Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…I was going to make sure that you said that this time because we're going to talk a lot about investing and investors in NVIDIA stock over the years. It has been a wild, wild journey. Last we left our plucky heroes, Jensen Huang and NVIDIA at the end of our NVIDIA, the GPU company years ending roughly 2004, 2005, 2006. They had cheated death, not once, but twice. The first time in the super overcrowded graphics card market when they're first getting started and then once they sort of jumped out of that frying pan into the fire of Intel now gunning for them, coming to commoditize them like all the other PCI chips that plugged into the Intel motherboard back in the day. They bravely fend them off. They team up with Microsoft, they make the GPU programmable, this is amazing. They come out with programmable shaders with the GeForce 3, they power the Xbox, and they create the CG programming language with Microsoft. Here we are, it's now 2004, 2005 and it's a pretty impressive company. Public company, stock is high-flying after the tech bubble crash. They've conquered the graphics card market. Of course, there's ATI out there as well, which will come up again. There are three pretty important things that I think the company built in the first 10 years. One, we talked about this a lot last time, the six-month ship cycles for their chips. We talked about that, but we didn't actually say the rate at which they ship these things. I actually wrote down a little list. In the fall of 1999, they shipped the first GeForce card, the GeForce 256. In the spring of 2000, GeForce 2, in the fall of 2000, GeForce 2 Ultra, spring of 2001 GeForce 3, that's the big one with the programmable shaders. Then six months later, the GeForce 3 Ti500. The normal cycle I think we said was two years, maybe 18 months for most of their competitors who just got largely left in the dust. I was just thinking the competitors are gone at this point, but I'm thinking about Intel. How often did Intel ship new products, let alone fundamentally new architecture? There was the 286, then the 386, and the Pentium, then they got into Pentium 5 or whatever.…

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