Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:30:13 · Rob Wachen
[00:30:13] S3: When we decided we wanted to build a rack and not just a chip, we were looking at this and we're saying, you know, how many products have actually shipped at scale for a rack scale system that actually have the power density that we're trying to solve? And we just kind of said, if we were gonna wave a magic wand, what would the best possible person in the world look like? And we're like, well, if we could find somebody who, like, started at NVIDIA and built the entire Rack team through all their different generations, learned all this different stuff, but is still scrappy, still understands the startup culture, but has seen scale, like, would be the best possible person. So we mapped all of the different teams that related to all of the different Rack Scale products at NVIDIA. And we found three people that we thought could fit the bill. And we talked to all of them, and two of them have just retired. And one of them was planning to do one more generation for NVIDIA and and then retire. His name is Brian. And over time, we convinced him to join. Brian started the HDX and DGX team at NVIDIA, which was, you know, a majority of NVIDIA's revenue, tens of billions of dollars a quarter. And the other two guys ended up investing, by the way. But when you have somebody like that, they just know what good looks like, you know, because they they've seen it. And there's so many times where we'd talk to Brian, he'd just point to us and be that's a billion dollar like, a billion dollar lesson I learned. A billion dollar lesson I learned. Like, yo, that just saves us cycles. And you pair someone like Brian with somebody like Sanford.
00:31:31 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Rob Wachen, Gavin Uberti
[00:31:31] S0: Do have a name for them? So Brian's a legend. What's what's Sanford? [00:31:33] S3: Yeah. We say chips on shoulders put chips in data centers. Yeah. Sanford and Gavin in in high school were world robotics champions and Sanford was finishing his senior year of college. And we called him up a couple years ago and we said, hey, can you come check out what we're doing? We need some help on the platform side. He comes for a week and we say, can you build a cold plate this week? And if you asked, like, any thermal engineer, anything like that, they they would think you're just, like, totally naive. Right? I mean, these things take months to do. And, like, to be clear, they do. But you can make real progress in a week if you if you put your mind to it and you think it's possible. And he built a contraption in a week that, like, actually derisked, like, a pretty key power question we had. And you put those two together, and they've done incredible things. One is not possible without the other because you need the extremely driven people that just keep asking why and don't know where the bodies are buried to, like, take tons of aggressive risks, and then you need the people who've seen scale and still have the startup scrappy mentality to help them along [00:32:32] S0: the way. So it's really the legends plus some naivete, law, first principles type talent. It's not just that you have both in the company, it's that they're working together. [00:32:39] S1: That's right. If I
00:32:39 · Gavin Uberti, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:32:39] S1: That's right. If I [00:32:40] S0: think about that funnel, anything else more interesting to say about how much better you've gotten at recruiting and why those metrics keep getting better? [00:32:47] S1: One of the shocking things is, I wish you being such a contrarian bet, kind of self selects, that, like, if you're the kind of person who is somewhat opportunistic, shouldn't go join whatever the hot company is or rather than go ahead and do deep diligence, you will not come work here, And it's one of the things I worry about as we announce more and more of the product and its specs, we may lose some of this if we're not very careful.
00:32:47 · Gavin Uberti, Rob Wachen
[00:32:47] S1: One of the shocking things is, I wish you being such a contrarian bet, kind of self selects, that, like, if you're the kind of person who is somewhat opportunistic, shouldn't go join whatever the hot company is or rather than go ahead and do deep diligence, you will not come work here, And it's one of the things I worry about as we announce more and more of the product and its specs, we may lose some of this if we're not very careful. [00:33:08] S3: You kind of have to be sick in the head to join our company. When you think about it on paper, it's like you, a person who is probably a very accomplished engineer, making a good amount of money, it's liquid, it's predictable somewhere else, you're going to convince your family to move to San Jose and live in this apartment on this housing program for the semiconductor company run by two, what, twenty four year olds now, that's pre product that is going against the biggest companies in the world and the most supply constrained environment ever created with a design that they're saying is not going to be, like, 10% better, but it's gonna be 10 x better. Something must be wrong with you to do that. People are just wired differently here that they, like, really want to not prove people wrong who don't believe, but prove people right who do believe. They just take it personally. And, you know, that's really fun to find those people. And, frankly, just the nature of the company makes it very easy to whittle out the people who aren't like that.
00:33:59 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:33:59] S0: One of the very first things you and I talked about, Rob, was I started asking about Sohu, which is the name of the first product here. And you said we can talk about that in great detail, but the thing you should know is that what we're really focused on is building a machine that can, at scale, produce these things and generations of them as efficiently at the highest possible quality level. So we want to build like the company or the machine that is the company is the thing that will produce this thing and then subsequent things. So I'd like to talk about a few principles or cornerstones of the company. You've alluded to some of them. You've said velocity. You've said vertical integration. These have become more popular topics. Parallelization is something maybe that we should talk about. But I'm especially interested in your guys' willingness to take huge risk to go faster. Maybe tell your favorite story about why this is the philosophy, what it's allowed you to do that maybe other companies haven't done. There's a number of stories here,
00:34:52 · Gavin Uberti
[00:34:52] S1: but one of my favorites is there was a time where we were getting close to taping out the chip. We realized, wait a minute, one of our vendors is way, way behind schedule. And we had two very bad options. One option, just keep the current vendor and push our timelines up by on the order of a year. Another option was to push vendors, start over and also get push timelines out by a year. Neither of these was a good option. So we had to go look for option number three. And what that was, was we figured out they're all in Bangalore. They think they're actually going and doing the work. We went out and shipped a dozen of our top engineers across the world to Bangalore for six months. So I was there as well. I lived in Bangalore for four and a half months personally and every morning, we'd go ahead and walk across the crazy busy Bangalore streets into the office, We'd be the first ones in. We'd go out and build a wide variety of tools, both things like, hey, auditing a huge amount of the code that was going in, building a bunch of tools as well to make this go even faster, making sure we're making the right design decisions on the spot right there. No to allow back and forth, go ahead and decide immediately. And then at 1AM, we'd go walk back through the now empty Bangalore streets and do it all again the next day.