There’s a plaque inside a Denny’s Restaurant in San Jose, CA commemorating the booth where NVIDIA was founded over coffee and pancakes by Jensen Huang, Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky in 1993.
Today, their idea has a market cap of $2.114 trillion. My mind cannot conceive of a number that large, so let’s just stipulate that it’s the third-largest company in the world. In-house innovation and impeccable market timing were instrumental to its success, but the developers who’ve been pulled in by NVIDIA’s gravity and mass have also helped it accrete value.
I wanted to learn more about how inception-stage AI founders can tap into developer ecosystems, so I spoke to Ozzy Johnson, Director of Solutions Engineering for NVIDIA Developer Programs.
In his role, he leads a global product team that accelerates its own work by interacting with outside developers who use the company’s technology. Johnson also works with NVIDIA’s Inception program, a virtual accelerator for AI and deep-learning startups.
“It's kind of necessary to know the shape of the world to have a sense of where things are headed,” he said. “We ideally want to see around corners, we want to try to get there first, or at least, meet developers where they are.”
Here’s what we talked about:
Why more AI founders should focus on fundamentals (1:50)
How AI is leveling the playing field for non-technical founders (4:28)
How to (and not to) recruit talent from the developer community (7:26)
The danger of digging your moat too early (9:41)
Finding scalable problems customers want solved (11:30)
Prioritize early spending on "saleable differentiation" (14:36)
Top traits of successful AI founders (17:21)
Benefits of NVIDIA’s Inception program (22:11)
Balancing customer feature requests with roadmap control (25:21)
Why the rise of Gen AI is a transformational moment (28:21)
Ozzy’s advice for anyone interviewing at an AI startup (31:36)
For my next episode, “Fundraising from Both Sides of the Table,” I interviewed Jorge Torres, CEO and co-founder of MindsDB, and Vijay Reddy, AI Start Investor, Mayfield.
Jorge has been through the fundraising process three times, and Vijay is an experienced seed investor, so if you’re curious about what a team needs in place before they put together a pitch deck, listen in.
