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Nvidia Started in a Denny’s. Now It’s Worth $1T
- ftxbro 3y agothis kind of headline is like, Elon Musk started as a helpless infant who couldn't speak or raise his head under his own power and now he is a multi billionaire who buy twitter so everyone have to read his tweet
- twelve40 3y agohaha yes. tbh I don't get why everyone is so hysterical about nvidia right now like this article. It's a chip company. We knew chip companies are important ever since ic's were invented in 1959. The technology is fascinating but it's also pretty predictable, nothing prophetic here.
- scarface74 3y agoIt’s not about the chip. It’s an ecosystem play with the chip + CUDA. I’m not saying that makes Nvidia worth 1T with it’s expected profit.
- jansan 3y agoRight, there are other chip companies. But products of those other companies usually do not make teen and crypto nerds drool.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago> Right, there are other chip companies. But products of those other companies usually do not make teen and crypto nerds drool. Also, none of those other chip companies have broken US$ 1 trillion in market cap. That's a notable achievement.
- twelve40 3y agodepending on how you count, so has FTX )) joking, of course, but only in part
- H8crilA 3y agoExtraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds To elevate a stock, a tulip, or a religious belief, to levels that far exceed any reason - that's just a part of being human.
- eduction 3y agoI admit to the extent I thought about nvidia I just kind of assumed they would fade away as companies like intel and apple integrated graphics processing into their own SOCs in phones tablets laptops etc. And I also figured the crypto boom was a temporary unsustainable surge in the market for discrete gpus. Now LLMs have taken up the crypto slack in terms of gpu demand. (I think? Is this what’s going on?) The question I have is whether there is any reason nvidia won’t be commoditized out of this market. Maybe someone who is smart at hardware can explain.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoIf China can learn to get along with everyone, and they are allowed to purchase high-tech manufacturing equipment needed to train a workforce over the next two decades, then yes, it will eventually be commoditized.
- bee_rider 3y agoUltimately CPU, GPU, and memory will be in the same package because, who wants unnecessary latency? But it isn’t clear to me if Intel or Nvidia are further ahead when it comes to figuring that out.
- twelve40 3y agoit's kind of a mystery why they haven't yet. The G part of the trillion dollar GPU almost sounds like a misnomer by now.
- bee_rider 3y agoI think they basically have, it is just a really, really difficult problem to make a CPU that is competitive with Intel and a GPU that is competitive with NVIDIA, so putting it all together is not for the faint of heart.
- solarkraft 3y agoOn consumer devices this is increasingly happening. In data centers probably not so much.
- qup 3y agoI started in the backseat of a pinto, and look at me now.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ergocoder 3y agoTechnically the truth
- amelius 3y agoThis is the kind of silly story that investors love. Hence there was a higher probability of it becoming true.
- PostOnce 3y agoI think Musk bought Twitter to control the media, Murdoch style. It makes a lot of sense, it makes even more sense to have 90% of the public believe you're an idiot who spent 50 billion dollars on a lark because you're childish, which mean's they're less untrusting of your media ambition.
- scotty79 3y agoThere's even a humorous song by John Lajoie "I started as a baby".
- getwiththeprog 3y agoMy friend once wrote a biography. It started with "I was born at a very early age".
- wslh 3y agohttps://archive.is/wCkqC https://archive.is/wCkqC
- robomartin 3y agoDamn! Who knew eating at a randomly chosen restaurant with bad food is the formula for trillion dollar success?
- Waterluvian 3y agoIt’s not survivorship bias. Your business must have a scrappy, relatable origin story. If someone with millions of dollars was involved, omit that part.
- raverbashing 3y agoYeah. Also buying 3dfx wasn't cheap
- xwdv 3y agoYou too can come up with the next trillion dollar GPU chip company while humbly taking a shit.
- bee_rider 3y agoWith a trillion dollars you can buy all sorts of scrappy origin stories.
- spiderice 3y agoDo not disrespect the Grand Slamwich like that
- alexjplant 3y agoAnything that Denny's does Waffle House does better.
- spiderice 3y agoWhat about being an incubator for trillion dollar companies?
- 3y ago
- musicale 3y agoGPU chip company started in Silicon Valley by electrical engineers with extensive design experience, right when GPUs were ready to take off. Now it's worth a $1T.
- curiousllama 3y agoBut they talked about it in a Denny’s once. Who else can say they talked about a thing in a Denny’s???
- bobwaycott 3y agoI’ve talked about many things in a Denny’s. ;)
- lotsofpulp 3y agoMy apologies.
- theRealMe 3y agoI hear baseball started there. Where else would baseball have gotten the “Grand Slam” from?!?
- qup 3y agoA grand slam is when you win four world series of poker titles, and the wsop was founded in a men's room at the go kart place in Dallas.
