Rob Wachen

speaker

529 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 30 Jun

Rob Wachen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480] · 30 Jun 2026 podcast

We actually went through multiple iterations of the rack before the chips even came back.

Before the chips came back, we made thermal chips that had the exact same hotspots as we expected our chips to have, so we could build the cold plates, we could over-pressurize them and blow them up.

We haven't had a single leak since our chips came back with the cold plates, because we already validated them.

We have a factory in Taiwan with a few dozen people out there.

We built a clone of a bunch of the test stations in our office.

We have a two megawatt data center on this floor, and we did 24-7 development cycles.

People are doing day shifts and night shifts to actually get the hardware up and running as quickly as possible.

It's that extreme vertical integration and extreme parallelization of the schedule that lets you get products to market way faster.

We have a pretty bimodal talent philosophy.

It starts with what we call the legends, which is when we're trying to solve an incredibly hard technical problem and generally do something that hasn't been done before, we need to find the very best person in the world.

And often the number one guy in the world versus the number 10 guy versus the number 100 guy, huge difference in whether it's actually possible to solve the problem.

We created the system we call project-based recruiting, where we map out all of the hardest technical problems across all industries that anyone has ever had to solve.

We look at temporality, so who are the people who did the zero to one, who is in charge, quote unquote, who actually did the work.

We talk to as many people as possible, and then we just track it.

And you'd be surprised by the amount of people who say yes after the first conversation is pretty low, but the amount of people who say yes after the 20th conversation is surprisingly high.

When we decided we wanted to build a rack and not just a chip, we were looking at this and we were saying, you know, how many products have actually shipped at scale for a rack-scale system that actually have the power density that we're trying to solve?

And we just kind of said, if we were going to wave a magic wand, what would the best possible person in the world look like?

And we were like, well, if we could find somebody who started at NVIDIA and built the entire rack team through all their different generations, learned all this different stuff, but is still scrappy, still understands the startup culture, but has seen scale, that would be the best possible person.

So we mapped all of the different teams that related to all of the different rack scale products at NVIDIA.

And we found three people that we thought could fit the bill.

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