- AI for Normal People
- Posts
- NVIDIA
Happy Thursday to all our favorite normies out there. Hope you’re getting ready to celebrate the weekend like we are here at ai for normal people.
We’ve got special guest on the newsletter today: Ryan Osbourn. Ryan has been a great buddy of mine for a long time, and recently told me his story in how he learned about NVIDIA - which spurred him on to being an early investor.
Tap to View Ryan’s Linkedin
Before we get started, what is NVIDIA?
I guarantee at some point or another, you’ve used their products without even knowing.
If you grew up in the gaming space, dabbled a little here and there in some old school zombies, or stayed up until the next morning playing Halo with that sound track we all know and love - you’ve used NVIDIA. NVIDIA was a driver for the last 3 decades in GPU’s (Graphics processing units) which means any video games you played through the XBOX, PS3, or the Nintendo Switch, you used a NVIDIA chip installed.
As they’ve grown over the years, they’ve been able to transition within the ai space to being one of the biggest, if the not the biggest, chip manufacturer for machine learning. NVIDIA also hosts a whole suit of developers that will help companies transform end to end with instituting ai into their day to day strategies.
If you want to learn more about NVIDIA, some resources are linked at the bottom of the page.
Down below is Ryan’s story on how he became an early investor in NVIDIA. None of the information in Ryan’s story should be used as investment advice, and no one here at ai for normal people or Ryan Osbourn should be held liable for any investment decisions made after reading this piece. This information is only written for entertainment purposes and not actual strategies or tactics in how to make money.
RYAN’S STORY: “I made over $25,000 investing in AI.”
“Back in July of 2020, I became exhausted of emotionally investing in the stock market – a less inflammatory way of saying I was tired of gambling. Rather than paying attention to trends and indicators like I was before, I decided to take a look at industries I genuinely believed in and felt had potential for long term success. Then, once I honed in on that, I wanted to do research on companies in those respective industries and ideally invest in first movers/industry leaders. That’s about as simple as I can put it. I did not want investing to feel like gambling anymore. It was officially time to get serious, re-evaluate my whole portfolio, and turn it into something I could confidently get behind.
A little bit of context: During the summer of 2020, I was a finance consultant for a Big 4 firm and simultaneously I had just launched my acting career (a weird thing to do during a pandemic – but whatever). My algorithms on social media were heavily saturated with those two topics (consulting and acting – what a pair), so I was constantly getting fed information on my two primary career paths. Through that, I began to learn there were significant implications that “artificial intelligence/machine learning” would eventually have on both. That’s when I decided a significant portion of my new revitalized portfolio was going to be related to artificial intelligence in some way.
After coming across AI more that summer, I figured out pretty quickly that it could definitely do 90% of my job as a consultant, if not more. And while I didn’t necessarily believe that about acting (I still don’t), to my dismay I did believe AI was going to play a very real part in the film making process one day. I thought (and currently think) that’s unavoidable. Which sucks. Side note: human art > AI art.” (disclaimer: here at ai fnp, we agree for now… 😅)
“AI scared me back then. To be honest in many ways it still does. Sometimes I fear it more than I am fascinated by it. But despite my fear of its present and future capabilities, I didn’t think that was reason enough to not invest in it. In my mind, it’s integration in society was inevitable, so investing in it, to me, was an incredibly wise decision and effectively free money.
So the research began. I don’t want to pretend the research was particularly extensive, because truthfully it wasn’t. I googled “best AI stocks” and an article came up on the first page that had recently been published titled, “5 Best Artificial Intelligence Stocks.” I wish I remembered what news source it was from, but I don’t. However, I do remember it was a credible source (source: trust me bro).
One of the companies in this article was this random company called NVIDIA. There were only a couple paragraphs on them, but I remember I really appreciated what I saw. I ultimately read they had a lot of cool stuff in the works and that they were big time first movers in the self-driving car industry. After reading the article, I went over to NVIDIA’s 10k to read up on them more. I was almost fully sold on them at that point.
I will say my biggest initial hesitation on investing in them was the chip shortage that was going on at the time. But I also thought “hey – that chip shortage can’t last forever, and when it ends that will more than likely only create more value for NVIDIA.” Like I said this isn’t mind blowing company research or financial analysis (although I obviously did look at the financials in the 10k), I am simply just trying to take you through my thought process before I invested nearly $4,000 in them.
I purchased 40 shares of NVIDIA at $97.39. And I will be honest again: when I did this, it was more so an investment in the INDUSTRY of artificial intelligence as opposed to a true investment and belief in NVIDIA as a company. Artificial intelligence was my investment, NVIDIA just happened to be my favorite AI company at the time. You might ask, “Ryan, if that was your thought process, why didn’t you just invest in an AI mutual fund or ETF?” Fair. The answer is I didn’t feel like having my money move that slow (maybe this was somewhat of a gamble after all – old habits die hard). So we put my entire AI-allocated budget on a stock.
To this day, I am still the only person I know who got in on NVIDIA at under $100 a share and is still holding. When I tell people this, they tell me to sell… All the time... I always say no. Then they ask me when I am going to sell. The answer to that? That’s a whole other article for another day.”
Disclaimer: the events and timeline above is my best attempt at recollection of an event that took place 4 years ago – and is subject to some error.
Thanks,
Ryan is the man. If you enjoy his story, make sure to connect with him on Linkedin. That’s all for this week. You guys be safe this weekend and we’ll see you on Sunday!
Boom Shakalaka,
Zander
💥 Subscriber Count 👉 1,910 🎉
We crushed our 1,500 goal over the weekend and we’re almost there! Never would’ve believed we’d hit it that fast… can we hit 2,000 by month’s end?! 💥 🎊
Let’s keep the party going —— Do you know any other normal people?!
Share this sign-up link with them today!
⚡️ RESOURCES ⚡️
💣️ WANT MORE ai FNP? 💣️
Follow me on X ← DO IT ✖️
Connect with me on My LinkedIn ← I WANT TO CONNECT 😎
Follow our Instagram - BOOM!!! 🧨