- latenightcoding 3y agoI understand this sort of articles are for entertainment and are meant to be relatable, but this one is pretty ridiculous, what does "started in a Denny's" even mean? did Nvidia's founder teach himself electrical engineering while he was waiting tables at Denny's or something. Next time I start something I'm only talking about it at el pollo loco.
- timw4mail 3y agoDoesn't make me want to buy any of their products.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoReally, the pancakes are none the worse for Nvidia having started there...
- timw4mail 3y agoI wasn't referring to the pancakes
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoI knew that...
- napierzaza 3y ago[dead]
- pbj1968 3y agoCompaq on a cocktail napkin…
- _8j50 3y agoPeople who started a company at Denny's somehow avoided diabetes and heart disease from the food long enough for the company to be worth $1T.
- senko 3y agoThis was interesting to me as I sometimes wondered hth they came up with the name: > At the time, graphics cards were known by two letters, and Priem liked the sound of “NV.” Envy. They called their startup Nvision, which wasn’t a real word and didn’t hint at what they would do. It was perfect. [...] The only problem was that several companies already had similar names, including one that made environmentally friendly toilet paper. Priem reached for his Latin dictionary and found the word for envy. Invidia. He dropped the first letter [...]
- VincentEvans 3y agoI recall my relatives asking me in … 98? 99? timeframe what they should invest some spare 10k or so cash in - 3dfx or Nvidia, and it was a clear choice to me - Voodoo3 was far superior to to anything budget-choice Nvidia had at a time. I wonder if they are reading this article.
- magic_hamster 3y ago3dfx was an incredible company but they made mistakes when it came to partners and they basically self destructed. One can only imagine what could have been.
- bushbaba 3y agoPerfect reason why you should go with an etf or broad industry exposure. Don’t bet on the winner. Bet on the industry trend.
- solarkraft 3y agoNow I know where to start my next business.
- davesque 3y agoYou mean at the right time and in the right place?
- solarkraft 3y agoThe right time is any and the right place is Denny's. I'll update the comment when my Uber for pet food has reached a trillion dollars.
- davesque 3y agoStories like these are what I would call "humility porn." So Huang succeeded partly because he worked as a waiter and taking "pancake orders" taught him how to deal with strangers? Do the authors realize how ridiculous this sounds? That's great if Huang found a way to draw on his life experience. But he also just happened to have a master's degree from Stanford University and lived in Silicon Valley. Those are the sorts of characteristics that narrow down the possibilities quite a bit. Maybe he really did have a humble background. I don't know. But can we quit implying that's really what matters?
- alok-g 3y agoCuriously, a multitude of AI algorithms can figure which 'features' are relevant (ignoring training data requirement for a second*), to what extent, and how to use them as needed. On the other hand, humans (the authors in this example) often don't understand that, and can take any of the input features as the key determining factor. * When, why, and if, AI needs more training data than humans aside, even humans have received enough of it to have developed some common sense, but yet ...
- fuzzfactor 3y agoRegardless of how humble, good business strategy can be useful to pay attention to. There was a recent posting of a twitter thread by Peter Yang discussing the $Trillion valuation. I added a link to a different thread where he pointed out Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave an inspiring commencement speech on May 28 where it was briefly mentioned the way Nvidia almost failed on 3 different occasions: https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1662831418882560000 https://twitter.com/petergyang/status/1662831418882560000 At the time this did not appear to be appreciated at all. Maybe this far into June there will be others who find his recollection worthwhile. As an excerpt: "Run don't walk. Either you're running for food, or you are running from being food: 1. Have the humility to confront failure and ask help. 2. Endure the pain needed to realize your dream. 3. Make sacrifices for your life's work."
- o1y32 3y agoFor those who complain about the headline: if you listen to WSJ's recent podcast episode on Nvidia, parts of it are equality ridiculous and embarrassing. ...but of course it wouldn't matter to people who don't have the technical background.
- wly_cdgr 3y agoImagine how much it'd be worth if it had started in a Waffle House
- fisherjeff 3y agoIf something good ever started in a Waffle House, that would for sure be newsworthy
- wly_cdgr 3y agoHow dare you! : throws chair :
- fisherjeff 3y agoOk wow, now see this kind of behavior is exactly why I never go to Waffle House, except for when I do
- qup 3y agoMy parents met in a waffle house. Before the pinto.
- atleastoptimal 3y agoI think the gripe people have with the title is insecurity. They feel that they're "less than" because they can't go from humble beginnings to being a master of the universe as the title here implies.
- boringg 3y agoCurrently 1T. When AI hype fades out back to 250-400B range
- gundmc 3y agoNo, surely the 204 P/E ratio is sustainable!
- koheripbal 3y agoThe pe ratio will increase.
- throw74775 3y agoThe ratio can go down if E goes up.
- sharts 3y ago[flagged]