Nvidia Part II: The Machine Learning Company (2006-2022)

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 20 April 2022

⏱️ 132 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

By 2012, NVIDIA was on a decade-long road to nowhere. Or so most rational observers of the company thought. CEO Jensen Huang was plowing all the cash from the company’s gaming business into building a highly speculative platform with few clear use cases and no obviously large market opportunity. And then... a miracle happened. A miracle that led not only to Nvidia becoming the 8th largest market cap company in the world, but also nearly every internet and technology innovation that’s happened in the decade since. Machines learned how to learn. And they learned it... on Nvidia.

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Links:

Ben Thompson’s great Stratechery interview with Jensen
Linus Tech Tips tests an Nvidia A100
Episode sources

Carve Outs:

The Expanse short story collection, Memory's Legion
Sony RX100 point-and-shoot camera

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Still got Swedish house mafia Greyhound in my head from the pump up. Nice. Nice
0:06.1	It is funny how all like GPU companies like I was watching a bunch of Nvidia keynotes and AMD keynotes
0:12.1	You're ready for this and everyone is so like
0:14.8	Tech no neon lighting like it's like crypto before crypto
0:30.0	Down say a straight another story on the way
0:35.8	Welcome to season 10 episode six of acquired the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them
0:44.1	I'm Ben Gilbert, and I am the co-founder and managing director of Seattle based Pioneer Square Labs and our venture fund
0:50.6	PSL ventures and I'm David Rosenfall and I am an angel investor based in San Francisco and
0:56.9	We are your hosts
0:59.2	When I was a kid David I used to stare into backyard bonfires and wonder if that fire flickering was doing so in a random way
1:09.0	Or if I knew about every input in the world all the air
1:13.1	Exactly the physical construction of the wood all the variables in the environment if it was actually
1:18.8	Predictible and I don't think I knew the term at the time, but
1:22.4	Modelable if I could know what the flame could look like if I knew all those inputs and we now know of course
1:29.2	It is indeed predictable, but the data and compute required to actually
1:34.4	Know that is extremely difficult, but that is what Nvidia is doing today
1:41.3	Ben, I love that angel. That's great
1:43.5	I was thinking like where is Ben going with this and this was occurring to me as I was watching Jensen
1:48.3	sharing the omniverse vision for Nvidia and
1:51.8	Realizing Nvidia has really built all the building blocks the hardware the software for developers to use that hardware
1:59.0	All the user-facing software now and services to simulate everything in our physical world with their unbelievably efficient and powerful
2:06.8	GPU architecture and these building blocks
	...

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