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Hungry upstarts don’t always get the attention of major players, but in the case of You.com, founder Richard Socher got a front-row seat with Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

“I was extremely impressed with Jensen,” Socher told Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sozzi on his Opening Bid podcast (above video; listen in here).

His AI-powered search engine recently announced a $50 million Series B round with investors including Nvidia (NVDA), Salesforce (CRM) Ventures, and DuckDuckGo. The capital raise valued the Google (GOOG) and Yahoo rival at close to $1 billion.

Socher said he met with Huang for nearly two hours around the time of the investment, discussing topics ranging from history to running a business.

“I don’t generally get nervous with most people, but it was very impressive to hear him giving advice," Socher said.

During his conversation, Socher says Huang shared that “he focused a lot on the speed of Nvidia" during its early years.

Eventually, Nvidia opted to pivot a little to gain focus.

“At some point, they realized that the best way is to focus on gaming first and really dominate that niche,” Socher said, adding that Huang suggested staying focused on You.com's mission of being an AI-powered alternative to Google.

This isn’t the first time Socher and Nvidia have crossed paths.

In the early 2010s, his research group at Stanford utilized Nvidia GPUs. At that time, Nvidia mostly sold GPU products to the graphics sector. “Nvidia was like, ‘who are you? Why are you trying to buy our GPUs,’” said Socher, noting that GPUs now assist with the company's AI workloads.

Nvidia launched in 1993 — born from Huang's scribbling on a napkin at a Denny's — to develop 3D graphics for gaming and multimedia purposes. Back then, an increasing number of consumers were taking the computing plunge, leading to demand for higher-powered computers.

Six years later, Nvidia introduced graphics processing units (GPU), and in 2012, it brought AI to the forefront by introducing the AlexNet neural network.

This summer, Nvidia introduced an initiative that would bring generative AI to a wider audience using its latest GPU technology. The company's AI chips are seen as having a wide performance lead over rivals AMD (AMD) and Intel (INTC), leading to impressive financial results over the past two years.

Nvidia's second quarter sales and earnings rose 122% and 152%, respectively, from the prior year.

After a summer pullback following mixed third quarter guidance, Nvidia is now the third most valuable company in the world. It sports a market cap of $2.98 trillion, while Microsoft sits at $3.18 trillion and Apple stands at $3.46 trillion, according to Yahoo Finance's comparison tool.

Year-to-date, shares are up 145% compared to an 18% gain for the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite.

Three times each week, Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi fields insight-filled conversations and chats with the biggest names in business and markets on Opening Bid. You can find more episodes on our video hub or watch on your preferred streaming service.

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