[HN Gopher] Nvidia Started in a Denny's. Now It's Worth $1T
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Nvidia Started in a Denny's. Now It's Worth $1T
Author : lxm
Score : 67 points
Date : 2023-06-03 17:57 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| solarkraft wrote:
| Now I know where to start my next business.
| davesque wrote:
| You mean at the right time and in the right place?
| ftxbro wrote:
| this 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 wrote:
| haha 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.
| H8crilA wrote:
| Extraordinary 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.
| scarface74 wrote:
| It'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.
| eduction wrote:
| I 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Ultimately 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.
| solarkraft wrote:
| On consumer devices this is increasingly happening. In
| data centers probably not so much.
| Duplo wrote:
| [dead]
| twelve40 wrote:
| it'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 wrote:
| I 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.
| xur17 wrote:
| > And I also figured the crypto boom was a temporary
| unsustainable surge in the market for discrete gpus.
|
| It's kind of amazing how perfect the timing was for LLM
| popularity (right around the time Ethereum moved to PoS,
| and the crypto market cooled down).
| scotty79 wrote:
| I read that a lot of gpu miners went smoothly from mining
| to AI training.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If 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.
| jansan wrote:
| Right, there are other chip companies. But products of those
| other companies usually do not make teen and crypto nerds
| drool.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| depending on how you count, so has FTX )) joking, of
| course, but only in part
| ergocoder wrote:
| Technically the truth
| PostOnce wrote:
| I 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.
| amelius wrote:
| This is the kind of silly story that investors love. Hence
| there was a higher probability of it becoming true.
| scotty79 wrote:
| There's even a humorous song by John Lajoie "I started as a
| baby".
| qup wrote:
| I started in the backseat of a pinto, and look at me now.
| [deleted]
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Imagine how much it'd be worth if it had started in a Waffle
| House
| fisherjeff wrote:
| If something good ever started in a Waffle House, that would
| for sure be newsworthy
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| How dare you! : throws chair :
| musicale wrote:
| GPU 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.
| thsksbd wrote:
| [dead]
| curiousllama wrote:
| But they talked about it in a Denny's once. Who else can say
| they talked about a thing in a Denny's???
| bobwaycott wrote:
| I've talked about many things in a Denny's. ;)
| theRealMe wrote:
| I hear baseball started there. Where else would baseball
| have gotten the "Grand Slam" from?!?
| qup wrote:
| A 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| My apologies.
| rchiang wrote:
| Well, two engineers and one mathematician IIRC.
|
| I don't expect any single article to cover all the details of a
| company that just passed it's 30th year. And even then, they're
| missing bits of lore, like the CEO playing ping pong as a
| teenager (see https://engineering.stanford.edu/news/jen-hsun-
| huang-nvidia-...).
|
| This WIRED article from 2002 gives an interesting snapshot of
| the same company and CEO: Meet Nvidia CEO Jen-
| Hsun Huang, the man who plans to make the CPU obsolete.
| https://www.wired.com/2002/07/nvidia/ - Quote: "What we
| can do in the next five years is going to blow your mind. In 10
| years, we should be bigger than Intel." (which took until July
| 2020)
|
| Then you can see how things evolved by the 2009/2010 timeframe,
| plus where they thought they might be headed:
| Mercury News interview: Jen-Hsun Huang, co-founder of Nvidia
| https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/10/09/mercury-news-interview-
| jen-hsun-huang-co-founder-of-nvidia/ I'm Prepared
| for Adversity. I Waited Tables. https://archive.is/2iUbf
| giraffe-flavor wrote:
| [flagged]
| latenightcoding wrote:
| I 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.
| akiselev wrote:
| Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem were eating
| at a Denny's one night - because it's literally the only
| place open at 10 pm in the Bay Area - when Jensen bit onto a
| piece of silica sand that had made it into his Grand Slam
| Breakfast and very painfully chipped his tooth.
|
| His yelled "GPUUUUUUUU" in pain, and NVIDIA was born.
| mastax wrote:
| Everyone's been to a Denny's*. It's humble and relatable.
|
| * Please do not respond that you haven't been to a Denny's.
| It is a figure of speech called hyperbole.
| wilg wrote:
| I have been to Dennys
| spamizbad wrote:
| not to brag but me too.
| tomcam wrote:
| Sure, lord it over the rest of us
| baybal2 wrote:
| [dead]
| [deleted]
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Why are we not talking about all the other companies started at
| Denny's but that failed??
| khazhoux wrote:
| This is a classic example of survivorship bias. These stories
| never mention the many stomachs that did not survive the
| Denny's Super Slam Ham & Five-Cheese Omelette.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| I 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.
| davesque wrote:
| Stories 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?
| wslh wrote:
| https://archive.is/wCkqC
| senko wrote:
| This 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 [...]
| kwanbix wrote:
| In spanish is eNvidia (envy), i thought it was from it.
| jldugger wrote:
| I mean, it is, in the sense that spanish is a latin language.
| boringg wrote:
| Currently 1T. When AI hype fades out back to 250-400B range
| napierzaza wrote:
| [dead]
| timw4mail wrote:
| Doesn't make me want to buy any of their products.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Really, the pancakes are none the worse for Nvidia having
| started there...
| timw4mail wrote:
| I wasn't referring to the pancakes
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I knew that...
| VincentEvans wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| 3dfx 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.
| robomartin wrote:
| Damn! Who knew eating at a randomly chosen restaurant with bad
| food is the formula for trillion dollar success?
| spiderice wrote:
| Do _not_ disrespect the Grand Slamwich like that
| alexjplant wrote:
| Anything that Denny's does Waffle House does better.
| spiderice wrote:
| What about being an incubator for trillion dollar
| companies?
| alexjplant wrote:
| Mere child's play compared to smothered, covered, and
| chunked hashbrowns.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's not survivorship bias. Your business _must_ have a
| scrappy, relatable origin story. If someone with millions of
| dollars was involved, omit that part.
| bee_rider wrote:
| With a trillion dollars you can buy all sorts of scrappy
| origin stories.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah. Also buying 3dfx wasn't cheap
| xwdv wrote:
| You too can come up with the next trillion dollar GPU chip
| company while humbly taking a shit.
| pbj1968 wrote:
| Compaq on a cocktail napkin...
| o1y32 wrote:
| For 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.
| badrabbit wrote:
| People 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.
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(page generated 2023-06-03 23:01 UTC)