The CEO of $162 billion chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices said that one early career question helped her make big decisions at the once-struggling company.
As a junior employee at Texas Instruments and IBM in the mid-1990s, Lisa Su said she was lucky to have bosses who asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up — and she realized she wanted to manage people and projects.
Nearly two decades later, she asked herself that same question about AMD when she landed a leadership role at the chipmaker during a tumultuous time in the company's history.
Deciding what AMD wanted to be long term — "when we grow up" — was key, she said during a talk at Stanford Graduate Business School uploaded online on Thursday.
"Decisions that we make today, you will really see the impact three to five years down the road," she said.
Su said that when she worked as AMD's chief operating officer in 2014, the company evaluated building smartphone chips, which were taking off at the time.
"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," she said in Thursday's talk. The company opted to prioritize building high-performance computers.
Su joined AMD as a senior vice president of global business units in 2012, after about 18 years in the semiconductor industry. She said the company was at a "crossroads" and her mentors advised her not to join AMD because it had "a track record of not perfect execution."
After a six-month stint as COO, she was asked to become the company's CEO in October 2014.
At the time, the company's stock was trading at around $3 a share, and it was rumored to be on the verge of bankruptcy due to intense competition from Intel and Nvidia.
Su is credited for turning the company around. She led AMD to diversify its business beyond personal computers and into gaming consoles and designed new chips. In 2018, AMD replaced GlobalFoundries with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company as its main manufacturing partner.
AMD's stock, which peaked at nearly $200 a year ago, was worth $100 on Monday. The fall in the last year came largely from underwhelming revenue data.
