From fending off 89 competitors with one computer graphics textbook to making non-consensus bets on AI/Robotics, how NVIDIA has become a $2T market leader
In his recent “View From The Top” interview at Stanford, Jensen Huang ( Founder and CEO of NVIDIA ) shares his experiences in founding NVIDIA, getting funded, building the first 3D-graphics killer application for NVIDIA’s technology, deciding which markets are worth exploring, finding the conviction in making non-consensus bets, steering the company through challenging times, designing the proper organization structure, which ultimately made NVIDIA the third most valuable company – over $2T in market value – on Wall Street.
Whether it is his advice on focusing on building a good past – Jensen bragged about being Denny’s best dishwasher – or his anecdotes of successfully fending off 89 competitors with just an OpenGL ( Open Graphics Language ) manual, the interview is full of gems and is utmostly inspiring.
Creating technology to create a new market
The idea is that the company needs to create technology that creates a new market. This defines NVIDIA today.
Jensen Huang on NVIDIA’s founding roots
Driven by its mission to build an accelerated computing platform, NVIDIA sets out to make the first 3D graphics chip for a brand-new PC gaming industry. By creating a full-stack software system on top of its hardware, NVIDIA enabled a low-cost market that would not have been possible without the company’s novel accelerator technology, available only on a million-dollar supercomputer at the time.
Looking for the Early Indicators Of Future Success ( EIOFS )
Often, NVIDIA engages in exciting projects in a market that has yet to be successful. However, these projects and their importance must be justified to be deemed sustainable. In other words, the work must be so impactful that a brand-new market can eventually be created. Relying on these Early Indicators Of Future Success ( EIOFS ), NVIDIA identified early on some of the most unconventional yet promising markets, including AI, Robotics, Self-Driving Cars, Computational Drug Discovery, Materials Design, and Weather Simulation.
These EIOFS have been foundational to the monumental success of AI/Deep Learning. By implementing CUDNN ( CUDA for Deep Neural Net, OpenGL for Deep Learning), a software language platform for neural networks, NVIDIA has enabled AI researchers such as Andrew Ng to train an AI cat-recognition model much more effectively on the high-performing NVIDIA GPUs ( Graphics Processing Units ) in 2010.
Using the same CUDNN technology, a group of University of Toronto researchers, including Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever ( Chief Scientist of OpenAI ), and Geoff Hinton, developed a convolutional neural network, which won the 2012 ImageNet computer vision challenge.
Jensen Huang on NVIDIA’s challenges ahead
Despite being the third most valuable company in the market, NVIDIA is not sitting on its laurels. When asked about the challenges he would face in the next ten years, Jensen Huang lamented that there were so many new markets that he would desperately wish to create.
Nevertheless, Jensen was very excited about computational drug design. Like the EDA ( Electronic Design Automation ) tools that have shaped NVIDIA’s success, NVIDIA’s accelerated platform technology could transform the world of biology, powering the discovery of next-generation medicine.
He was also excited about the potential of robots that can be trained like a Large Language Model ( LLM ) and be able to perform intelligent tasks such as delivering goods in urban settings.
Serve Robotics IPO
Sharing NVIDIA’s mission of delivering significant impacts to the world, Good AI invests in AI companies transforming various industries.
On this note, I am very excited to announce that Good AI’s portfolio Serve Robotics debuted publicly on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol “SERV”.
With NVIDIA and Uber as the lead investors in Serve Robotics, the autonomous sidewalk delivery company raised gross proceeds of $40 million through the IPO.
Congratulations to Ali Kashani, Tourag Parang, and the Serve Robotics team.
At Good AI, we are both humbled and honored that we can be part of this exciting journey from the very beginning!