I sat down with the ASML CEO in the Netherlands for A Bit Personal, and our conversation kept coming back to a few plain ideas: stay curious, take real risks, tell each other the truth, and go home at night. Here is what stayed with me, followed by some reading if you want to go further.

If you’re curious about the process of building these chips, I like this video from CNBC that takes you through exactly how it works.

A spaceship behind glass

Eighteen years ago, Christophe was working in the US semiconductor industry and took a tour of a research center in Albany, New York. A window runs along the clean room there, and as he walked past rows of tools that all looked like big boxes, he stopped at one enormous machine with cables everywhere. It looked like a spaceship. His host told him it was the first ASML EUV prototype. He sent his résumé to ASML the next day.

What he saw in that machine was risk. Someone, he told me, had clearly taken a big bet to make it work, and the bet took another 20 years to pay off. For much of that time EUV nearly bankrupted the company, because ASML kept putting its profits into the tool. Christophe credits the people who stayed with it for 10 or 20 years until it worked.

From being good to being useful

For the first part of a career, Christophe said, you prove yourself through expertise, and school trains you for it by rewarding the person who is first in the class. Then you hit a ceiling, because the only variable is you. In his mid to late 30s he started spending his energy on sharing methods and ideas instead of defending ownership of them, and he got comfortable when an idea he started became the group’s idea. Looking back, he said, he felt he had wasted some time before that. For him, that shift is the moment you become a leader and not just a manager.

It is also why he calls the CEO the least important person in a company. One person has a fixed amount of bandwidth, and the job is to build a team that multiplies it by 10 or 100.

Ego, truth and failure

When I asked how he separates conviction from ego, Christophe pointed to data. An engineer can believe a design is the best thing humankind ever thought of, then test it, and the result says whether that is true. If you keep going after the data says you are wrong, that is ego, stubbornness or arrogance, and you will fail. He called success the biggest threat of all, because it can convince you that you are very smart and make you forget it came from hard work, mistakes and risk.

The same thinking shaped how ASML is built. The company chose to be a system integrator, working with the best partner for each critical component, Zeiss for the optics among them, instead of trying to do everything itself. The idea that you can be the very best at everything, he said, is pretty close to ego. It also shapes who he keeps around: people who tell him the truth, because flatterers are useless.

On failure, he allows himself the disappointment, since it is part of the learning, and then treats the problem as something left to invent. In some ways, he told me, failure can be more fun than success.

Doing everything twice

We also talked about what it would mean to split the US and Chinese chip ecosystems. His point is a practical one: you would have to do the work twice. The R&D for a new ASML machine, for the next generation of chips at TSMC, Intel or Samsung, and for NVIDIA’s AI products would all be duplicated. He added that restrictions give the strongest possible incentive for someone to build an alternative, which can leave a country with a complete, independent and very expensive ecosystem.

He is also skeptical that EUV can be copied quickly. It took ASML and its partners about 30 years, and a report he received the week we spoke said ASML systems around the world have now exposed one billion wafers. That is a body of learning feeding the next machine, and he said those trying to catch up have nowhere near it.

Leaving ASML at the front door

Christophe grew up in Grenoble in a modest family and was the first in it to finish high school and go to university. His parents measured success by happiness, he told me. The question at home was whether he was happy with his results, never whether he was first or second or third in the class. He took his first flight at 25, signed his first job offer at Applied Materials without knowing much about the company (it had offices in Israel and the United States, which sounded good), and has since worked in Israel, the US and the Netherlands.

Today he has six children, the oldest 27 and the youngest 3, and he lives in a small village in the countryside near ASML. A Sunday morning for him means a slow start, some time in the garden, a trip to the bakery for bread and croissants, and breakfast with the family. He does not keep a morning routine. What he keeps is a boundary: when he crosses the door of his home, he stops thinking about ASML, and he says that empty space in his mind is what makes room for new ideas the next day. He takes two weeks of holiday every summer for the same reason, and American colleagues still ask him why.

Keep reading

• Chip War by Chris Miller. I reread parts of it before the interview, and the chapter called “No Plan B” covers the EUV bet Christophe and I talked about.

• How ASML Got EUV by Brian Potter. American institutions funded much of the early EUV research, yet ASML ended up the only company to bring it to market. Potter explains why having a working technology and winning in the marketplace are two different problems.

• The Costs of U.S.-China Semiconductor Decoupling from CSIS. A look at what it takes to separate the two ecosystems, which pairs with Christophe’s point about doing the work twice.

• Europe’s irreplaceable innovator: ASML’s CEO on powering the digital future. A November 2025 interview with Christophe by IMD professor Jean-François Manzoni, for a more traditional business view of the same leader.

Listen

The full conversation with Christophe Fouquet is on A Bit Personal with Jodi Shelton, anywhere you get your podcasts.

While the industry often focuses on technical specifications, Leo joins us to share the human side of his legacy. He reflects on the "builder’s DNA" he forged working on farms, the resilience required to hold 14 patents, and the leadership philosophy that drove Spreadtrum from $70M to $2B in revenue.

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In our conversation, we get a bit personal and discuss:

1. Why they built trust for over a decade before they ever needed it, and what that means for anyone picking who to go into business with

2. The different ways each of them sizes up risk, and why having all three on a team beats having three of the same

3. Why they treat disagreement as a feature of good decisions, not a problem to manage around

4. What “no ego” actually looks like day to day, and why it’s a discipline, not a personality type

5. How a new executive’s first day revealed what their culture had actually built, without anyone performing for her

6. The three-step philosophy their chairman calls “old-fashioned,” and why they never outgrew it

7. Why staying a “builder” after a successful IPO takes more intention than staying one before you had anything to lose

Keep Up With Astera Labs:

Jitendra Mohan on LinkedIn

Sanjay Gajendra on LinkedIn

Casey Morrison on LinkedIn

Astera Labs on LinkedIn

Astera Labs on X

Astera is hiring at Astera Careers!

