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【V+ Perspective】The Courage to Say “No”: Lessons from TSMC and NVIDIA
- Apr 15
- 5 min read
Focus, Replication, Scale — The Shared Code of Great Companies
1. The Biggest Flaw of Smart People: Seeing Too Many Opportunities
Entrepreneurs are usually very smart. And smart people share a common flaw — they see too many opportunities at once.
Have you ever met a founder like this? The first slide of their pitch deck says:“We’re building a B2B SaaS and a consumer app. In the future, we’ll expand into Southeast Asia. Oh, and we’re also exploring AI…”
By the third slide, early investors have already lost half their enthusiasm.
A startup with ten people and only a year of runway trying to do five things at once means each effort gets only 20% of the energy. And 20% effort has no competitive edge in the market.
The scarcest resource for a startup is not money — it’s focus. Once focus is scattered, it’s like shining a flashlight at the sun — you think you’re emitting light, but you’re illuminating nothing.
2. Are You Optimizing a Crooked House?
When founders hit a growth bottleneck, their first instinct is often “optimization.” They stare at metrics: conversion rates, click-through rates, return on ad spend. They bring in ad experts from Google or Meta, or hire consultants to try various growth hacking techniques.
None of that is wrong. But here’s a harsh reality:
If the core problem lies in your product, target market, or business model, then even the most precise ad optimization or the most beautiful dashboards will only bring 10–20% improvement at best.
It’s like a crooked house — you replace the carpet, repaint the walls, install better lighting, but the house is still crooked. The real issue is the foundation, not the decoration.
What truly drives exponential growth are deeper structural choices:
Is your market large enough?
Have you truly achieved product-market fit?
Is your business model inherently scalable?
No amount of ad budget can help you bypass these questions.
Many entrepreneurs aren’t lacking effort — they’re misdirecting it. They use tactical diligence to mask strategic ambiguity.
3. It’s Not What You Can Do — It’s What You Do Better Than Anyone Else
In 1987, a 56-year-old engineer in Taiwan decided to start a semiconductor company. What was unusual was his business model — he would only manufacture chips for others, never design or sell his own.
At the time, everyone found this strange. What kind of semiconductor company doesn’t make its own products?
But Morris Chang had thought it through:
Taiwan couldn’t compete with Intel in branding, nor with Samsung in vertical integration. But around the world, there were brilliant chip designers with great ideas — yet no billions of dollars to build fabs.
Their biggest problem was simple:
“Who can turn my design into a real chip?”
Chang’s answer: “I can.” And he focused on that one thing.
Thirty years later, that company is TSMC. Its operating margin has long stayed between 40–45%, while Samsung’s foundry division sits around 10–15%, and Intel has struggled with losses. Companies like Apple, NVIDIA, and AMD all line up to work with it.
TSMC’s strongest moat isn’t just its technology — it’s a simple promise:“We never compete with our customers.”And they’ve done that one thing for 30 years.
The key lesson for founders:
Don’t ask “What can I do?”
Ask instead: “Where is my asymmetric advantage? What can I do better than anyone else?”
Do you have something that makes customers feel, “There is no alternative but you”? Find it — and go all in.
4. It Only Counts If Customers Will Pay — and Keep Paying
Finding what you do better than others isn’t enough. You must also ask:Will customers pay enough, and for long enough?
In 2006, NVIDIA launched the CUDA platform, enabling researchers to use GPUs for scientific computing. At the time, it generated little revenue, and many thought it was a waste of resources.
But Jensen Huang insisted on investing in it. He was betting on one thing:
Once developers got used to programming on CUDA, they wouldn’t leave. The switching cost would be too high.
That bet paid off in the AI era. Today, millions of AI engineers build on CUDA. They pay NVIDIA billions — and they can’t easily switch away.
Does your product create increasing dependence?
Does it become harder to leave the more it’s used?
If yes, you’ve found something worth committing to fully.
5. Find a Model You Can Replicate and Scale
Doing one thing well and having customers who pay long-term still isn’t enough. The final piece is finding a scalable model.
The core logic:
With the same input, serve 10x more customers — or serve the same customers at a lower cost.
There are two paths:
1. Replicate customers
Imagine running a fully booked restaurant with limited seats. If you standardize recipes, supply chains, and training manuals, you can franchise and replicate the same dishes across 100 cities.SaaS follows this model: write code once, sell it to 10,000 customers, with near-zero marginal cost.
2. Replicate the product
TSMC follows this path. Manufacturing capability can’t be copied, but capacity can be expanded. The more chips produced, the lower the average cost per unit, and the higher the profit — a direct manifestation of economies of scale.
No matter the path, the principle is the same:
As you scale, costs grow much slower than revenue.
6. Scale Effects: Survive the Threshold Before the Flywheel Spins
Scale effects — network effects and economies of scale — don’t exist from day one. They accumulate over time.
In its early days, TSMC was a small, technologically lagging company. But it did one thing:relentless investment, continuous accumulation, and unwavering focus.
With each generation of process technology, it invested more in R&D. With each new customer, it improved service. Each year, it expanded capacity and improved yield. This positive cycle gradually accelerated — this is the flywheel effect.
At a certain threshold, the flywheel spins so fast that competitors simply can’t catch up.
Today, building a TSMC-like company requires over $20 billion, thousands of PhD engineers, and years of supply chain relationships. This isn’t a ticket you can buy with money — it’s a path you must walk over time.
For early-stage founders, before scale effects kick in, there will be a period of “high input, low return.” Many give up during this phase or get distracted by quicker opportunities.
Only those who endure get to see the flywheel truly spin.
7. Conclusion: The Courage to Say “No” Is Real Strategy
The hardest decision in entrepreneurship is not “What should I do?”It’s “What should I not do?”
Behind every “no” is a sacrificed opportunity, potential revenue, and temporary discomfort.Morris Chang said no to designing chips.Jensen Huang said no to the tempting mobile chip market when the company was struggling — and doubled down on GPUs.
Saying “no” is painful in the moment.
But those “no’s” are what make your “yes” incredibly powerful.
Three final questions for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists:
Can you do this better than anyone else in the market?
Will customers pay a premium for the long term — and become increasingly dependent on you?
Do you have a scalable model that becomes more efficient as it grows?
If you have clear answers to all three, go all in — and endure the period before the flywheel starts spinning.
That’s how TSMC and NVIDIA did it. Their greatness didn’t come from having the most resources, but from making the clearest choices:
Do one thing — and say “no” to everything else.
You can do it too!
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About VENTURE+
VENTURE+ specializes in SaaS and AI investments, offering more than just funding. We provide startups with strategic guidance, corporate partnerships, and capital market planning. We aim to be the "Best Co-Founding Partner" bridging startups, venture capital, and industry leaders in long-term collaboration.
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