With the overall strengthening of Nvidia's stock price this year, executives including Huang Renxun have been engaging in cash out activities, among whom Mark Stevens, a board member, is often seen.
According to Nvidia's 14A filing, as of March 25th, Stevens holds over 4.1 million shares of Nvidia stock, second only to Huang Renxun in terms of shareholding within the company. In addition, Stevens also holds a minority stake in the NBA Golden State Warriors.
According to media estimates, due to the appreciation of assets such as NVIDIA and the Golden State Warriors, Stevens' net worth reached $8.8 billion, ranking 306th on the global billionaire list, surpassing hedge fund manager and founder of Pershing Square, Bill Ackerman.
According to sources, Stevens grew up in California and his parents did not attend college. While pursuing degrees in electrical engineering and economics at the University of Southern California, he also worked part-time at Hughes Aircraft Company for several years. After graduation, he entered Intel as a sales position and then joined Sequoia Capital for about 20 years.
When Stevens was still a new partner at Sequoia, the "VC Godfather" Sequoia founder Don Valentine invited Stevens to meet with Huang Renxun. According to data, Sequoia initially invested $1 million in Nvidia, while the chip company's initial valuation at the time was only $7 million.
As a young semiconductor expert in Sequoia, Stevens joined the board of directors of Nvidia in 1993. However, it should be pointed out that Nvidia is not the only technology company that Stevens is interested in. In the future, he has also led investments in companies such as Google, Yahoo, YouTube, etc., serving as a director of at least 12 companies.
In 2006, as Sequoia partners withdrew from the board of directors of listed companies and began to focus on non listed companies, Stevens also withdrew from the board of directors of Nvidia; In 2008, Stevens gradually quit his job at Sequoia, so Huang Renxun invited him to rejoin.
Stevens, 64, told the media that he finds it unbelievable what has happened in the past two to three years. "Some mornings you have to wake up and pinch yourself." He admitted to having doubted whether Nvidia could survive. "The earliest products failed, and at that time the company was burning money, competing with other graphic companies in Silicon Valley and Apple for engineering talent.
I remember at least three times we almost lost our company. Johnson (Huang Renxun's English name) once said, 'We're only 30 days away from bankruptcy.' Today, this may seem a bit absurd, but in the 1990s, it was a reality, "Stevens said.
It is worth mentioning that even 3 to 5 years ago, Nvidia was not very well-known, with reports stating that the company had long been known in the niche gaming community for its GPUs.
Nvidia has been working in the field of artificial intelligence for many years, but the fact is that it was not until the chatbot ChatGPT sparked an AI craze that the market began to see the company's capabilities and potential. No one predicted that Nvidia's valuation would skyrocket from $8 or $9 million in Series A funding to $3 trillion today. No one could have imagined this
Stevens pointed out, "This is a classic case that combines the right product vision, proactive management, and a huge market. Therefore, as long as you appear at the doorstep with the right product, the market will explode
Stevens believes that the potential of AI is higher than that of the Internet and mobile networks. "If the Internet has five times the impact on changing society, the mobile network is 20 times. I think the impact of AI is more like 200 times."