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Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

One meta-lesson is probably that sustained effort by the same people or same culture matters

i.e. maybe you need “two hits” to become this big, separated by ~2 decades

For nvidia, it was graphics and then programmable GPUs (CUDA)

For Apple, it was GUI desktops and music players/phones

Google is up there, but I’d argue it’s closer to “one hit”, and limited by the founders stepping back and turning the company into an investment conglomerate, rather than being mission-based

When the founders leave, efficiency and creativity seem to be slowed by competing factions of upper management, often working at cross purposes

I’d say that in the best cases, institutional knowledge can build over 2 decades, but it’s also very possible to lose it

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Another lesson is to try to be incredibly lucky.

I'm not suggesting this is all luck, Nvidia has executed very well and their early investments in programmable GPUs really paid off as a result, but a lot of their insane valuation now is due to crypto and then LLMs which are basically two back to back once in lifetime goldrushes where Nvidia happened to be the best positioned shovel seller.

You can run a company well to prepare to ride such a wave should it appear, but you've also got to be born with horseshoes up your ass for this to work out as well as it has for Nvidia

The other thing I find interesting is that Jensen Huang has said that he wouldn't do it all over again. That is, knowing how hard it is now to build a startup, he wouldn't do it again.

I find this pretty crazy given that (at least for now) NVidia is the most successful startup of all time. Imagine the millions of other entrepreneurs, many of whom worked just as hard, who completely failed in the process.

There's almost nothing interesting that any CEO says publicly, including this. They're celebrities; they'll say anything that helps them get higher in the celebrity popularity contest even if they're contradicting themselves during every other interview.

I may concede it's "luck" to start a company in computing, rather than another industry. All the $1T+ companies seem to be in computing -- if you go into fossil fuels or real estate, you're not going to get to $1T apparently!

BUT one thing I didn't know was that, from the very beginning, Nvidia was not a graphics or gaming company. In college, I thought of them as the company that made graphics cards.

Rather, they were looking for applications of fundamental semiconductor technology, and gaming turned out to be the most promising one at the time.

I learned that from one of the Acquired podcasts; it might have been this one:

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-company-1993...

I'd say it's analogous to Amazon -- Jeff Bezos was actually not interested in books, per se. He was interested in Internet retail, because he saw a rocket that was taking off. The "meta" was that he understood that an online bookstore could inherently have more selection than a physical bookstore. And that he could build this vertical slice business, and expand from there. This strategy succeeded wildly, and he was misunderstood for a long time.

Jensen said something like "Intel and Nvidia are like Tom and Jerry -- whenever I see Intel in a market, I pick up my chips and run !!!"

So crypto and AI were applications of semiconductors that Intel was not occupying. If you wanted to make money in semiconductors 2000-2015, you would probably go for desktops, servers, phones. But Jensen explicitly understood that his smaller company had to find other markets.

So he made a bet, that turned out to be correct. From that perspective, I would not call it luck. All the big companies have been lucky, to some extent, but they haven't become as big as Nvidia.

One of my favorite quotes is, "Luck is when preparation meets opportunity" :)

Yes but opportunities are random.

I recently read in the https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44495428 (it is absolutely good article) and the first comment there which I wanted to paste here is:-

It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.)

-Bruce_511 (HN)

So sure preparation meets opportunity but don't be stubborn just cause you feel like you are prepared.

Work hard but honestly, if you walk the line like bruce said (then persistence will result in you doing the hard work too tbh that's my philosophy right now)

So Everybody just need to figure out this line b/w stubborness and persistance especially in the startup world. But I think we need a book written on this topic tbh, any suggestions anybody?

>Yes but opportunities are random.

Not random, but always in the places where the big and easy to get money is. You're not gonna get much VC funding in Botswana or Bangladesh no matter how good your idea is and how smart you are.

That's why so many sacrifice everything to go live in the bay area even if it's an overpriced shithole full of homeless, drug addicts and feces.

AMD, Intel, IBM,.. were just as lucky, and what?

Satoshi =? Jensen

I think Nvidia's market development efforts have meant more than its culture. Ever since Nvidia started moving towards general purpose compute with the 8800 GPU back in the mid 2000s, it's been actively growing markets - first in research (leading to AI advances), and now in autonomous driving, world simulation, biotechnology, and robotics.

