What This Work Is For:

Semiconductor investment decisions are hard because two worlds rarely talk to each other: the engineering reality of how chips are made and used, and the financial models that value the companies making them.

Earnings models that can't account for physics. Valuation frameworks that miss what actually makes semiconductor companies succeed or fail. The gap creates blind spots—and blind spots create opportunity for those who can see across both domains.

N72 exists to bridge that gap.

For Individual Companies

I assess semiconductor companies through four integrated lenses. Each answers a specific question:

Are the reported profits real?

The Business Quality Rating examines earnings sustainability, value creation patterns, and governance quality. The methodology builds on Columbia Business School forensic accounting principles—specifically Professor Doron Nissim's framework for identifying earnings that won't persist.

Does the technology roadmap create or destroy value?

Technology Strategy Returns evaluates whether a company's technical direction generates shareholder returns. Many semiconductor companies chase leading-edge nodes that never pay back. This lens distinguishes disciplined capital allocation from value-destructive technology ambition.

Can the company actually reach its customers?

Market Awareness & Access assesses the invisible ceilings on revenue growth. In semiconductors, the "Approved Vendor List" dynamic means a company can have superior technology and still be locked out of major customers. Financial metrics don't capture this. Engineering relationships do.

Will leadership execute?

The Organizational Values Profile examines how leadership teams navigate competing tensions—innovation versus execution, short-term versus long-term, technical excellence versus commercial discipline. Cultural patterns often predict performance changes 12-24 months before they appear in financials. Based on Trompenaars' organizational culture framework.

These lenses integrate. Leadership culture informs technology execution probability. Market access modulates revenue ceiling estimates. Earnings quality provides foundation filtering. Together, they answer: Is this company building sustainable value, and can leadership actually deliver it?

For Markets and Systems

Some questions can't be answered by analyzing individual companies. When structural forces reshape entire sectors, you need a different tool.

Balance of Forces analyzes markets, sectors, and policy environments as complex systems. The core insight: markets behave like weather systems—many forces acting simultaneously, interacting in non-linear ways, producing emergent behavior that no single force explains alone.

The framework maps these forces as vectors, calculates how they combine, and identifies which forces currently dominate. The output is a Net Force Vector—the aggregate direction and magnitude of all forces acting on the system.

Why vectors on two-dimensional planes? Human auditability. Investment committees and regulators can verify 2D calculations by visual inspection. Higher-dimensional models become unauditable black boxes. Transparency matters more than mathematical sophistication when consequential decisions are at stake.

Inflection Reports apply the N72 proprietary Balance of Forces methodology to identify structural turning points before they become consensus.

The current report—AI Economy Inflection—analyzes structural forces converging on AI infrastructure through 2035: depreciation accounting that diverges from semiconductor physics, demographic-driven capital flows, index concentration mechanics.

This isn't company-level analysis. It's system-level analysis: What forces are building? How do they interact? Where do the physics and the arithmetic point?

I use a three-star system inspired by a respected Parisian culinary guide. The principle: exceptional quality is rare by definition. If everyone earns stars, stars mean nothing.

• ★★★ (normalised rating score ≥0.90) — Truly exceptional. Fewer than 5% of companies.
• ★★ (normalised rating score 0.83–0.90) — Excellent. About 5–10% of companies.
• ★ (normalised rating score 0.76–0.83) — Very good. About 5–15% of companies.

No stars (score below 0.76) — The majority of companies.

Most companies don't earn stars—not because they're poorly run, but because exceptional quality is genuinely rare. This selectivity is the point. A single star from N72 represents something meaningful.

Beyond research publications, I work directly with investors who hold significant stakes in companies—enough to have board access and influence governance.

This is hands-on partnership: analyzing corporate governance, identifying operational improvement opportunities, preparing supervisory board engagement strategies, and providing the documentation shareholders need to hold leadership accountable for performance.

The work is comparable to what operating partners do in private equity—but for shareholders in public or private companies who want to actively improve their investments rather than passively hold them.

If you own a meaningful position in a technology company and believe the board isn't delivering the value it should, I'd welcome the conversation.