NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

**Ben Gilbert** (0:00)
I will say, David, I would love to have Nvidia's full production team every episode. It was nice not having to worry about turning the cameras on and off and making sure that nothing bad happened myself while we were recording this.

**David Rosenthal** (0:13)
Yeah, just the gear. I mean, the drives that came out of the camera.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:18)
All right, red cameras for the home studio starting next episode.

**David Rosenthal** (0:22)
Yeah, good.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:23)
All right, let's do it. Welcome to this episode of Acquired, the podcast about great technology companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:48)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:49)
We are your hosts. Listeners, just so we don't bury the lead, this episode was insanely cool for David and I.

**Jensen Huang** (0:56)
Yeah.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:57)
After researching Nvidia for something like 500 hours over the last two years, we flew down to Nvidia headquarters to sit down with Jensen himself. Jensen, of course, is the founder and CEO of Nvidia, the company powering this whole AI explosion. At the time of recording, Nvidia is worth $1.1 trillion and is the 6th most valuable company in the entire world. Right now is a crucible moment for the company. Expectations are set high, I mean sky high. They have about the most impressive strategic position and lead against their competitors of any company that we've ever studied. But here's the question that everyone is wondering. Will Nvidia's insane prosperity continue for years to come? Is AI going to be the next trillion dollar technology wave? How sure are we of that? And if so, can Nvidia actually maintain their ridiculous dominance as this market comes to take shape? So Jensen takes us down memory lane with stories of how they went from graphics to the data center to AI, how they survived multiple near-death experiences. He also has plenty of advice for founders and he shared an emotional side to the founder journey toward the end of the episode.

**David Rosenthal** (2:12)
Yeah, I got new perspective on the company and on him as a founder and a leader just from doing this despite, you know, we thought we knew everything before we came in advance and it turned out we didn't.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:25)
Turns out the protagonist actually knows more.

**David Rosenthal** (2:27)
Yes.

**Ben Gilbert** (2:29)
All right, well, listeners, join the Slack. There is incredible discussion of everything about this company, AI, the whole ecosystem, and a bunch of other episodes that we've done recently going on in there right now. So that is acquired.fm slash Slack. We would love to see you. And without further ado, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. On to Jensen. So Jensen, this is acquired, so we want to start with story time. So we want to wind the clock all the way back to, I believe it was 1997 You're getting ready to ship the Riva 128, which is one of the largest graphics chips ever created in the history of computing. It is the first fully 3D accelerated graphics pipeline for a computer.
You guys have about six months of cash left. So you decide to do the entire testing in simulation, rather than ever receiving a physical prototype. You commission the production run site on scene with the rest of the company's money. So you're betting it all right here on the Riva 128 It comes back and of the 32 DirectX blend modes, it supports eight of them. You have to convince the market to buy it, and you got to convince developers not to use anything but those eight blend modes. Walk us through what that felt like.

**Jensen Huang** (3:55)
The other 24 weren't that important.

**David Rosenthal** (3:58)
Okay. So wait, wait. First question. Was that the plan all along? When did you realize that only eight were going to work?

**Jensen Huang** (4:05)
I realized I didn't learn about it until it was too late. We should have implemented all 32 But we built what we built, and so we had to make the best of it. That was really an extraordinary time. Remember, Riva 128 was MV3. MV1 and MV2 were based on forward texture mapping, no triangles but curves, and it tessellated the curves. Because we were rendering higher-level objects, we essentially avoided using Z-buffers, and we thought that that was going to be a good rendering approach, and turns out to have been completely the wrong answer. So what Riva 128 was, was a reset of our company. Now, remember, at the time that we started the company in 1993, we were the only consumer 3D graphics company ever created, and we were focused on transforming the PC into an accelerated PC, because at the time, Windows was really a software rendered system. And so anyways, Riva 128 was a reset of our company, because by the time that we realized we had gone down the wrong road, Microsoft had already rolled out DirectX. It was fundamentally incompatible with Nvidia's architecture. 30 competitors have already shown up, even though we were the first company at the time that we were founded.