Referenced:

Astera Labs

Texas Instruments

EY World Entrepreneur of the Year

NVIDIA

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Jodi’s Biggest Takeaways:

Most founders give me one rehearsed version of their company's story. These three gave me three different versions of the same decade, and let each other interrupt to correct the details. Here's what stuck with me, and what I think is usable if you're trying to build anything with other people.

1. Trust Isn’t Built in the Crisis. It’s Spent There.

By the time Astera Labs existed, Jitendra, Sanjay, and Casey had already spent over a decade solving problems together inside National Semiconductor and then Texas Instruments. The confidence to eventually risk everything on their own company didn’t come from a pitch deck, it came from years of smaller bets that had already paid off. If you’re choosing who to build something with, this is the actual test: not whether you like them, but whether you’ve already been through enough small fires together to know how they behave under pressure. Jitendra put his own spin on it, describing how differently each of them handles risk: “Sanjay will jump. Then he’ll probably look down and say, okay, where am I gonna land. I will go to the edge and I’ll look, is there water there, do I know how to swim, will I survive. And then I will jump. Casey will jump because I tied a rope to his legs.” The lesson isn’t that everyone should take risks the same way. It’s that a team of three different risk profiles is sturdier than a team of three people who’d all jump, or all hesitate, together.

2. No Ego Is Something You Practice, Not Something You Have

The honest version of a good partnership isn’t harmony, it’s disagreement that doesn’t turn personal. Sanjay described it plainly: “The goodness, I think, for three of us is the respect and trust and no ego. He could make a point, get away with it, I’m not gonna hold it against him.” That’s a practice, not a trait: letting someone win an argument and choosing not to keep score. Jitendra told me that when the three of them disagree and one direction wins out, the group’s call has been right, by his account, every single time, more often than any one of them would have landed on alone. If you want a gut check for whether your own team has this, look at what happened the last time someone’s idea won and someone else’s lost. Did the losing argument get held against them later? If disagreement doesn’t cost anyone anything, it’ll keep happening, and that’s the point.

3. “Builder” Is a Daily Choice, Not a Company Stage

Astera now calls itself a public startup, and Sanjay was clear about what that phrase has to actually mean to be true. “Anytime there’s a challenge or opportunity, we don’t think about how big or complex it is. We think about how do we solve it. That builder mindset is what has allowed us to get so far. In fact, that’s who we are. We are builders.” It’s easy to have that instinct when you have nothing to lose. The harder, more useful version of it is keeping that instinct once you have a lot to protect. Their chairman, an early investor the three of them call the godfather of the company, reduces the whole philosophy to three steps: build products customers like, sell them for a profit. It’s almost too simple to write down, which might be exactly why it still works.

Looking for more insight into semiconductors and tech leadership? Follow us on Instagram and Linkedin to get A Bit Personal right in your feed.

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In our conversation, we get a bit personal and discuss:

1. Why he stays quiet until he has something worth saying

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6. The Thursday morning a sitting president publicly demanded his resignation

7. How a childhood memory of Morris Chang became his actual argument to the White House

8. Why he says he only answers to one audience

Keep Up With Lip-Bu:

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Referenced:

Intel

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Jodi’s Biggest Takeaways:

I have interviewed a lot of CEOs. I don’t think I’ve had one describe surviving a public call for his resignation from the President of the United States with this much calm. Here’s what stayed with me after we stopped recording.

1. He Took Himself Out of the Equation, on Purpose

When Tan got the call that Trump had publicly demanded his resignation, his first move wasn’t to fight back. “That’s not about me,” he told me. “I don’t need this job. And then if I’m not suitable, and then so be it.” That’s not resignation in the defeatist sense, it’s a specific mental trick: remove your own ego from a crisis so you can actually think clearly about what’s best for the company. It’s the same instinct that let him walk into a meeting with the President four days later and turn the conversation toward a $10 billion investment in Intel’s future, using an argument he’d built from watching Morris Chang and the Taiwanese government build TSMC forty years earlier.

2. The Best Advice He Ever Got Was Permission to Be Wrong

During his hardest early weeks at Cadence, a mentor named Moshe spent two and a half hours every night walking him through the company, then gave him one piece of advice that changed how he leads: “Lippo, if you make 70% of the decisions right, you’re a damn good CEO.” Tan told me that sentence lightened his entire load. It’s a strange thing to hear from someone this accomplished, that permission to be imperfect was the thing that actually unlocked his confidence, not a strategy framework or a leadership book (though he did read three copies of one literally called “CEO for Dummies” when he took the Cadence job with zero CEO experience).

3. Faith Is the Actual Operating System, Not a Side Detail

Near the end, I asked what Silicon Valley gets wrong about faith. His answer wasn’t defensive, it was almost architectural. He described his faith as the thing that makes him accountable to only one audience, which means the daily noise, a bad quarter, a public attack, a hard decision, doesn’t have to carry the same weight it would otherwise. “You don’t have the burden,” he said. “You just carry out. Every morning you get excited to come here.” I don’t think that’s a small thing to hear from someone running one of the most scrutinized companies in the country. It’s the actual explanation for how he stayed steady during a week most people would have found unbearable.

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