What if you invested in Nvidia 30 years ago, ago became publicand kept?
Venture capitalist Mark Stevens is currently one of Nvidia individual major shareholderssecond only to CEO Jensen Huang. He invested in the AI chip maker in 1993 as a junior partner at Sequoia Capital. Stevens has been on Nvidia's board for most of the company's history, serving from 1993 to 2006, and then again from 2008 to the present. Nvidia went public 1999.
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“There are at least three times I can think of where we almost lost the company,” Stevens told Bloomberg. “Jensen has his famous line, 'We're 30 days away from being fired,' which is almost laughable today, but in the '90s it was the reality.”
No one expected Nvidia to go from $8 million or $9 million Series A to $3 trillion market cap today, Stevens said.
According to a Friday Bloomberg According to the report, the more than four million Nvidia shares that Stevens owns are now worth about $4.7 billion and make up more than half of his $8.8 billion fortune. The rest of his net worth comes from his 6% ownership stake in the Golden State Warriors and other investments made during his venture capital career.
Although the AI boom has driven Nvidia's stock to new heights, Stevens says it wasn't easy to sustain in the early days. The chip market was crowded with competitors and it was expensive to keep Silicon Valley's best talent.
Mark Stevens looking through a 360 degree display. Photo by Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Nvidia currently leads the AI chip market, with technology leaders such as Microsoft and Google BELIEVING to be among its biggest customers. These customers could one day be Nvidia's competitors, joining other chip makers like Intel AND AMD.
Huang said in June that Nvidia's strategy in response to increasing competition was to create AI chips with “lower total cost of ownership”. Tens of thousands of Nvidia chips are the brains of OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Huang has the largest individual stake in the company, with 3.8% or over 934 million shares. it cashed to $169 million in shares in June. Directors and other Nvidia executives have sold more than $700 million worth of stock since the start of the year.
Nvidia has seen it 3000% the stock's rise in the past five years, which has made early investors rich. Some long-term employees are said to be in “half pension” based on stock grants only.
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