Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
24 published records
01 / belief
“I think a lot of the GPs at Sequoia and certainly Mark Stevens, who was one of my professors at GSB, who was on the board for Sequoia and still on the board, have held their shares personally to this day.”
02 / belief
“We still have a few more years until the dot-com bubble crashes. PlayStation 1 is out, but PS2 is not out yet, I think.”
03 / observation
“The problem is, when you emulate it in software, it's really slow. When you play a game, when you're looking at your computer monitor or whatever, it's refreshing 30 to 60 times a second.”
04 / belief
“I think your assessment of Microsoft did basically nothing except make really good strategic decisions is reasonable enough for DirectX, but totally is not fair for Xbox.”
05 / uncertainty
“I don't know enough yet about how the machine learning market is going to develop or has developed in order to make a call yet on that point.”
06 / evaluation
“The fiscal year then ends January 31st, 1999. This is right before they go public or right as they go public.”
07 / uncertainty
“I don't know if they're using United or one of the other foundries in Taiwan, not TSMC.”
08 / commitment
“If it is and this person does that mind numbing work, and sits there just observing, and observing, and observing, then we will go right to manufacturing without ever producing a physical prototype and ship that.”
09 / belief
“I think maybe this is where Jensen and the NVIDIA story bridge from the obvious investment market to bet on, team to bet on, to go all-star engineers to go build this graphics card.”
10 / commitment
“I thought an interesting data point to ground this discussion would be that, if we look at the gross margins today for NVIDIA, which we will talk on our whole next episode about everything they do that's so insanely differentiated, they sell their GPUs at a hardware business with a 66% gross margin.”
11 / belief
“I think at the time, people thought really the only big use case for parallelization is graphics.”
12 / belief
“I think you know, in this grading question, the longer we do this show, the more I realize, this is like a mega theme of Acquired that Microsoft in the 90s or early 2000s was such a power.”
13 / commitment
“The acceleration of all the other things in our computing world that has been very advantageous to become parallelizable. I will leave it there, so I don't have too many spoilers.”
14 / belief
“If I'm remembering right, I think NVIDIA basically was the only customer of that emulation software.”
15 / prediction
“For so many reasons, everything we've discussed, there's also in the interim year-and-a-half since NVIDIA started, the price of memory dropped because, thank you, Moore's Law.”
16 / recommendation
“Getting a reference from the CEO of a portfolio company is a really good way to come in with a venture capitalist already leaning toward investing, especially if you're referred to by the top performing company of all time in their portfolio. It's kind of hard for Jensen to mess up this pitch with the recommendation that he's coming in with.”
17 / evaluation
“I think some of the NVIDIA employees call it CEO math when he rounds all the numbers and he's like, reflecting back, I do understand what the professors were trying to show.”
18 / prediction
“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.”
19 / prediction
“There's a thing that we're going to talk about a lot in the next episode, which is totally changing the world as we know it, which is things that we used to have to do physically we now do in simulation.”
20 / evaluation
“I think I give NVIDIA, for this period of time, an A because they're basically the only company that survived.”
21 / evaluation
“Even graded where the NVIDIA Bowls have put him, I think Jensen is one of those people where if you know about him, you know what we're talking about and you have unbelievable reverence, but I think not enough people really know.”
22 / evaluation
“I will say, NVIDIA doing what they did has been net unbelievably positive for the world. I watched the NVIDIA GTC Conference 2021, because the 2022 is about to happen.”
23 / evaluation
“The legacy of ASICs today, still around, still use both ASICs, but the legacy is FPGAs, Field Programmable Gate Array chips that some might say are sort of a bear case for NVIDIA these days. We will get to that far, far, far down the road.”
24 / preference
“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.”