Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…Let's move to playbook. I just wrote down in advance one that is such a big one for me. I'm biased because I tried to think about this in investing, particularly in public markets investing, but man, you really, really want to invest in whoever is selling the picks and the shovels in a gold rush. The AI, ML deep learning gold rush. Those years, oh my gosh, we should all be kicking ourselves in 2012, 2013. Maybe not 2012, but certainly 2014, 2015, into 2016. Marc Andreessen said every startup that comes in here who wants to do AI and deep learning, and they're all using NVIDIA, maybe we should have bought NVIDIA. I don't know if any one of those startups, any given one, is going to succeed, but I'm pretty sure NVIDIA was going to succeed back then. Yeah, it's such a good point. I'm kicking myself. One I have is being willing to expand your mission. It's funny how Jensen, in the early days, would talk about to enable graphics to be a storytelling medium. Of course, this led to the invention of the Pixel Shader and the idea that everybody can tell their own visual story their own way, in a social networked real time way. Very cool. Now it's much more that wherever there is a CPU, there is an opportunity to accelerate that CPU. NVIDIA will bring accelerated computing to everyone, and we will make all the best hardware, software, and services solutions to make it so that any computing workload runs in the most efficient way possible through accelerated computing. That's pretty different from enabling graphics as a storytelling medium. Also, they need to sell a pretty big story around the TAM that they're going after. I think there's also something to the whole NVIDIA story across the whole arc of the company. It's sort of a trade cliche thing at this point in startup land, but so few companies and founders can actually do it, just not dying. They should have died at least four separate times and they didn't. Part of that was brilliant strategy, part of that was things going their way. But I think a large part of it too was just the company in Jensen, particularly in these most recent chapters where they're already a public company, just being like, yeah, I'm willing to just sit here and endure this pain. I have confidence that we will figure it out. The market will come, I'm not going to declare game over…

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