Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…Be careful what you wish for here, though, because, again, as we've been saying, literally, 89 other companies get funded within a couple months to go do the same thing. It's a very clever name, also the notion of vid being in there, that it's video. That's another thing that they want to do. It's the classic Rich Barton empty vessel name. There are enough things that it could mean and we're going to fill it with meaning. Because they're doing a thing here that 89 other people are also simultaneously doing. It is kind of a new frontier that they need to invent and then own thought leadership in that area. They do need to quickly build a brand, not only with consumers, but with PC manufacturers. Jensen, the way he describes it is their vision, although he doesn't like the word vision because he thinks it's exclusionary to people, so he said, our perspective is that they want to enable graphics to be a new medium to tell stories. The way that he articulates at the time why video games today are a $180-billion-a-year industry, bigger than Hollywood, bigger than music. It's the biggest entertainment medium, but at the time, he had this thesis that you really can't, through computer graphics, tell stories today. But if you could, it's really interesting because it's not pre-recorded. It can be new and different every single time you enjoy it. It's also the only medium of entertainment that can be networked. Therefore, it's the only one that can really be social and interactive. Our reason for being is to create 3D graphics as a form of artistic storytelling for the future. Everything will be in service of that. I think that's not really what they are today, necessarily. It's a piece of what they are today, but that kept them going for the first 20 years of their existence. And baked into that is, again, Wilf hit on—and you did too to your credit, you're a very good venture capitalist—you hit on really the key problem with this first iteration of NVIDIA, which is, they have to go evangelize to developers to like, yeah, there's id and there's Carmack out there, but not a whole lot of other PC game developers out there. There's not a whole lot of other 3D PC game developers at this time. There are 2D PC game developers, but they got to convince a whole lot of people to go learn how to do 3D game development for PCs. That's like, we're going to enable storytelling on them. To do that, they have to go write their own APIs, SDK, and development framework to develop for this new graphics chip that they come out. They have to make a whole bunch of technical design decisions that they want the industry to standardize on.…

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