What if you invested in Nvidia 30 years ago, before it went public, and held on?

Venture capitalist Mark Stevens is currently one of Nvidia’s top individual shareholders, second only to CEO Jensen Huang. He invested in the AI chipmaker in 1993 as a new partner at Sequoia Capital. Stevens has been on Nvidia’s board for most of the company’s history, serving from 1993 to 2006, and then again from 2008 to the present. Nvidia went public in 1999.

Related: Is It Too Late to Buy Nvidia? Former Morgan Stanley Strategist Says ‘Buy High, Sell Higher.’

“There’s at least three times I can think of where we almost lost the company,” Stevens told Bloomberg. “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.”

No one anticipated Nvidia going from a $8 million or $9 million Series A to a $3 trillion market cap today, Stevens said.

According to a Friday Bloomberg report, the over four million Nvidia shares Stevens owns are now worth about $4.7 billion and comprise over half of his $8.8 billion fortune. The rest of his net worth comes from his 6% ownership stake in the Golden State Warriors and other investments made throughout his venture capital career.

Related: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Turned Down a Merger Offer in the Company’s Early Days, According to Insiders. Here’s Why.

Though the AI boom has propelled Nvidia stock to new heights, Stevens says that it wasn’t easy to hold on in the early days. The chip market was crowded with competitors, and it was expensive to keep the best Silicon Valley talent.

^{Mark Stevens looking through a 360-degree display. Photo by Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images}

Nvidia currently leads the AI chip market, with tech leaders like Microsoft and Google believed to be among its biggest customers. Those clients could one day be Nvidia’s competitors, joining other chipmakers like Intel and AMD.

Huang said in June that Nvidia’s strategy in response to rising competition was to make AI chips with the “lowest total cost of ownership.” Tens of thousands of Nvidia’s chips are the brains of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Huang has the largest individual stake in the company, with 3.8% or over 934 million shares. He cashed in on $169 million worth of shares in June. Other Nvidia executives and directors have sold shares worth more than $700 million since the start of the year.

Nvidia has seen over 3,000% stock growth in the past five years, which has made early investors wealthy. Some long-term employees are reportedly in “semi-retirement” based on stock grants alone.

Related: Elon Musk Praises Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s Leadership Style: ‘Absolutely the Right Attitude’

The proposed expanded joint employer rule, which an International Franchise Association (IFA)-led coalition challenged in federal court, was defeated Friday when The National Labor Relations Board dropped its appeal of an earlier ruling in favor of the coalition.

Related: Considering franchise ownership? Get started now to find your personalized list of franchises that match your lifestyle, interests and budget.

“This announcement means that the latest attempt to implement joint employer is finally finished and represents a landmark victory for franchise small businesses in communities across America,” Matt Haller, IFA president and CEO, said in a statement. “The franchise business model is the best vehicle for American workers to generate upward mobility and create small business ownership from all walks of life. Make no mistake: while today’s news means the current threat is behind us, IFA will remain vigilant against any attempts to target the franchise model or our members.”

Related: Find Out Which Brands Have Ranked on the Franchise 500 for Longest, Earning a Spot In our New ‘Hall of Fame’

Some form of the Joint Employer Rule has existed for years, but in 2023, the NLRB expanded it in a way that directly impacted the franchise industry. Under the proposed expanded version of the rule, two companies — say, McDonald’s and a McDonald’s franchisee — could more easily be considered “joint employers” of the same employees. That would make McDonald’s legally liable for any labor violation committed by one of its franchisees, even though McDonald’s itself did not hire and does not manage that employee.

Although this is the end of this attempt to expand the rule, attorney Jim Paretti of labor relations law firm Littler Mendelson recently told Entrepreneur what the NLRB’s options are moving forward. “The short answer is that the board can keep trying to write a rule,” Paretti said. “They can go back to the drawing board, try again and write something more narrow.”

Read More: Bloomberg Law

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