Chip On My Spine: A Love Letter to Silicon
A deeply unhinged analysis of why I got a semiconductor company's logo tattooed on my spine and call it the start of my "neural network"
The “chip” on my spine (my beloved Substrate tattoo).
Virginia Heffernan Changed My Life
It all started innocently enough. I was doom-scrolling in March 2023, avoiding my mounds of email, when I stumbled upon Virginia Heffernan's WIRED article: "I Saw the Face of God in a Semiconductor Factory."
You know that moment when you realize you're either having a spiritual awakening or a psychotic break? That's what it felt like after reading this article. In TSMC's Fab 18 in Taiwan, they carve and etch a quintillion transistors for Apple every six months. A quintillion. That's a one with 18 zeros for those who don't know.
She wrote about the cleanest air she's ever inhaled, with no more than 100 particles of dust per cubic meter compared to ordinary air's million particles. She painted semiconductor manufacturing as a religious experience, a rare glimpse into the divine machinery of our modern existence. I was sitting in my underwear, eating Cheetos, having my own revelation: We're completely fucked if Taiwan gets invaded.
The pandemic showed us what happens when supply chains break. Remember when you couldn't buy a car because there weren't enough chips? I was ready to raid old PlayStations and even suggested that to Elon's team at some point. This near-catastrophic failure was just an appetizer, I'm afraid. The main course could be watching civilization grind to a halt while China and Taiwan duke it out over an island that produces 92% of the world's most advanced chips through TSMC.
After reading this article, I had to take a pause. Once you get past her inane ramblings about losing her luggage, you get to the meat of it. What shocked me most was the job requirement for being an engineer at TSMC: you must believe in God. Yes, you read that correctly. They say that to think subatomically, you must have faith in God to think like God. Now, there is a chance someone might say they “believe in God” just to get and keep the job (or they might actually believe in God).
The Sacred Mountain and the God You Must Believe In
Here's something Heffernan's article didn't fully explore but haunted me for weeks: TSMC is literally revered as Taiwan's "Sacred Mountain," a company so vital to the nation's survival that it's discussed in quasi-religious terms. Mark Liu, the chairman of TSMC, told her straight up: "Every scientist must believe in God."
Let that sink in. The chairman of the world's most important technology company, the one that makes the chips that power everything from iPhones to nuclear weapons, says you have to believe in God to work there as a scientist.
You know, it could be propaganda. Something to ward off China, but maybe, just maybe, they believe it.
This isn't Chick-fil-A. This isn't Hobby Lobby. This is the company that holds Western civilization together through its semiconductor monopoly, saying atheists need not apply to their scientific positions.
Liu even quoted Proverbs: "It is the glory of God to conceal matter." He talks about TSMC scientists doing "atomic constructions" and tells his engineers to "Think like an atomic-sized person." But apparently, you can only think like an atomic-sized person if you also believe in a cosmic-sized deity.
Two qualities set TSMC scientists apart, Liu said: curiosity and stamina. Oh, and mandatory theism.
Is there any other company like this in the world? A technology company at the absolute cutting edge of human achievement that requires religious belief? Not in Silicon Valley, where the religion is usually disruption and the god is usually yourself. Not in American tech companies, where even mentioning God in a job interview might trigger a lawsuit.
On its surface, it's so weird that it would be like NASA requiring astronauts to practice astrology or CERN physicists passing a theology exam.
The irony to me is staggering. In America, we openly embrace religion through chicken sandwiches, craft supplies, and Bible verses on burger wrappers and fries. In Taiwan, the scientists celebrate their achievements through prayer and the occasional perks of eating at Burger King.
And you know what? Maybe that's why they're so good at what they do. When you're manipulating matter at the atomic level, when you're creating structures so small that the wavelength of visible light is too big to see them, when you're essentially playing God with silicon, maybe you need to believe in something bigger than yourself.
The Monopoly Game Nobody Wants to Play
Here's the thing about monopolies: they're great until they're not. ASML holds 100% of the EUV lithography market. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT. Not 99.9%. Not "basically all of it."
Every. Single. Machine.
Imagine if bread kept all of humanity alive and there was only one oven maker. Oh, and each oven costs you $200 million. Oh, and they only make about 40-50 a year. And they're all in the Netherlands, which I love, but let's be honest here, it's basically the New Atlantis waiting to happen with climate change.
Meanwhile, TSMC is worth $1.5 trillion as of October 2025. Yes, that's trillion with a T. That's more than the GDP of many countries. They're precariously positioned on an island that China considers a renegade province.
The entire tech industry, your iPhone, your laptop, your smart toilets that analyze your bowel movements and send everything to the cloud, it all depends on this precarious arrangement. We've built civilization on a Jenga tower.
The Investment That Changed Everything
Here's the thing: I didn't just read Heffernan's article and have a revelation in March 2023. A year before that article was even published, in April 2022, I had already been studying supply chain shortages and had narrowed in on chip manufacturing. That's when I got on a call with Lee Jacobs and a founder named James Proud.
