Andrew, welcome to the Inside Jiteex podcast. I'm really happy to have you in the fishbowl. Welcome. How are you?
I'm doing well. Thank you for having me.
How are you finding being in Dubai? Back in Dubai again.
Dubai is an amazing place. It is busy. It is interesting. It is fun. It is congested. It is sort of everything a city is.
And you're based in San Francisco, is that right?
Yeah, we're based a little south in Sunnyvale. And then we have offices in Toronto and in Bangalore and here in Dubai.
Very nice. I've been to San Francisco a few times. Beautiful city.
Do you miss it? Do you one of those people that gets quite nostalgic and miss home and go homesick?
Yeah, I do. You get a little jet lag and you're a little tired and call your wife and she shows you a picture of the dogs and yeah, that's then you're missing home and a little home-cooked meal for sure.
Yeah, it goes a long way. You're obviously the CEO of Cerebras. And I just found out off camera that you've been married for 30 years and you have two grandchildren. How you do not look like a man who's old enough to have grandchildren and to also be, you know, in such a prominent position. What's the secret?
Have a wife that's a little bit older than you and have kids from a previous marriage is really the secret. Find the right woman. I think to be happy in life you have to make a very small number of important decisions and picking a partner that works and that you can get along with and that you can fight with and fight fair and forgive and that's sort of foundational.
Yeah, absolutely. Especially now if you sort of translate into the corporate world. You had other co-founders with you. There's four others and you were tasked with giving the name of the company. So why did you come up with the name Cerebras? Great name.
All the founders worked for me at our last company. And we sold that to AMD in 2012 and we worked at AMD for a couple years and then we took a little time off, wandered our different ways. In the middle of 2015, we came back together and we just wrote two things on the white board that we wanted to work together again and we wanted to do something important and that it wasn't going to be about money. It was going to be about seeing if we could move an industry we cared about and we care about compute. And when as we were iterating over ideas, when we sort of looked up and we thought we saw AI on the horizon and we came to believe that it was going to be big. We obviously got it wrong. We thought it would be big and it's enormous. And we came to believe that we could build a better computer for AI work, that we could invent something that would be 20, 30, 50 times faster than an NVIDIA GPU for this type of work. And we have.
Do you know what I love about your answer is that it's so simplistic an answer. You're the CEO of an 8 billion company. Okay. Which is an incredible achievement. But how you describe why you're doing what you're doing in such simple layman terms, that's quite inspiring.
You know, I think as we were saying before the show, I think simple is powerful and it's part of the path to happiness. I think do work you like with people you respect, for people with integrity. I think if you've got those three things right, work you like, colleagues you respect, and maybe a boss with integrity, it's hard to imagine you being very unhappy at work. And that's enough.
What kind of pressure are you under when you are the CEO and the face of an eight billion dollar company?
I think the answer is a lot. I think investors invest looking for 3 to 5x their money, right? So, you know, if you go public at 15 or 18 billion, it's not a success. But as I said, you have to take pleasure in the journey in trying to create wealth for your team and for your investors. Those are things you have to take pride in. And now this is my fifth startup and we've had four successful exits prior to this. Okay track record. And we have about 750 people and nearly 100 have worked for me before.
It's beautiful. That says a lot about you, that says a lot about you than about what kind of image and culture you want to create at a company. You ultimately are a computer company. You design beautiful chips.
What is the, you know, for the average listener, what is the problem that you basically want to answer? What is the problem you're trying to solve when it comes to chips?
Let's imagine you have a glass and we'll call that glass memory and you fill that glass with Coke and we'll call that data and you want to get the Coke in your mouth. We'll call your mouth compute. The rate at which you can get Coke into your mouth turns out to be a function of the size of the straw. And that's an interesting observation, right? You can have a bigger cup, you can have a smaller cup, you can have lots of Coke or little Coke, but the rate at which you get soda into your mouth is a function of the size of the straw. And this is the fundamental problem with Nvidia GPUs is the straw is small. And what we saw was an opportunity to get rid of the straw and to bring that glass right up to the compute mouth and pour data in. And that's why we're 20 times faster than Nvidia. You know, they're a $4.5 trillion company and, you know, we're 750 people and we built a chip and a system and a solution that's more than an order of magnitude faster than anything they've built.
So, two things come to mind. First of all, the way I next time I drink a soft drink is going to be very, very different. I'm going to have that analogy in my head.
Think about it, right? I mean, if you're really thirsty, don't use a straw.
Get rid of the straw. Just go all Australian. Just start. Go back to heritage.
That's your English. You don't drink beer with a straw because you want a lot of in your mouth.
There you go. Right. The second thing that comes to mind was you mentioned the size of the company. How much is sort of the nimbleness and the agility of your company your biggest weapon to be able to sort of compete with the likes of Nvidia? And by definition, the bigger you get, does that then potentially slow down the rate of development and growth for your company?
Yeah, that's a really thoughtful question. I think I'm a professional David in the battle with Goliath, right? This is my fifth startup. In each case, we chose to build something to compete with a company that was thousands of times larger than us. And you take great pride in using our mind over their muscle, right? When you're David, every dollar you win is a dollar that if you didn't think, if you didn't act more quickly would have naturally defaulted to the market leader. Or it just defaulted to them. And so when you sell hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, it's because your ideas, your grit, your strategy paid dividends. That's an enormously rewarding feeling. So yeah, please.
I think that, you know, 700 people when you're competing against a company with 55,000 is still pretty small.
I think I can still know most people's names, not everybody's name, but most. I can still see all the engineering projects. I can still know the top 30 or 40 largest sales opportunities. And so it's not so large that I'm blind to what's actually going on with the rank and file.
Yeah. But what if let's say devil's advocates, you need to take a break. You're no longer there. You need to take a sabbatical. God forbid something bad happens. You know what happens to the company? How is it a situation where you because you're so involved across so many areas because you're still quite a small unit that you're able to have really strong oversight but at the same time a little bit encumbered because you have that oversight and you're a little bit of a bottleneck. Is that a challenge?
I think you have to change your leadership style as your company grows and as it changes. I think you need to be a different type of CEO when you're 25 people than when you're 250 and different still when you're 750. I think if you want to hire leaders with experience and with their own drive and you have to stay out of their way a little bit. You have to give them leeway to make decisions. And I think even if they make decisions that are different than yours, they ought to be in the set of decisions that are reasonable. That's right. That they ought to be among reasonable choices. And I think that's something that some CEOs are able to do and others stumble as they try and run a 750 or a thousand person companies as if or a 30 person company become the bottleneck.
