‘If we don’t build it, they can’t come,’ says the Nvidia CEO.

Earlier in the week Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spoke at Caltech, as the keynote speaker at the Class of 2024 Commencement Ceremony. Huang, one of the richest people in the world, talked about how Nvidia used to build products that “would be incredibly successful, generate enormous amounts of excitement. And then one year later, we were kicked out of those markets.”

The fabled graphics and acceleration computing company went through several rough patches in the 90s. This happened so much that its unofficial corporate motto, which it still uses internally today, is, “Our company is thirty days from going out of business.”

These setbacks forced the company to look for markets with no customers. “Because one of the things you can definitely guarantee is where there are no customers, there are also no competitors,” said Huang. The Nvidia CEO calls these “zero-billion-dollar markets”, which are markets that aren’t worth anything right now, but will be worth billions in the future — like GPU accelerated computing was when Nvidia got started.

Unlike general computing chips from Intel and AMD which can do everything, accelerated computing processors are more focused upon a particular purpose. This led Nvidia down the GPU path; since graphics processing is like other computing-intensive processes, the raw horsepower of its video cards made them ideal for the raw computational horsepower that other industries need.

Nvidia’s investment in accelerated computing (which initially focused on consumer GPUs) paid off. Its RIVA 128 GPU, which launched in 1997, sold a million copies in four months, allowing the company to reinvest its profits in further research and development.

At the time of Nvidia’s founding, Huang hadn’t yet thought of artificial intelligence as the primary driver for the company’s growth. In his speech, he said, “No one knew how far deep learning could scale, and if we didn’t build it, we’d never know.” He also added, “Our logic is: If we don’t build it, they can’t come.” This was a clear reference to Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams, when the main character heard a voice telling him ‘If you build it, he will come.’

Jensen Huang told the Caltech graduates, “Prioritize your life and you will have plenty of time to do the important things.” They should pursue their craft — their life’s work — with excellence, grit, and dedication. Setbacks will always happen, and they shouldn’t treat it negatively. Instead, they should look at it as an opportunity to follow a new direction, opined the Nvidia CEO.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/jensen-huang-tells-caltech-grads-to-pursue-zero-billion-dollar-markets-hopes-to-inspire-the-next-big-tech-leaders