Jensen Huang-The First Six Months of NVIDIA

so i was 30 years old and i've never taken um a single business class and and i've never taken any marketing classes and and i've never used never used a at the time it wasn't powerpoint was called persuasion um on the on the mac it was called persuasion and so i bought a mac so i could i could use persuasion and um and and then i try to create a company presentation to take it to venture capitalists um the process kind of went like this we started my first official day of work was my 30th birthday february 17th and we got the company funded and so once we got started the question is what are we going to do you know how does it all work out how do we start the company and so um we met every day the three of us in in one of the founders townhouse uh in fremont and um and we would get together and and there would be nothing to do i mean what do you do you got three guys get together you just talk you know so so what did you guys do last night uh you know what did you have for dinner i mean so you talk about that for about six months okay and and the big event of the day would be um hey where do you guys want to go to lunch and so you know philly cheesesteak today or you know chinese food tomorrow or whatever that would be like a big deal and then after a while it was like could you put some donuts in the fridge in the morning for when we come i mean so that would be a big deal for a while and so that lasted for a few months just the three of us like that i know it sounds pathetic but it's it's true because at that time i'm reading about books on how to start companies and i'm trying to figure out you know how to go raise money and you know what's a venture capitalist and how do you incorporate the company into those kind of things pretty soon i met a meta meta lawyer went to it went to a law firm called cooley godward and they helped us incorporate the company and um the amount of money that he said he says um you know we need we need some money from you so that we could price the shares and also to incorporate the company so he says how much money do you have in your pocket i said two hundred dollars so he says okay give me 200 i gave him 200 and for 200 i bought 15 percent i think it was 20 of nvidia so it was a good deal yeah 20 yeah and then i went i went back to the house and then went back to the condo and and uh they all they both gave me 200 and they both got 20 and that's how it worked literally it's not that much more you know don't here here's here's the thing nvidia i never finished my business plan i know it i know it um we that we never finished um a business plan uh never could figure out how to finish a business plan to tell you the truth um and uh and if if if i would have finished that book and i went to went to borders and got um gordon bell's book how to start a high-tech company it's like this thick if i would have read the whole thing i would have been dead now we would have run out of money ran out of time and so i i read i read the first three four chapters and i you know i i got to go to work yeah so so i i incorporated the company they introduced us to two venture capitalists um and i just went to their office and told them what i like to do the thing that that gets the company funded and when you're when you get to that point you just have to remember a few things uh vcs don't invest in in business plans because business plans are easy to write i couldn't write it but other people could right and so so um they invest in this they invest in great people and so so the question is is do they trust you your reputation matters your history matters because uh because i had done so much work with um andy bechtolsheim which was another graduate of stanford of stanford and the founder of sun uh and and worked with uh the founders of synopsis and lsi logic and they and you know we we we were all very successful and we did good work um your reputation will precede you even if your business plan writing skills are you know inadequate the second thing is you need to have a vision that's sufficiently large to invest in because they their statistics their probability of success is rather low and if they need to put in 10 million dollars if the market's only 20 million dollars large they'll never get the 10 million dollars back with with reasonable return but if it's a 200 billion dollar market then of course it's a rather different thing okay so the size of the market and they want to know that that um at least there is a clever idea that the market has never never done before so they that last part is probably second you know last i said i said it last because also i think it's the least important you have to you might have to reinvent yourself over time and if you want to reinvent yourself you need to have great people that's why great people so important

Channel: Entrepreneurship.org

Views: 480,580

Keywords: 22909911001, STVP

Id: yU3GUHDf0mk

Length: 5min 38sec (338 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 28 2013