‹ Cerebras Systems
Ch 4 · Two AMD Alumni, Their Second Company
Chapter 4 · Management
Two co-founders. 20 years of building chips together.
Andrew Feldman (CEO) and Sean Lie (CTO) co-founded their first chip startup in 2007. AMD bought it. Then they started Cerebras.
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✦ The bottom line
Andrew Feldman (CEO) and Sean Lie (CTO) — co-founders since 2016. Both worked together at SeaMicro (acquired by AMD 2012) and at AMD itself. This is their second chip company together.
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✦ Teach me
Skin in the game
Founder-CEOs who've already built one successful company tend to make different decisions than first-time CEOs. They've felt the consequences of bad calls. They know what they're risking. When the founder pair has been working together for 20 years — through one acquisition exit and now a second startup — they're aligned in a way that's hard to manufacture. The cap table will tell you how much of their wealth is tied up in the stock.
Wall Street calls this
Founder alignment / second-time founders
Cerebras is selling shareholders a 10-year bet on wafer-scale AI infrastructure. You're not just buying chips — you're buying the people who'll make the next 10 years' worth of architectural decisions.
The founder arc
2004-08
Sean Lie works at AMD on microprocessor architecture. MIT M.Eng background.
2007
Andrew Feldman (Stanford MBA, marketing background at Force10 Networks) founds SeaMicro — a dense microserver company. Sean Lie joins as lead hardware architect.
Feb 2012
AMD acquires SeaMicro. Feldman becomes Corp VP at AMD; Lie becomes Chief Architect for Data Center Server Solutions.
2015
AMD shuts down the SeaMicro product line. Feldman and Lie leave.
Apr 2016
They co-found Cerebras. The bet: build the wafer-scale chip that AMD and Nvidia wouldn't — because it was "impossible."
2019
First WSE chip ships. Skeptics start to convert.
Now
10 years in. Both still here. WSE-3 shipping. Public company. The bet partially proven.
From the prospectus · the founder backgrounds
Andrew D. Feldman ... served as Chief Executive Officer at SeaMicro, a dense microserver company acquired by AMD ... From February 2012 to June 2014, Mr. Feldman served as Corporate Vice President and General Manager at Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. ('AMD'), a semiconductor company. Sean Lie ... From April 2012 to June 2015, Mr. Lie served as Chief Architect, Data Center Server Solutions at AMD. From March 2008 to March 2012, Mr. Lie served as Lead Hardware Architect of the IO virtualization fabric ASIC at SeaMicro.
↳ 20 years of chip experience together. That's an enormous amount of accumulated trust and aligned judgment — particularly valuable for a wafer-scale bet that requires deep architectural commitment.
Source · 424B4 · Management — Executive Officers and Employee Director · as of IPO · Filed May 14, 2026
✓
Strong
Founder pair, second chip company together, 10 years at Cerebras. Both still in seat. Decisions are theirs to live with.
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Chapter 4 · MANAGEMENT
Two AMD Alumni, Their Second Company
you now read: skin in the game
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Chapter 6 · RISK
What Could Break the Brief