[FULL] Nvidia 3d Tv Play Crack
Niki Wienberg
Who would have thought facilitating payments for Beanie Baby trades could be so lucrative? The only acquisition on our list whose value we can precisely measure, eBay spun off PayPal into a stand-alone public company in July 2015. Its value at the time? A cool 31x what eBay paid in 2002.
Ben: Yup. All right, now on to NVIDIA. Welcome to season 10, episode 5 of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm the co-founder and managing director of Seattle-based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund, PSL ventures.
As David and I began our research, we realized this really could be a book and a thriller of a book since the co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang really has bet the whole company three separate times, nearly going bankrupt each time. But obviously, as we reflect back here today, that certainly did not happen.
David: All right, here's everything you need to know about Jensen. The CliffsNotes before we talk for six hours about him. The dude used to drive a Toyota Supra, like the Fast and Furious style, like a death machine, and he almost died. He got in a huge accident.
Ben: Because we have way too much here for one episode, we'll save the stories on machine learning for next time. Today, we are going to 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 true invention and innovation. It reminds you that engineering breakthroughs really do push our world forward.
In saying that, to set some context, this is a story that takes place from about 1993 to the mid- to late-2000s. As hyped as NVIDIA has been over the last five years, obviously, with the stock run up and everyone's excitement around the company, I think Jensen is still an underrated CEO. Even graded where the NVIDIA Bowls have put him, I think Jensen is one of those people where 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.
Ben: Listeners, before we begin our parallel processing and graphics rendering journey, we want to 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, 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?
Christina: Definitely, especially in retrospect. I think when I was at USV, I didn't know the word SaaS. That's a reflection on me not at USV at all. What we called it or how I thought about it was developer tools.
You're just be like, oh, no, people haven't caught up yet, like this is very much a real thing. I think I just saw that a little bit earlier, the market broadly. Coming into Vanta, I just deeply believed a go-to market focused on startups can work. There are pros and cons of any, but you get fast iteration cycles and that works. You don't have to worry about selling to IBM when you're a five-person startup.
Christina: Right. You don't have to become an expert in compliance, or in financial accounting, or whatever it is. Think of Vanta very much the mold of a Jeff Bezos, like you should focus on what makes your beer tastes better, not on the electricity you need to to produce the beer. I think the Vanta version of that is you should focus on your product, what makes it special, not on how it becomes compliant.
Ben: Our thank you to Vanta, the leader in automated security and compliance software. If you are looking to join Vanta's over 2000 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, 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 mentioned this was years ago, Spotify in their mobile app just added the ability to rate. If you listen to Spotify, you should totally leave us a little rating in there. If you're on Apple podcasts, leave us a review. We really, really, really appreciate it when you help share your experience as a listener with others.
David: Yes, the southern part of the island of Taiwan with the birth of Jen-Hsun Huang, later Americanized to Jensen Huang. His dad was an engineer for the air conditioning company, Carrier. You see those big industrial air conditioning units on buildings and stuff.
When Jensen is four, his dad goes on company training to America, to New York City. He was like, wow, this is amazing. I want my kids to grow up here and to have all the opportunities that are available. He comes home, Jensen's four. Jensen has an older brother who's a couple years older. Nobody speaks English. His mom gets an English dictionary and picks 10 words every day, grills the two kids, quizzes them, and teaches them English out of the dictionary.
If you listen to Jensen, where's that accent come from? Because it's not what you would think. The family ends up moving to Thailand a few years later. When they're living in Thailand and Jensen is nine, they finally decided that this is the right time to send the kids to America.
The parents can't move to America yet. They don't have enough money, but they found a boarding school in America that is cheap enough that they can afford. It is called Oneida Baptist Institute and it is in eastern Kentucky, the sticks of Kentucky. Jensen would later say that he and his brother were the first foreigners to attend this school and they're pretty sure they were the first Chinese people ever in the town of Oneida.
It turns out that the reason that this school, OBI (Oneida Baptist Institute) was so cheap was it's actually not a prep school. It's a reform school. This is a school for troubled kids. It's a reform school. Jensen's roommate, when he shows up as a 9-year-old, is a 17-year-old kid who had just gotten out of prison and was recovering from 7 stab wounds that he got in a knife fight.
David: And amazingly, this is so Jensen. They become great friends, even though this kid is eight years older than him, twice his age, basically, from a way different background. Jensen helps him with math and he gets Jensen into weightlifting. You see Jensen today and you're like, that dude is jacked.
David: He's been weightlifting since he was nine years old. It's about his time in Oneida. Now, I don't get scared very often. I don't worry about going places I haven't gone before. I can tolerate a lot of discomfort. Boy, does that play out in his life, as we will see.
It's pretty awesome. Actually, now, he and his wife Lori have given a few million dollars to the school. It's an amazing institution now. You can see Jensen gave the commencement address in 2020. We're going to link to this in the sources. It's pretty awesome.
After a couple of years at OBI, his parents are finally able to save up enough money to afford to come to the US themselves. They moved first to Tacoma, Washington, great state of Washington. Then they move a little farther south down to the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. Jensen and his brother go home. They live with them. They go to public school there.
His parents continued their academic discipline. Jensen's super smart, obviously. He ends up skipping two grades. Then going to college, he goes to State College. He goes to Oregon State University just down the road a little bit.
David: He got there when he was 16 because he had skipped a couple grades. He loves math, so he decides he's going to major in electrical engineering at OSU. He totally falls in love in more ways than one.
The first way that he falls in love is he just thinks electrical engineering is the coolest thing in the world. He becomes one of the top students in the school. He talks about how he gets mad at the professors because they don't use enough precision when talking about exact numbers.
Ben: Which he later comes to say that he respects the opposite position. I think some of the NVIDIA employees call it CEO math when he rounds all the numbers and he's like, reflecting back, I do understand what the professors were trying to show. The details only matter if you understand the big picture first.
David: That's so Jensen, he understands. My employees get mad at me when I round the numbers and you see your math, like I get it. I appreciate precision, too, but the big picture is what matters here.
David: You could see it coming from a long way, and still coming, and still coming. Amazing. Of course, now, he makes literally the fastest chips in the entire world. He starts at AMD. He starts at night working on a master's degree in electrical engineering at Stanford. It ultimately takes him eight years to finish this master's.
He works all the time that he's at AMD and then at LSI Logic where he goes to. We can talk about it in a sec. He ultimately does graduate right before they start NVIDIA. This is a super cool bit of trivia. Did you go back and watch the Don Valentine view from the top?
David: Yup, when he holds up Alfred Lin's resume. Also Easter egg in that talk, that was the day that the Jensen and Lori Huang Engineering Center at Stanford was dedicated. Don says Jensen did a building. Pretty awesome.
b1e95dc632