Wayne Dai: Two Decades Building Between Silicon Valley and China

As a boy in Shanghai, Wayne Dai forged his parents’ signatures on a permission slip so he could swim across the Huangpu River. Years later, after three years of farm work on Chongming Island and a national exam that changed everything, he landed at Berkeley with a few months of English and no experience with a computer. Today he is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of VeriSilicon, one of China’s leading semiconductor design platform companies. In this episode of A Bit Personal, Jodi Shelton sits down with Wayne in his office at VeriSilicon’s Pudong headquarters, in what he describes as possibly his first English-language interview. It’s a conversation between old friends, with stories of pandas, hairy crab, and a family that became semiconductor royalty. Wayne, his brother Wei-Jin, and his sister Weili Dai, co-founder of Marvell, were among the first students from mainland China at Berkeley, and all three married fellow computer scientists. Wayne talks about leaving the security of a UC Santa Cruz professorship to build a company in China, commuting between continents while still advising more than ten PhD students. He explains why his company has never made its own product, and the “design light” model that earned it a reputation as the quiet engine of the fabless industry: no inventory, no boundaries, and a clear promise never to compete with its customers. We also dig into the culture he built, where everyone from engineers to the receptionist and his driver holds stock options, where he has fought the 996 work schedule from day one, and where employees’ kids have been known to veto a job change. He shares his hiring philosophy (integrity first, attitude second, capability third), how a company that hosts a New Year party for 3,000 people and their families thinks about soft power, and why the order of “CEO” is customer, employees, owners. Looking ahead, Wayne makes the case for AI at the edge, from offline AI toys that talk with young children to smart glasses, built on small open-source models developed with Google. He also offers a candid view on U.S.-China relations, arguing for “precision decoupling” rather than a complete break, and explains why he sees himself as a bridge between the two. We close with his advice from his PhD advisor, the lesson of the Chinese landscape painting, and a rapid-fire “last tape out.”

GPT-4正在为你翻译摘要中......

翻译全文