20 years for a hardware startup to get really going isn't unusual. One of the other reasons VC likes SAAS. Hardware startups are cash intensive and slow boils, typically.
They weren't a startup for 20 years, they were a huge company with billion dollar fabs, thousands of workers, and they were exchanging technology lead with other silicon manufacturing companies many times (back before 2020s, mid/late 2010s, TSMC was not undisputed leader).
UMC was a Taiwan foundry that started even before TSMC and it eventually folded.
