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In October 2014, Lisa Su was appointed CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, after serving previously as the company’s chief operating officer and as an executive at Freescale Semiconductor and International Business Machines. It has been an impressive run so far: AMD’s revenue rose more than 20% in each of the past two years, and the company generated $337 million of earnings last year.

AMD stock (AMD) is up more than 900% since Su became CEO—including an 80% advance this year through June 10—reflecting investors’ optimism about AMD’s product pipeline. Last year, AMD was the best-performing stock in the S&P 500.

Barron’s readers are familiar with AMD. We wrote in December that the stock could be a big winner this year because of the company’s promising products. More recently, we named Su one of the World’s Best CEOs in this past weekend’s cover story, and put her photo on the cover. In a recent phone interview, she discussed the company’s big technology bets, her corporate strategy, and why investors trust AMD again. An edited excerpt follows.

Barron’s: What were your vision and strategy when you first became CEO, and how did that lead to AMD’s turnaround? I read somewhere that you wrote an internal memo back then about the company’s IP, or intellectual property strategy, and the need to simplify it.

Lisa Su: AMD had a long history of having good technology and great engineers. But when I took over as CEO I thought that what we needed to do was focus on the right things. When we looked at the market back then, we said high-performance computing is a great market. It’s going to become more and more important as we go into the future and it’s pretty hard. Very few companies have the IP necessary to play in this area. So we focused. My mantra to the team was focus on great products, our most important customers, and just simplifying everything that we do. And that has held with us for the past four and a half years.

AMD spends a fraction of what Intel, your main competitor, spends for research and development. What has made AMD’s spending so effective, giving you step-function increases in the performance of the company’s Zen 1 and Zen 2 processors? What was the difference in execution over the past four or five years?

In tech, what’s really important is that we make bets far out in time. The decisions that we made in that 2015 to 2016 timeframe were very important technology bets that are now playing out in the roadmap in 2018 and 2019. It’s things like betting on 7-nanometer technology and being early in that, really investing in our core IP and our core foundation. And, frankly, it was as important to decide what we were not going to invest in. There were a whole bunch of things that we said, hey, they are interesting, but they’re not going to make or break our story. So let’s focus and let’s take some big bets.

Read more: The World’s Best CEOs of 2019

We’ve bet on chiplet technology, and at that time nobody was thinking that. And we said, look, we believe this is where high-performance computing technology should go. So we made some good calls and we let things play out. You can’t rush technology. It literally takes five years to build a new core and we gave the team the time and the resources they needed to get it done.

Was the team pretty much the same when you were COO and you made them focus, or did you hire a bunch of new people after you became CEO who turned out to be great engineers?

The engineering team was largely the same. I give Mark Papermaster a lot of credit as chief technology officer. It’s basically our shared vision in terms of what to do with technology. As it relates to businesses and executives, we have had some changes and the changes have brought more talent from a business and a market perspective. But the core engineering team, if I look at the leadership that has gotten us to where we are, is very much the same, with some additional executives to bring some horsepower on markets, management, and business leadership.

Was there any change in culture or your management philosophy at the time? Any anecdotal story that illuminates this?

The best story is—I know it sounds simple—what I’ve asked the team to do. It was, do what we say we’re going to do. Everything in our culture is around that, especially around our products. I used to go to customers and they would say, “Hey we really like AMD, but your roadmap changes all the time. We don’t know if we can count on you.”

Read more: AMD’s Lisa Su and Other Change Agents on Our List of the World’s Best CEOs

Our mantra for the past five years has been, “We do what we say we’re going to do and we are meeting or exceeding our commitments to customers.”

It is very important for the engineering team to be focused on the end product. It’s wonderful to have a great product. It’s much better to have a product that is on time and meets our customer’s commitments.

Were there any lessons earlier in your career at IBM that helped you when you became AMD’s CEO?

A number of people asked me, why would I come to AMD? There was always this notion of, what’s the attraction?

I’ve always been attracted to solving really tough problems. That was a piece of advice I was given when I was a young engineer at IBM. It was the idea of, run towards the problems because problems actually create opportunities. I really believe that is the AMD story.

AMD has had some history that has been up and down, but when you look at the opportunity that we have in the markets that we serve and the customers that we’re partnered with, there’s no better opportunity in the semiconductor industry.

How important is it for a CEO in the technology industry to have the technical expertise and chops in that area? There are other CEOs who speak a lot of buzz words and don’t know product as well as you do. How important do you think that is?

For us particularly, since we are a big-bet company, it’s important to have some [technical] intuition. I don’t design chips any more. I don’t think I’ve done that for quite a while. But I love spending time with the engineers, going into the lab and getting a feel for what the real challenges are, because it just helps me make better decisions about the business.

Last question. You have touched on how AMD built trust with customers and partners. It seems like AMD has done a great job over the past few years building partnerships with Microsoft, Sony, and now with Google, Samsung, and Amazon.com. How did you do that?

We look at every customer interaction as a long-term customer relationship. And we have to earn their business [by] offering great technology, but [also] doing what we said we were going to do.

We are at our best when we’re solving [problems] and working in partnership with customers. We learn a lot and we help shape the customer’s solution. That’s one of the things that has been very important for us over the last four to five years.

Thanks, Lisa.

Write to Tae Kim at tae.kim@barrons.com