When we invested on April Fools Day in 2022, I told my husband Scott, "Let's put the whole fund in this and go on vacation." Well, we can't do that legally, so we put as much as the fund could do, for something that wasn't made yet and nobody was even sure was possible.
But when I read Heffernan's article a year later, it sealed everything I'd already believed. It was confirmation, validation, a sign from the universe that we'd made one of the best investment decisions of our lives. Sometimes you invest based on analysis. Sometimes you invest based on conviction. And sometimes, the universe sends you a WIRED article that makes you want to tattoo a company logo on your spine.
Enter the Thiel Fellow With the Chip on His Shoulder
This is where the story gets interesting. Really interesting.
James Proud became one of the first 24 Thiel Fellows in 2011, accepting $100,000 to skip college and build something that mattered. What followed was the kind of education you can't get in any classroom: the brutal, unforgiving curriculum of Silicon Valley.
First came Hello. The company raised $40 million and reached a $250 million valuation for 'Sense', a sleep-tracking device that ultimately couldn't find its market. When The Verge called it "dysfunctional," when the reviews came in lukewarm, when the company shut down in June 2017, Proud didn't hide. He wrote: "It's with a heavy heart that I share with you the news that Hello will soon be shutting down."
FWIW, I owned one of these and they were beautiful and I loved mine.
But here's what most people don't understand about failure at this scale: it teaches you things success never could. Every burned bridge becomes a lesson in structural engineering. Every wrong turn becomes a data point. Every dollar lost becomes tuition for the most expensive MBA program in the world, the one where the classroom is the market and the professors are your failures.
The chip on Proud's shoulder?
He used it to found Config, raising over $5 million for software that streamlines hardware design via computer-aided design.
He learned what he needed to learn. Every startup, every pivot, every late-night debugging hardware, it was all preparation for this moment.
And now? Now he's running Substrate. And this time, it's different. This isn't a consumer product hoping to find product-market fit. This is a response to an existential threat to American technological sovereignty.
The man who was early for sleep tracking is now solving one of America's most critical infrastructure problems. One that everyone was sleeping on.
And you know what? That's exactly why it might work. Because James Proud has something ASML's executives don't have, something TSMC's board doesn't have: the bone-deep knowledge of what it's like to fail, to rebuild, and to come back with a chip on your shoulder the size of Texas.
He's not trying to build a better mousetrap. He's trying to build the mousetrap factory that saves Western civilization. The stakes couldn't be higher, and the founder couldn't be more battle-tested.
The Day I Decided to Get Inked
March 21, 2023. The day Heffernan's article came out.
I was surprised to find out that nobody I knew had read it. When I finished reading it, I immediately reached out to James and asked him to meet me in a park in San Francisco. There, I expressed to him my gut feelings about his business and its place in the world. How vitally important his work is. How this wasn't just another startup, but a genuine attempt to solve an existential problem for America.
It was then that I decided to get the tattoo. The article was the sign I'd been waiting for.
So there I was, months after reading that article, when I had what entrepreneurs call "conviction" and what therapists call "an interesting choice" and what I call "skin in the game." I already have an Anduril tattoo on my left shoulder. I put it there to symbolize strength, endurance, and the will to lift and protect the world. The name Anduril comes from a sword, which you must lift with your arms.
I decided that I'm eventually going to tattoo every company I've had a small part to play in at the formative period that reshapes humanity in meaningful ways. There are a lot of companies that deserve to be on my body, but Substrate skipped the line. I decided I wanted to put all of my AI company investments down my spinal column. Get it? If you don't, don't worry about it.
I've kept my tattoo in stealth for a while now and everyone asks me what it is. I joke and tell them it's my power button, but really, it's the free world's power button.
The Tattoo Appointment
Two hours into the session, the tattoo artist wiped the blood off my back while wrapping me in plastic.
"What if the company fails?" he asked.
"They won't," I said, with a grin.
"But what is it, actually? If it isn't a power button, what is it?"
"Well, ultimately it's a symbol. A symbol of belief in James Proud and his team. He was forged in fire and came out unbroken."
The artist paused, considering this, then shrugged and went back to his work.
Virginia Heffernan understood something when she saw God in that semiconductor factory: these chips aren't just technology. They're the physical manifestation of human ambition crystallized into silicon. They're proof that we can manipulate matter at a scale so small it borders on the theoretical.
And now, I carry that proof on my spine. A reminder that sometimes the most important investments aren't just financial. Sometimes they're literal. Sometimes they're permanent. Sometimes they're etched into your skin with ink and blood and conviction.
Because in the end, if civilization really does depend on a Jenga tower of Taiwanese fabs and Dutch lithography machines, then maybe it's worth having some skin in the game. Even if that skin happens to be on your back. Even if that game is saving the free world.
The chip on my spine isn't just about Substrate. It's about believing that American innovation can solve American vulnerabilities. It's about betting on founders who've failed before and learned from it. It's about understanding that the future isn't just code and algorithms, it's atoms and silicon and faith in something bigger than yourself.
Whether that's God, as TSMC's chairman insists, or just the audacity to believe we can build something that matters, I'll leave that up to you.
But I know what I believe. And I've got the tattoo to prove it.