Venture capitalist Mark Stevens was early to Nvidia Corp.’s relentless stock rally. Three decades early, to be exact.
The Nvidia board member first invested in the chipmaker in 1993 as a newly minted partner at Sequoia Capital. It has been a bumpy ride since then: By Stevens’ count, Nvidia survived at least three near-death experiences before the artificial-intelligence craze sent its stock surging, pushing the value of his holding to about $4.7 billion.
Combined with a minority stake in the Golden State Warriors of the National Basketball Association and more than two decades in venture capital, Stevens is worth $8.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which is calculating his fortune for the first time. That makes him the 306th-richest person in the world, ahead of hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman and Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots of the National Football League.
“There are some mornings you have to wake up and pinch yourself, especially what’s happened over the last two to three years,” Stevens, 64, said in an interview from his home in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. “It’s a classic case of having the right mix of product vision, aggressive management and a big market that’s exploding right when you’re at the front door with the right product.”
Nvidia has been an outsized beneficiary of booming demand for AI due to its dominant share of the market for high-end accelerators. Its stock has risen more than eightfold since the beginning of 2023, making co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang one of the richest people in the world, with a fortune of $106.5 billion. It’s also brought some of Nvidia’s board members up the billionaire ranks alongside him.
Former Sutter Hill Ventures Managing Director Tench Coxe, who invested in the same round as Stevens in 1993 and has remained a board member since, also owns more than $4 billion of Nvidia stock in a mix of family and retirement trusts. Another original board member, Square Wave Ventures’ Harvey Jones, has been selling millions in stock and retains a stake worth about $900 million.
Nvidia and Coxe declined to comment, while attempts to reach Jones were unsuccessful.
'CHIP GUY'
It’s a reversal of fortune from the early days of Nvidia, when Stevens wondered whether the chipmaker was going to make it. The company’s earliest products had flopped, and it was burning cash and competing with Silicon Graphics and Apple Inc. for engineering talent.
“There’s at least three times I can think of where we almost lost the company,” Stevens said. “Jensen has his famous saying of, ‘We’re 30 days away from going out of business’ — which is almost laughable today, but in the '90s it was the reality.”
Stevens grew up in Culver City, California. His parents, who didn’t attend college, worked as a secretary and an environmental test engineer at Hughes Aircraft. Stevens worked part-time at Hughes for a few years while finishing his degrees in electrical engineering and economics at the University of Southern California. He left the aerospace industry for a sales role at Intel Corp. and ended up in Silicon Valley as an associate at Sequoia in 1989.
He quickly became Sequoia’s “chip guy,” joining the first meeting with Nvidia’s co-founders. The chipmaker ended up raising its first funding from Sequoia and Coxe’s Sutter Hill Ventures in 1993, the same year Stevens became a partner at the VC firm and joined Nvidia’s board as its representative. Other than a two-year break in the aughts when Sequoia wanted its partners to reduce their board workload, he has been a director at Nvidia ever since and is now its second-largest individual shareholder after Huang.
“Nobody forecasted the company going from a Series A valuation of $8 [million] or $9 million to $3 trillion today,” Stevens said. “Nobody could dream of that.”
Today, he runs S-Cubed Capital, the family office he started in 2012 after leaving Sequoia. (The name is in reference to his three children, whose first names all start with S.)
The firm is diversifying Stevens’ fortune into areas like real estate, health care and energy. He isn’t making as many direct private investments but instead is backing firms like crypto investor Paradigm and Josh Kushner’s venture firm Thrive Capital as a limited partner. S-Cubed also has a large position in Sequoia Heritage, the wealth manager that split from Sequoia Capital last year, and Makena Capital, a Silicon Valley-based investment firm started by ex-Stanford Management investors.
Stevens also owns a single-digit stake in the Golden State Warriors that he bought in 2013 from the Sacramento Kings’ new owner, Vivek Ranadive.
While his Nvidia shares are responsible for the bulk of his fortune, a controversy on the court may be what he’s best known for. Stevens was fined $500,000 and banned from NBA games for a year after shoving Toronto Raptors player Kyle Lowry while sitting courtside during the 2019 NBA Finals. Stevens rebuffed calls to sell his stake, worth an estimated $492 million today. He’s also on the Warriors’ executive board.
While Stevens’ family office rarely invests directly in early-stage companies, he’s still an evangelist for AI, seeing its potential in areas ranging from drug development to how meatpacking plants in the Midwest process food. He compares it to the internet, which he believes had a 5x impact on transforming society; or mobile, which he says had a 20x impact on the world.
“I think the impact of AI is more like 200x,” he said.