Why We Built HowTheyMakeMoney — A Letter from Taiwan

Hi — we're two developers from TaiwanLink to this section#

This post is a little different from the rest of the site. There is no ticker at the top, no backlog number, no stock that fell 8%. Instead we want to step back and tell you who we are, why this site exists, and where we want to take it.

We are two software developers based in Taiwan. Like a lot of people right now, we have spent the last couple of years watching the AI wave reshape one industry after another — and watching the companies behind it grow at a pace that is genuinely hard to model. It has been a strange and exciting thing to live through, both as builders and as investors trying to make sense of it all.

The complicated became simpleLink to this section#

What struck us most was not any single product. It was how quickly the difficult became easy.

Things that used to take us days — reading a dense quarterly filing, reconciling segment numbers, turning a wall of tables into something you could actually see — collapsed into hours, then minutes. Information that used to be locked behind expertise and patience started flowing faster than ever. That shift is the backdrop for everything we do here.

Why we started HowTheyMakeMoneyLink to this section#

We started HowTheyMakeMoney about two years ago, and the original goal was almost embarrassingly simple: we wanted a tool for ourselves.

We were analyzing company earnings, and we were tired of squinting at tables. We wanted to see a business — where the revenue comes from, where the money goes, how the margins move — as a picture rather than a spreadsheet. So we built charts. The Sankey revenue-flow diagrams you see across the site came out of that itch: a way to understand a company's financial shape in a single glance.

That was the seed. The site was a tool before it was a publication.

What we do nowLink to this section#

Today we still lead with charts, because we think a good chart is the fastest honest way to understand a company. But AI has let us do something we could not do on our own at this speed: reinterpret an earnings report — quickly, and in plain language.

Each post you read here pulls together the numbers, the earnings-call framing, and the market's reaction, and tries to answer the one question a chart alone can't: so what? We use AI across that whole process — extracting the figures, drafting the analysis, and translating every post into English, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese.

We are not pretending the tooling makes us infallible. We keep tuning it, and we optimize relentlessly for two things:

• Accuracy. The numbers have to be right, and the interpretation has to be fair. When we get something wrong, we want to know.
• Readability. A correct paragraph nobody finishes is a failure too. The writing exists to make the charts make sense.

The part we care about most: TaiwanLink to this section#

Here is the thing we are quietly ambitious about.

Taiwan is one of the most important players in the global semiconductor industry — arguably the linchpin of the world's most important supply chain. A lot of investors around the world are genuinely curious about the companies on this island. But language and cultural distance have made them hard to read from the outside. The filings, the commentary, the local context — much of it simply doesn't cross over.

We think AI can help close that gap. One of the reasons we publish in four languages is so that an investor in New York, London, or Tokyo can understand a Taiwanese company the way a local reader would. Taiwan's stock market is on its way to becoming the world's fifth largest. We would love to help the rest of the world meet it properly.

Write to usLink to this section#

So that's who we are and what we're trying to do.

If you are one of our readers or users, we would genuinely love to hear from you — your thoughts, the things you need, and the places we got it wrong. We read all of it.

And if there is a topic you want us to explain, or a Taiwanese company you have been wanting to understand, tell us. Honestly, those are our favorite emails to get.

Thanks for reading. We're just getting started.

— The HowTheyMakeMoney team, Taiwan