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“万亿大佬”黄仁勋,做对了什么?

What did the “trillion-dollar guy” Hwang In-hoon do right?

新智元 ·  May 31, 2023 18:03

Source: Xinzhiyuan

Last Saturday, in just one day, Nvidia's market capitalization soared by more than 200 billion US dollars, shocking the US stock market.

In just a moment,Just one AMD and two Intel.

The AIGC boom sparked by ChatGPT made Nvidia profitable.

At the recent COMPUTEX conference, Nvidia CEO Hwang In-hoon bombed the field with the superchip GH200, which shocked the world by 100 million points.

Meanwhile, at the recent graduation ceremony of Taiwan University, which was very popular, Huang Renxun made this prediction:In the next decade, our industry will use new AI computers to replace trillion-dollar traditional computers.

The opportunity to revive the computer industry has really arrived.

On May 30, Beijing time, Nvidia's pre-market stock price increase expanded to nearly 4%, and the total market value officially exceeded one trillion US dollars.It became the seventh US company to unlock this achievement after Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, and Tesla.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Wong In-hoon's net worth soared by nearly $7 billion last week alone.

So far this year, his net worth has increased by 21.1 billion US dollars, making him 37th on the global ranking of the richest people.

Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun, 60, can be described as a true winner in life.

From “problem teenagers” who grew up in Taipei to CEOs on the world's richest people list. What kind of life experience did Wong In-hoon have?

“Problem Boy” Strikes Back

Growing up in Taiwan, Huang Renxun wasn't always a good kid.

In 1963, Huang Renxun was born in Taipei City.

He went to the US when he was 9 years old, and his dad sent him and his brother to his uncle's house in Washington first.

However, Hwang In-hoon's uncle did not have good financial conditions at home and was unable to raise two more children. He had no choice but to send both of them to a rural boarding school in Kentucky.

According to today's parlance, most of the students in this school are so-called “problem teenagers.”

Wong Yin-hoon said that this school is more like a correctional institution. The children inside carried knives, and others had tattoos all over their bodies.

In such an environment, Hwang In-hoon was also dazzled by some bad habits. He climbs trees against safety, occasionally steals things to eat, and has learned to smoke.

Fortunately, this kind of life didn't last long.

Two years later, Hwang In-hoon's parents also came to the US. Since then, Hwang In-hoon has been able to enroll in a regular school.

Although he went to the US a long time ago, Huang Renxun, as a Chinese, has the unique talents of Chinese people in many ways.

For example, good at studying, and love to play table tennis.

At school, he relied on his strong ability to learn and had excellent grades. At the same time, he also showed outstanding ability in table tennis after class.

Moreover, Wong In-hoon's level of table tennis is really not as good as playing in the amateur group; it is his ability to become a professional player.

It is said that the best result he personally achieved in table tennis was the third place in American doubles when he was 15 years old.

Later, Wong In-hoon's interests slowly became specific. He said he loves technology even more.

After taking the joint high school entrance exam, he took the rest of his hobbies and went to Oregon State University, majoring in electronics.

That year, he was only 16 years old.

In 1984, Hwang In-hoon graduated from Oregon State University. Then I went to Stanford University and got my master's degree.

Wong In-hoon's continuous research in the field of electricity laid a solid foundation for him to later found Nvidia.

Moreover, it is clear that his two years of work experience were also of great benefit to his personal development.

From 1983 to 1985, Hwang In-hoon worked at AMD for two years. After that, I worked at LSI Logic for another 8 years.

In 1993, he left LSI Logic and founded Nvidia.

Before age 30, you need to own a company

Back in time, Hwang In-hoon graduated in 1983. Having just graduated from the electronics major at the time, where would he choose to go?

Obviously, for him, the best option would be to find a relevant job in Silicon Valley.

At that time, Silicon Valley wasn't as thriving as it is now. Intel and AMD, as we know them, were just the two “latecomers” of the semiconductor industry, and Microsoft was far from as strong as it is now.

Hwang In-hoon chose to join AMD and became a chip designer. In this position, his personal skills have been steadily improved.

