Phil McKinney's Studio

Phil McKinney's Studio

How I Bankrupted Two Companies

It wasn't bad decisions. It was no decisions. I had technology that could beat Intel and HP. My team waited for direction. I gave them meetings.

Phil McKinney's avatar
Phil McKinney
Jan 26, 2026
∙ Paid

The engineers were staring at me.

On the whiteboard behind me, a diagram of the MISChip architecture. A dozen instructions. Sixty-five megahertz. The most elegant processor design I’d ever seen. We were going to change everything.

The question was simple: What market should we focus on?

My spreadsheets were ready. Market projections. Competitive analysis. …

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