Cindy and I pretending to be ballers in a fancy department store in Paris, France. Not our sunglasses.

How I Learned to Invest (Part 1)

Let’s start with index investing

I made millions of dollars from being an early employee of NVIDIA, the company that develops the GPUs that are accelerating the current AI revolution. Though it’s now the eighth largest company in the S&P 500 index, with a market cap of about 562 billion dollars (at the time of writing), when I joined we were on the verge of going out of business.

I remember sitting in the office of co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, in the late 90s, in a little building in Sunnyvale that was owned by the Amdahl Corporation. As we discussed me joining, he told me that, “It’s not every day that you get to make someone into a millionaire.”

And that’s what he did.

I didn’t track my net worth very carefully at that time, but within a few years it was a few million dollars. Before long, I was buying expensive houses and cars with cash and never having to worry about money.

But I did wonder how I could sustain my wealth and help it grow, so I started learning about investing. I started out by reading The Snowball (paid link), an excellent biography of Warren Buffett, and I began to understand the approach of perhaps the most successful investor of all time.