Stanford Entrepreneurship Videos

With every product development, NVIDIA asks What is the purpose of this product and the soul of its existence? NVIDIA has been very successful developing distinctive brand names for their products that describe the soul of the product. These names have become widely recognized and have given the product a personality.

It is important to foster a culture that embraces mistakes and an environment where anyone can have a great idea. The majority of great ideas come out of mistakes and adversity. Adversity should be seen as an opportunity rather than a life-threatening event.

Execution is critically important; it is better to have a simple idea that can be easily implemented rather than a complicated idea that has implementation challenges. Drastic changes do not have to be made overnight; it is a long road to success and each change need only take the company to the next step.

NVIDIA's goal is to light up every pixel in the world. LCD technology has make displays more prevalent. NVIDIA hopes to take advantage of this trend, and future trends, in display technology to drive as many pixels as they can.

Jensen aims to spend his time on what he believes will have a long lasting effect on the company. Numerous meetings and events often take up a CEO's time and it is important to regularly take that time back for product and strategy planning. Communication time with employees is also important -- the most important responsibility of the CEO is being a custodian of the company culture.

The company must have a vision and make product choices based on that vision. Once you commit yourself to a product, do not be easily deterred from this decision. Though the product will undergo feature adjustments, the vision should always remains constant.

If you have a great idea, many other people probably have that idea too. When you start a company, you must assume that similar companies will form to compete with you. Be prepared to fend them off.

NVIDIA Founder Jensen Huang emphasizes hiring employees is a company choice. With highly skilled engineers everywhere, the choice of who to hire can come down to the personalities and motivations of the candidates. Each employee will become part of a larger team and must mesh with company culture.

[Introduction by David Cassak] Tom Fogarty explains that he became interested in medicine "by accident." He discusses his early design development and how he turned a clinical problem into a device that could solve the problem: "In this situation...it was almost like a lightbulb that went off. If you put a thin catheter system down, and you can make it bigger and then withdraw it and control the volume during withdrawal, you get the clot out. Essentially, I took what they call uretheral catheters, which are long, thin tubes. I cut the baby finger off a number 5 glove. I tied it on the cather system...and that was the first balloon catheter.

Yock states that the most important thing he learned in his in whole career was that in medtech, you have to keep it simple. The reason is that people in MedTech seem to have less skill, and even less patience than a typical kid in an 8th grade shop class.

Yock talks about further developments moving from radiations to using drugs with the stents as a carrying mechanism. This is a blockbuster idea which has dropped the recurrence rate from 20% to essentially 0.

Yock addresses the question: Where else is convergence happening between biology and devices? He believes that outside of the cardiovascular area, convergence is happening in local drug deliveries for many uses. The combination of sensing some condition and delivering and optimizing drugs is something that will be seen in the future, he says.

Yock talks about how the hospitals make money on cardiac surgery, but they are concerned that the stents will take away the nice margins they have in cardiac surgery. This would mean loss of revenue for the hospital, he says.

Yock tells the story of how less invasive cardiac techniques got started. He shares a video clip from Charles Dotter, better known as crazy Charlie

Yock mentions a problem - there is a tremendous diseconomy because loss per stent has gone up. There will be serious economic trouble with this new technology, he says.