“I wish I had kept some shares”

In 1993, three young engineers sat around a table at a Denny’s from Silicon Valley with an ambitious idea: to create processors capable of generating realistic 3D graphics on a computer. Thirty years later, the result of that conversation is called NVIDIA and it is the company with largest market capitalization in history, with a market value that exceeds the 4.6 trillion dollars.

Of those three founders, only one has remained at the helm: Jensen Huang. Paradoxically, Curtis Priem, the engineer who designed his first chips, lives almost disconnected from the world. He took a completely opposite path from Huang by selling all of his NVIDIA shares. Today he would be the second richest person in the world, only behind Elon Musk.

Three engineers who only wanted quality graphics

Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem were three young engineers who already saw the potential of GPUs long before they became popular. the AI ​​engine. In those years, their goal had a much more practical focus: to make video game graphics They will improve.

As confirmed by Jensen Huang himself in an interview For the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the initiative came from its two partners. “Chris and Curtis said that one day they would like to leave Sun Microsystems, and that they would like me to figure out why they were leaving Sun Microsystems. They insisted that I figure out with them how to build a company.” Months later, NVIDIA was a reality. The company started with $40,000 in the bank.

Huang ended up being the visible face of the company, while Priem focused on the more technical part and Malachowsky remained on a more discreet level as a senior executive. NVIDIA went public in January 1999 at a valuation of about $1.1 billion, and at that time, Priem already owned approximately 12.8% of the company.

The Invisible Architect: Curtis Priem

While Huang served as the company’s CEO, Priem worked in the shadows designing the architecture that would allow engineers to program NVIDIA chips.

It was not the first time he had done this job since he had worked at companies such as Vermont Microsystems, GenRad, IBM and Sun Microsystems, where he was part of the design team for the IBM Professional Graphics Adapter, the first dedicated graphics processor for PCs. Priem accumulated nearly 200 patents in the US and internationally throughout his career, according to indicated in the profile of your foundation.

Priem’s ​​role at NVIDIA was so technical and so far from the media spotlight that the founder himself counted to Forbes that his colleagues had created an unwritten rule for him: “never put Curtis in front of a camera, and never put Curtis in front of a client.”

The 600 billion dollar man

Priem was never much of a business person, so he didn’t feel comfortable at NVIDIA. Shortly after the company’s IPO, he founded the Priem Family Foundation and transferred more than three-quarters of his stake in NVIDIA to it. As and as you estimate Fortunewould have been the equivalent of about 100 million NVIDIA shares. By 2006, Priem had already sold all of his shares in the company.

If Priem had retained his initial 12.8% stake, without taking into account potential share dilution, that stake would be worth more than $597 billion today. That figure would have made Priem the second richest person in the world, surpassed only by Elon Musk.

Instead, Forbes esteem that Priem’s ​​current assets are around $30 million, which gives him enough to live without pressure, although he acknowledges that “I did something crazy. And I wish I had kept some more shares.”

Philanthropy and a clock that reminds you of NVIDIA twice a day

Currently, Priem lives in a large house in California, in an area with unreliable cell coverage. He has a private plane, but he uses it only four times a year to travel home. alma mater: he Rensselaer Polytechnic Instituteto which since 2001 it has been making regular donations that now total more than 275 million dollars.

As he explained, philanthropy gives him “purpose and sanity.” His family foundation is dedicated to financing educational and innovation projects in areas such as art, science and technology, currently has about $160 million in assets and plans to cease operations in 2031.

According to collected FortuneCurtis Priem thinks about NVIDIA at least twice a day: when he puts on and when he takes off his Omega Speedmaster X-33 Mars, a watch that NVIDIA itself gave him on the occasion of his fifth anniversary with the company.

Meanwhile, the only one of the three founders who is still in the company, Jensen Huang, accumulates a net worth of about $157 billion with just a 3% stake. AND Chris Malachowskythe other co-founder, continues as senior vice president of NVIDIA, with a net worth that, although unknown exactly, places him in the category of billionaire… although not at the levels that Priem could be.

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