Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Mark Ross, a seasoned semiconductor expert and former CTO of Cypress Semiconductor, was an early supporter of Etched. Initially skeptical, he was convinced by a functional simulation and later became Etched's full-time CTO as he witnessed the development progress.
“And Mark's like, 'No, you can't. It will not work.' But then he told me, 'If you can convince me, you write a white paper, you go ahead and build a functional simulation, and show me.'”
“And he was like, 'Huh, this works.' 'But,' he said, 'you'll need a large amount of capital. Like $300 million even to get you started.'”
“And I think in general, the skepticism has filtered really heavily for folks who want to go ahead and do right, regardless of being skeptical, but willing to go ahead and say, sure, I'm skeptical, but I will go ahead and work the numbers myself.”