Time & Perspective Quote by Mike Marsh

Marsh’s line has the plainspoken snap of someone used to performance metrics: when the stakes rise, you don’t bet on the flashy newcomer, you bet on the system that has already survived pressure. The “chip” isn’t just a component here; it’s a stand-in for reliability at scale. By pointing to silicon foundries “running their plants for the past fifty years,” he’s smuggling in an argument about institutional muscle memory - the unsexy competence built through decades of defects, bottlenecks, and incremental fixes.

The intent is practical persuasion. He’s narrowing the conversation from hype (“we can build it”) to throughput (“can you build a million of them without the wheels coming off?”). “Mass manufacture” functions like a credential, and “volume increase problem” is the tell: the real crisis isn’t invention, it’s amplification. Any prototype can look heroic. Scaling is where timelines snap, costs balloon, and reputations get set on fire.

The subtext also carries a quiet rebuke to industries that romanticize disruption. Marsh is effectively saying: stop treating manufacturing like an afterthought or a mere supplier relationship. Foundries aren’t just factories; they’re a strategic advantage because they’ve already solved the brutal, boring math of yield, consistency, and repeatability. Coming from an athlete, it reads like training wisdom applied to tech: championships are won by fundamentals and conditioning, not by one highlight reel move.