Two years later, he moved to LSI Logic, which is also a chip company. The main business is not CPU, but graphics processing that favors chips.

However, the industry pattern at the time focused on the controversy of one hundred companies, unlike today's few companies that monopolize the industry. In the early stages of industry development, it was particularly important to find the right path and seize opportunities.

While at LSI Logic, Hwang In-hoon moved from the design department to the sales department. In his opinion, this career change has laid the foundation for him to start his own business from another aspect.

After all, in addition to making products, starting a business also includes selling products; the latter is just as important. And his experience in the sales department taught him what customers really care about.

Hwang In-hoon once promised his wife that he would own a company before the age of 30, and he actually did it.

At the end of 1992, two partners who had worked together brought Huang Renxun to Nvidia's startup team.

Wong In-hoon wanted technology and skill. When he said management understood management and sales understood sales, he was naturally promoted as the president and CEO of Nvidia, and he has been working in these two positions until now.

In order to fulfill his promise to have his own company before the age of 30, he specifically targeted his first day of work at Nvidia as February 17, 1993 — which happened to be his 30th birthday.

You need to know that Hwang In-hoon was persuaded by analysts to quit in the beginning. The analyst said that the market was already in shambles before it started. There are now almost 30 companies working on this, so you'd better not get mixed up.

Nvidia, which has put into work, pioneered a different approach, opted for square forming technology, which was not favored in the beginning, and placed more emphasis on the versatility of chips.

However, things didn't always go smoothly — the first-generation product, the NV1, was not a success, and the first money raised by Nvidia was spent.

There was no way, Hwang In-hoon was only able to lay off some of his employees (actually persuaded them to quit) and promised to rehire these people after starting his family in the future.

At this point,Nvidia is now directly one-third of its original size.

At a critical time of lack of money, Sega's $7 million deposit really took Nvidia's breath away.

Although in the end, Sega did not use Nvidia products, alas, this 7 million allowed Nvidia to survive the Win95 era.

Also in the Win95 era, Hwang In-hoon began to shine. The famous Wong's law was proposed - the performance of a video card chip doubles every 6 months.

On this path, Hwang In-hoon went further and further, launching chip products with excellent performance one after another.

At the end of 1999, Hwang In-hoon first launched a chip with a new architecture — GeForce256, which took the lead in bringing the chip industry into the GPU era.

Always on the cusp

The GeForce 256 graphics processor was a huge success and became the foundation for the entire GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) product line.

Today, NVIDIA is already a leader in GPU design, with over 80% of the standalone graphics card market.

Meanwhile, Nvidia's products continue to expand into the video game, professional visualization, and automotive industries. Among them, NVIDIA onboard computers are already being used as the basis for autonomous vehicles.

Gamers have been shouting “AMD! YES!” In the end, I was only able to obediently hand over the money to Boss Huang and exchange it for a freshly released GeForce video card.

In the face of huge industry opportunities such as the explosion of virtual currency, metaverse, and AI, NVIDIA, led by Hwang In-hoon, did not miss a single wave and continued to move from one outlet to the next bigger one.

As the planner and leader of the company's direction, he can be said to be the most successful tech company CEO in recent years based on his judgment of the industry and future technology trends alone.

The trillion-dollar owner of a night market carrying a plastic bag

As Nvidia's stock soared, Wong In-hoon received more media attention.

What's interesting is that the new head of a trillion-dollar market capitalization giant was photographed by netizens recently taking a leisurely tour of night markets in Taiwan with a plastic bag in his hand.

However, the news last year that she was mistaken for a female anchor suddenly went viral on the internet.

At the time, Taiwan was hosting an e-sports carnival. Outside the venue, the two anchor girls are singing live on the street with two microphones on the street.

Just when the two of them didn't know what to sing and were seeking comments from netizens, a group of people passed by in a low-key manner behind the camera.

At this point, a famous person in leather came in from the left side of the camera and asked, “Are there really people watching now?”

What's interesting is that Lao Huang originally intended to leave the camera and listen to the song silently, but at the girl's invitation, he stayed in the middle of the camera and swayed along with the rhythm.