The market for compute is endless, and Nvidia makes huge efforts to commoditize the software side of things so people can buy hardware.

Well, I'd say that actively growing markets and seeking out new application areas is part of a company culture.

For example, I'd argue it's a thing that's NOT in Google culture.

Google culture is more about technical advantage, scalability, etc. These kinds of values are typically enforced by employee performance evaluations and so forth

NVIDIA put a lot of effort into making their hardware and accompanying software useful and usable. CUDA by itself might have never got any attention if not for the effort that NVIDIA puts into helping their customers use their technology, effectively. And they are by no means perfect at it. Most of their products are a horrible mess and they often have 7 different ways to do the same thing. A lot of their libraries are closed source and you're forced to use an API that links to a black box. There's lots to complain about.

To balance my own viewpoint, another way to look at it is that the dollar is weak, and will probably get weaker for the next 10 to 50 years

So that is helping Nvidia reach $4T, and all the other tech companies

They also probably have good ways of offsetting the weakness of the dollar, whereas regular citizens and investors don't

Amazon ($2.3T)? Microsoft ($3.7T)? Meta ($1.8T)?

I'd say Amazon had 2 hits - Online retail, and then cloud computing. (AWS is now most of their profit.)

And even Warren Buffett said that it's unusual for a company to succeed in two different areas, yet Amazon did it.

I would say Meta had only one hit -- social networking. Instagram and Whatsapp were good acquistions, but I think of them more as monopoly plays. Zuck has been investing in VR and AI, looking for the next big thing -- but like Google, he doesn't really know what it is. I'd say it's more driven by a desire to be big and powerful and profitable, than by mission (although of course every case is a mix)

I'd argue that Google also has one hit. Chrome and Android are impressive, but they are not businesses on their own. Self-driving cars didn't turn into a great business.

Google invented transformers, and OpenAI turned it into a product. But neither one got the product + business combo right. OpenAI is very far from profitable, and Gemini looks like a ChatGPT clone to me.

Microsoft is a weird case -- I'd argue that they were second in most of their hits:

- Windows - the GUI desktop was second to Apple

- Enterprise software - Excel was second to Lotus; Word was second to WordPerfect; databases were second to Oracle

- Cloud - Azure was second to Amazon

- Bing - was second to Google

I think Microsoft got to $3T by operational competence -- by cloning and embrace and extend, as opposed to nailing a new hit product + the associated business.

I would give them credit for the early BASIC and OS, but I don't think that's how they reached $3T. Whereas Google basically reached $2T with search+ads, and Meta with social networking.

---

To summarize my off the cuff theory, which I admit you can poke holes in:

- Apple, Amazon, Nvidia: nailed a hit product + associated business combo TWICE

- Google, Meta: nailed it ONCE (and they are younger companies, so to be charitable, they may not have had time)

- Microsoft: a special case

AWS for Amazon was a logical step because who is AWS largest customer? Amazon of course.

If you build large eCommerce like Amazon then of course you need huge IT infrastructure for it. Amazon was kind of forced to build the IT infrastructure and in that process Bezos saw another business opportunity because not every smaller company can easily build large IT infrastructure but many companies need it. And just as AWS built "SW services" for Amazon eCommerce it also became the foundation of the cloud business.

What I should have done is look up companies by market cap, instead of just picking them off-the-cuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

..there are some other interesting companies to consider:

Saudi Aramco, Broadcom, TMSC, PetroChina, Berkshire Hathaway

Crazy what a near total lack of anticompetitive regulatory enforcement can do for a monopoly’s value, amirite?

Amazon - Ecommerce (1994), AWS (2006)

Microsoft - Programming Language (1975), Operating Systems (1981), Office Suite (1983)

Meta - Facebook (2004), Instagram (2010)

I would argue microsoft is unique because of how badly IBM screwed up.

Microsoft also has Azure and its gaming division.

Books and AWS

EEE and owning the soul of every customer

Facebook and cool zuck

isnt the modern LLM frenzy googles second?

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