2. NVIDIA
Alter ego: Jamie Vardy
What’s the heavily manufactured comparison? Late bloomers who came out of nowhere
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For the first half of his career, Jamie Vardy was a relative minnow in his field, only making his top-flight debut aged 27.
But by 29, the prolific striker was lifting the Premier League trophy and surpassing the wildest ambitions of his more-feted contemporaries.
In an unsettling football-IT channel parallel, Vardy’s story arc bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Jensen Huang and his late-blooming NVIDIA (minus the leather jacket).
Before its GPUs powered the AI revolution, NVIDIA was a non-league Halifax Town to Intel’s Manchester United. Such were the struggles of its early years, it nearly went out of business in 1996.
But just like its footballing alter ego, NVIDIA came from nowhere to reach the peak of what is possible in its favoured arena (with its current $5.2tn market cap making it the world’s most valuable company).
Double-take rating: ****
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