When they got home, as soon as the two singers went to the forum, they discovered how sacred this man in leather was at the time.

In response, some netizens said that if this were recognized on the spot, it wouldn't be excessive for Lao Huang to reward a video card!

National Taiwan University Lecture: Untold Persistence

A few days ago, as a guest speaker, Lao Huang shared with Taiwanese university students that he and Nvidia have encountered three setbacks and difficulties along the way.

It can be said that how to face failure and setbacks is the key for Nvidia to survive and grow from an ordinary technology company to a great company leading technological innovation.

In his speech, Lao Huang put forward 3 suggestions to the audience. The future winners of life will quickly write them down:

1. “Facing mistakes honestly and asking for help with humility” is the hardest thing for smart and successful people to learn

Lao Huang founded NVIDIA, created accelerated computing technology, and won a contract with SEGA to build game consoles in his early years.

However, because the technology line clashed with Microsoft, after a year of development, NVIDIA would face the fate of going out of business no matter what.

Lao Huang contacted SEGA's chairman and explained the mistake to him, but he still suggested that SEGA should pay the full fee, otherwise NVIDIA would not be able to continue operating.

But what surprised Lao Huang was that he agreed. SEGA's understanding and generosity kept Lao Huang's company alive for 3 more months.

During that time, NVidia developed the RIVA 128.

Just when the company almost ran out of money, Riva 128 shocked the emerging 3D market, made NVIDIA start to get attention, save the company, and only then did it have all of this that came later.

2. The painstaking process of pursuing a vision to shape a successful character

In 2007, NVIDIA announced CUDA GPU-accelerated computing technology. Their hope is that CUDA will become a software design model that can improve the performance of application software in terms of scientific computation, physical simulation, and image processing.

Creating a completely new arithmetic model is difficult, and has been rare in history.

Since the IBM System360, the CPU calculation model has been standard for 60 years.

CUDA requires developers to write application software and demonstrate the advantages of GPUs; developers need a large user base; a large CUDA user base requires people on the market to buy new application software.

Therefore, in order to solve the question of whether to have the chicken or the egg first. NVIDIA uses the huge gaming market behind the gaming graphics card GPU GeForce to build a user base.

However, the cost of CUDA is very high. NVIDIA's profits have been hit hard over the years, and the market capitalization has only remained around 1 billion US dollars.

Years of sluggish performance have made shareholders skeptical about CUDA and want to focus on improving profitability.

However, Lao Huang persisted and believed that the era of accelerated computation would come.

NVIDIA created a conference called GTC and worked tirelessly to promote CUDA technology around the world.

Then application software for CT reconstruction, molecular dynamics, particle physics, fluid dynamics, and image processing began to appear in large numbers. Our developers wrote algorithms and accelerated chip computation.

Years later, the AI revolution began, and NVIDIA became the driving engine.

NVIDIA invented CUDA for AI. This journey forged the company's character, endured pain and suffering, and was an inevitable pain in the pursuit of a vision.

Meanwhile, the CUDA ecosystem, which has been built up over many years, has also become NVIDIA's deepest moat, protecting its market value of trillion dollars.

3. Learning to give up is the core key to success

In 2010, Google turned Android into a platform for great graphics.

NVIDIA's excellent computing power makes NVIDIA a good partner for the Android system.

NVIDIA was successful and stock prices soared, but competitors soon poured in.

Because the mobile phone market is huge, we can seize market share.

However, NVIDIA made the difficult decision to abandon this market.

Because NVIDIA's mission is to create computers that can solve “problems that ordinary computers cannot solve”, we should focus on our vision and make full use of our unique contributions.

The abandonment paid off, and we created a new market — robotics, with neural network processors, and a secure architecture that runs AI algorithms.

At the time, it was still a market of unknown size.

Withdrawing from the huge mobile phone market and creating a new market without knowing the size of the market became the key to Nvidia's success.

Lao Huang said in his speech that “retreat” is not easy for smart and successful people like you.

However, strategic retreat, sacrifice, and decision to give up is the core of success, a very critical core.

Editor/Hoten

The translation is provided by third-party software.


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