NVIDIA Co-Founder, Chairman and President Jen-hsun Huang
JEN-HSUN HUANG co-founded NVIDIA Corporation in 1993 and has served as President, Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors since its inception.
He spoke with the Wall Street Transcript on the record in July of 2000.
Unlike the current market, by July of 2000 the Dow Jones Index had dropped 10% from January of that year.
Mr. Huang was awarded the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year honor in June 1999 in recognition of his achievement in building NVIDIA from a start-up to the second largest supplier of desktop 3-D graphics processors in the world.
He was also elected as a member of the RAND Board of Trustees in October 1999.
Prior to founding NVIDIA, he held senior engineering and marketing positions at LSI Logic Corporation and at Advanced Micro Devices.
Mr. Huang holds a BSEE degree from Oregon State University and an MSEE degree from Stanford University.
Mr. Huang laid out his strategy 25 years ago:
“NVIDIA was founded seven years ago. We were founded with the vision that 3-D graphics would transform the PC into a much more important consumer platform than was the case in 1993.
Our longer-term vision is that 3-D graphics will be a pervasive medium and that it will be used for all kinds of applications, whether it’s e-commerce, entertainment such as video games or education, such as helping you with your homework or letting you virtually explore the Museum of Modern Art in 3-D.
That was why we started the company, and NVIDIA today has 500 people.
It’s a large company, growing very rapidly.
We’re one of the fastest growing companies in the world today, and our market share is currently about 25% of the PC desktop.”
JEN-HSUN HUANG pointed out that the computer gaming market was a key driver for the NVIDIA innovations that have led to it’s current success.
“NVIDIA is recognized as a leader in 3-D graphics, and so there are several trends that are going to affect the way that the PC industry utilizes 3-D graphics.
First of all, Sony’s efforts with the PlayStation 2 game console will force the PC industry to significantly raise the bar in 3-D graphics performance.
All of the content that is being developed today and that will be available in the next 12 months encompasses and embodies substantially richer 3-D graphics because of competition created by the capabilities of the PlayStation 2.
Again, this has forced the entire PC industry to raise the bar on its own capabilities in the world of 3-D performance.
The second thing is broadband Internet driving PC multiple media capabilities all over the place.
The more broadband capability we get ‘ the more streaming videos, streaming audios, streaming 3D ‘ the more we are going to be able to utilize these functions on the PC.
This increased broadband capability will drive the multimedia content and capability of the PC-based platform substantially higher.
The third major trend we see is that chip integration, which is enabled by Moore’s Law, will continue to transform the traditional, core logic business into a 3-D graphics business.
In certain segments of the market, it will no longer be cost effective to have a separate computer processing unit (CPU), such as a Pentium
processor, and a separate graphic processing units (GPU).
The integration of these two key components will drive costs down in such cost-sensitive markets as e-machines, without significantly sacrificing performance.
Graphics processing is much more complex than general computer processing, and our expertise is obviously in the graphics end.
So this trend toward integration is going to create new opportunities for us.”
The trend is your friend according to CEO and Chairman Huang:
“The biggest single opportunity is the explosion of digital devices that are connected to the Internet ‘ game consoles, PCs, mobile
devices, hand-held devices, plus a new category of product called Pocket PCs, which are completely sold out.
Whether portable or stationary, these devices will require more and more rich graphics and rich audio.
All of these devices need rich multimedia.
NVIDIA is recognized as a leader in multimedia technology: in your 2-D graphics digital video, HDTV quality video, and 3-D graphics ‘ all of which are capabilities that NVIDIA is known for.
I think NVIDIA is well positioned to take advantage of this explosion in digital devices.”
One compelling insight into the future growth of NVIDIA under JEN-HSUN HUANG is the quality of their customers in the year 2000:
“Today our targets are the PC industry, the workstation industry, the consumer electronics industry ‘ the Who’s Who of each industry.
On the PC front customers include Dell, Compaq, IBM, HP, Gateway, Sony; in Europe, NEC Packard Bell and Siemens/Fujitsu.
In other words, the major PC OEMs of the world are all customers of NVIDIA.
On the workstation side, 100% of the world’s workstation companies buy graphics processors from NVIDIA today: Silicon Graphics, Compaq, Dell, HP and IBM.
On the consumer electronics side we have partnered with Microsoft to develop the key components in Xbox to compete with Sony Playstation 2.”
The supply side was also covered as JEN-HSUN HUANG had already covered semiconductor inputs from TSMC:
“NVIDIA’s business clearly is growing very fast.
We are one of the fastest growing semiconductor companies in the world.
We have grown 100% year-over-year for the last several years.
For the foreseeable future, we are going to continue to grow very quickly.
So I would say that my greatest concern is growth and whether our partners can grow as fast as we can.
And with rapid growth is the challenge of retaining a highly focused culture and vision internally.
So those are my greatest concerns these days.
…Our single most important partner is TSMC.
TSMC is the world’s largest foundry, located in Taiwan.
It is the world’s most respected foundry, and we are one of their largest customers.
It is a terrific partnership.
TSMC is absolutely terrific and world-class.”
From his office in Santa Clara at the time, JEN-HSUN HUANG did not hedge on what he saw in the future for NVIDIA:
“The reasons are actually pretty simple.
The explosion of visual devices has created a huge multimedia market.
We are the best in the business, the most focused in the business and the single best pure-play of multimedia in the world.”
Read the complete year 2000 interview with JEN-HSUN HUANG of NVIDIA in the Wall Street Transcript and get more start up public semiconductor companies in our latest Technology Report and Semiconductors and AI Report.
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