. Her excessive expectations could make it difficult for individuals to outlive at AMD long-term, tech trade analyst and former AMD government Patrick Moorhead informed the journal.
That is likely to be by design: “I do not imagine leaders are born. I imagine leaders are educated,” stated Su.
Upon changing into CEO, Su promoted a three-part plan to assist AMD compete with rivals Intel and Nvidia, Time reported: promote solely high-quality merchandise, deepen buyer belief and simplify the agency’s operations. The long-term plan took time to pay dividends, however in 2022, AMD surpassed Intel in each market worth and annual income.
Nvidia, however, is not simply the world’s largest chipmaker — it recently overtook Apple because the world’s most beneficial publicly traded firm. But Su measures success in many years, not quarters, she stated.
“When you put money into a brand new space, it’s a five- to 10-year arc to actually construct out all the varied items,” stated Su. “The factor about our enterprise is, all the pieces takes time.”
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