Nvidia: The GPU Company (1993-2006)

1. BGBen Gilbert0:00

   Hello, Acquired listeners. We, uh, we are coming at you with a little bit of an announcement, uh, some late-breaking news. We recorded this episode, what, David, a week ago?

2. DRDavid Rosenthal0:11

   Yeah, a little over a week ago. We got some time travel going on here. I feel like I'm Jensen in, like, a deep fake Nvidia keynote. [laughing]

3. BGBen Gilbert0:19

   [laughing] We sit here, uh, Saturday, March 26th, getting ready to release this episode in about twenty-four hours, but we wanna tell you, we've got something that you don't wanna miss. Save the date of May 4th, Star Wars Day, for something in Seattle, Washington, and we hope to be able to see you in person. We'll be able to share more soon, but for now, save the date.

4. DRDavid Rosenthal0:44

   Consider this our save-the-date card that we're sending to each and every one of you.

5. BGBen Gilbert0:49

   [upbeat music] Yep, all right, now on to Nvidia.

6. SPSpeaker0:51

   Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight, another story on the way. Who got the truth?

7. BGBen Gilbert1:08

   Welcome to season ten, episode five of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert, and I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs, and our venture fund, PSL Ventures.

8. DRDavid Rosenthal1:23

   And I'm David Rosenthal, and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco.

9. BGBen Gilbert1:29

   And we are your hosts. It is the eighth largest company in the world by market cap.

10. DRDavid Rosenthal1:35

    Dang!

11. BGBen Gilbert1:35

    When Nvidia began in 1993, it made computer graphics chips in a brutally competitive and low-margin market. There were ninety undifferentiated competitors, all doing basically the same thing at the same time, and yet today, they have an eighty-three percent market share of standalone GPUs, that's graphics processing units, for those of you starting with us from square one, that are supplied for desktop and laptop computers.

12. DRDavid Rosenthal2:03

    Ben, you're telling, like, the whole story here. [chuckles]

13. BGBen Gilbert2:05

    [chuckles] Sorry, sorry, I'll just-- I'll tease a few things here. So not only that, but of course, followers of Nvidia know that they recently pioneered a completely new market, the hardware and software development tools to power machine learning, neural networks, deep learning, all of this in the cloud and the data center, which obviously is proving to define this whole decade of computing. And as David and I began our research, we realized this really could be a book, and like a thriller of a book, since the co-founder and CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, really has bet the company, like, the whole company, three separate times, nearly going bankrupt each time. But obviously, as we reflect back here today, that certainly did not happen.

14. DRDavid Rosenthal2:48

    All right, so here's everything you need to know- [laughing]

15. BGBen Gilbert2:50

    [chuckles]

16. DRDavid Rosenthal2:50

    ... about Jen-Hsun. The CliffsNotes before we talk for, like, six hours about him. The dude used to drive a Toyota Supra, [chuckles] like a Fast and Furious style-

17. BGBen Gilbert3:00

    Yes

18. DRDavid Rosenthal3:00

    ... like, [chuckles] like a death machine, and he almost died. He got in, like, a huge accident.

19. BGBen Gilbert3:05

    Just one more way he is like Elon Musk.

20. DRDavid Rosenthal3:08

    Oh, man. Crazy.

21. BGBen Gilbert3:09

    Well, because we have way too much here for one episode, we'll save the stories on machine learning for next time. Today, we are gonna tell the wild story of Nvidia's founding to its rise in prominence, powering the computer graphics and gaming revolution. This really is a story of, like, true invention and innovation. It reminds you that engineering breakthroughs really do push our world forward. And in saying that, to s-- kind of set some context, this is a story that takes place from about 1993 to kind of the mid to late 2000s. And as hyped as Nvidia has been, you know, over the last five years, obviously, with the stock run-up and everyone's sort of excitement around the company, I think Jen-Hsun is still an underrated CEO, even rated-

22. DRDavid Rosenthal3:54

    Hundred percent

23. BGBen Gilbert3:55

    ... where the Nvidia bulls have put him. I think Jen-Hsun is one of those people where, like, if you know about him, you know what we're talking about, and you have unbelievable reverence, but I think not enough people really know.

24. DRDavid Rosenthal4:08

    Just one more Jen-Hsun quote before we get into the episode. This is the best: "My will to survive exceeds almost everybody else's will to kill me." [laughing] Ah, amazing.

25. BGBen Gilbert4:22

    Well, listeners, before we begin our parallel processing and graphics rendering journey, we wanna introduce you to our presenting sponsor, Vanta, the leader in automated security and compliance. As you know from previous episodes, we are huge fans of Vanta and their approach to SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, all the compliance stuff. We have the CEO and co-founder, Christina Cacioppo, back with us today to help analyze her own company. Christina, I know long before Vanta, you were at Union Square Ventures from 2010 to 2012. You were really starting to be at the forefront and see how software was going to make it so companies could get way more leverage on people, and money, and all the resources they have at their disposal to accomplish so much more, so much faster. Was that an inspiration to what ultimately became Vanta?

26. SPSpeaker5:13

    So definitely, especially in retrospect. Like, I think when I was at USV, I didn't know the word SaaS, and that's a reflection on me, not on USV at all. But what we called it or how I thought about it, was like developer tools, right? And this was 2010, 2011. This was like, uh, is it too niche? How many of these people are there? All their customers are start-ups. Clearly, that's not sustainable. You know, how do you sell new-age tools to old companies? We sort of, being on the inside of USV, like, saw the traction of, like, an early Twilio or Mongo, right? And so you sort of just be like: Oh, no, people haven't caught up yet. Like, this is very much a real thing. And I think I just, yeah, saw that a little bit earlier than, I mean, the market broadly. And so coming into Vanta, just deeply believed, like, a go-to-market focused on start-ups-... can work, right? There are pros and cons of any, but you get, like, fast iteration cycles, and, like, that works. You don't have to worry about selling to, I don't know, IBM, you know, when you're a five-person startup.

27. BGBen Gilbert6:13

    Right. And with tools like Vanta and last season's sponsor, Pilot, I mean, you have this ability to get so much more of your internal focus exclusively on the thing that makes your company great.

28. SPSpeaker6:27

    Right. You don't have to become an expert in compliance or in, you know, financial accounting or, or whatever it is. Think of Vanta very much in the mold of, like, a, a Jeff Bezos. Like, you should focus on what makes your beer taste better, not on the electricity you need to, to produce the beer. And I think, you know, the Vanta version of that is you should focus on your product, what makes it special, not on how it becomes compliant.

29. BGBen Gilbert6:51

    Our thank you to Vanta, the leader in automated security and compliance software. If you are looking to join Vanta's over 2,000 customers to get compliance certified in weeks instead of months, click the link in the show notes or go to vanta.com/acquired for a 10% discount. Listeners, after you finish this episode, and you're thinking to yourself, "Gosh, I wish I could talk about this with people," we have good news for you. You can do that with 11,000 other smart members of the Acquired community at acquired.fm/slack. If you're dying for more after this, and you're like, "Ah, I can't wait for part two, I need some more stuff in the meantime," search Acquired LP Show in the podcast player of your choice. Here's a new thing. If you haven't rated or reviewed this podcast yet... I think the last time we, we mentioned this was, like, years ago. Spotify, in their mobile app, just added the ability to rate. So if you listen in Spotify-

30. DRDavid Rosenthal7:43

    Oh, nice

Episode duration: 2:04:07