00:00Today on Forbes, these NVIDIA shareholders have gotten $36 billion richer in a month.
00:08Last month, during NVIDIA's quarterly earnings call, NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang
00:14said quote,
00:15The next industrial revolution has begun. Companies and countries are partnering with
00:20NVIDIA to shift the trillion-dollar installed base of traditional data centers to accelerated
00:25computing and build a new type of data center, AI factories, to produce a new commodity,
00:31artificial intelligence.
00:34No one has benefited more from NVIDIA's meteoric rise than Huang. Five years ago, he was worth
00:39an estimated $4 billion, ranked No. 546 richest on Forbes' World Billionaires list. Just over
00:47a year ago, he was worth $21 billion, ranked No. 76 in the world. Now, with NVIDIA's market
00:53capitalization surpassing $3.2 trillion, he's the No. 12 richest person on Earth,
01:00worth $115 billion, mostly thanks to his nearly 4% stake in the company.
01:06While Huang is the best-known shareholder of NVIDIA, there are plenty of others who
01:10have personally benefited from the rising stock. Among the biggest gainers are five
01:14other top executives, including Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress and General Counsel
01:19Tim Teeter, plus four independent board members who together own more than $10 billion worth
01:25of stock.
01:27One of those board members is billionaire Mark Stevens, who first got involved with
01:31NVIDIA in 1993, the same year the fledgling chip company was founded. He was a newish
01:37partner at Sequoia when the firm's founder, Don Valentine, got a call from LSI Logic founder
01:42Wilfred Wilf Corrigan. According to Stevens, Corrigan told Valentine,
01:48quote, There's this kid who works at LSI, and I'm sorry to see him go. You guys should
01:52look at him.
01:54Valentine and Stevens met with Huang, who pitched them on the idea of a company designing
01:583D graphics chips for PC games. Stevens says, quote, And we thought, intriguing.
02:05Sequoia put $1 million into the company, part of an investment that valued the firm at just
02:10$7 million, according to PitchBook. Stevens, who had worked at Intel and was Sequoia's
02:16young semiconductor expert, joined the NVIDIA board. He left in 2006 at a time when Sequoia
02:22partners were stepping off public company boards to focus on private companies. In 2008,
02:28Stevens began to wind down at Sequoia, and Huang invited him to rejoin the board. Largely
02:33because of Sequoia's early investment, Stevens now owns $5 billion worth of NVIDIA shares.
02:40Current venture capitalist and former tech executive Brooke Sewell was convinced by another
02:45tech executive, Harvey Jones, to join NVIDIA's board in 1997. The two men got to know each
02:51other while Sewell was senior vice president of finance and operations at Synopsys, where
02:56Jones was CEO. Sewell recalls that NVIDIA, quote, was in the graphics semiconductor space,
03:03which was a hyper-competitive space, and the CEO was barely over 30. He hadn't even been
03:08a VP before he founded the company. I looked at it and said, boy, this doesn't seem likely.
03:14However, Jones, who joined the board in 1993, was persuasive, and NVIDIA was in search of
03:20someone with expertise in finance and taking a company public, which Sewell had done at
03:24Synopsys. Sewell now owns $700 million of its shares.
03:31Early on, it wasn't so obvious that NVIDIA would end up doing so well. NVIDIA's first
03:36chip, released in 1995, had failed. Partway through developing its second chip, Huang
03:42and the team decided the architecture was all wrong, and they stopped work on it, according
03:46to a podcast from the VC firm Sequoia. Board member Stevens says, quote,
03:52Between 1993 and 1997, we almost went bankrupt three times.
03:58NVIDIA turned things around, and its third chip was a success. In the early 2000s, it
04:03developed the world's first graphics processing unit, or GPU, which became hugely popular
04:08for rendering images in video games. In the past decade or so, NVIDIA found that
04:13AI researchers, in both the corporate and academic worlds, were using its GPUs to run
04:18neural networks, a foundation of AI, and to create homegrown supercomputers. That helped
04:24fuel the decision to bet on AI computing, before there was a demonstrated market. That
04:30bet has paid off in spades. For full coverage, and to see our list of
04:36the 10 current NVIDIA directors and executives who have gotten the richest from their holdings
04:40and share sales, which are up a cumulative $36 billion in the past month, check out Phoebe
04:46Liu and Carrie A. Dolan's piece on Forbes.com. This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks
04:53for tuning in.
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