IAM2397 – Founder Offers Viable Alternative in AI-Driven GPU Cloud Solutions

Darrick Horton the founder and CEO of TensorWave, a leading AI compute and cloud solutions company based in Las Vegas, Nevada. He has a strong background in technology and has led successful startups focusing on data centers, cloud infrastructure, and semiconductor tech.

Darrick shares his early career at Lockheed Martin, where he worked on nuclear fusion technologies, but found the corporate structure limiting.

Darrick emphasizes the importance of understanding the balance between business, technology, and human elements in running a startup.

He also discusses the significance of clear vision-setting and overcoming obstacles as key to a CEO's role.

Darrick highlights the importance of constant learning, reading books by influential leaders like Ben Horowitz and Kim Scott, and recognizing the mindset required to succeed.

Website: TensorWave

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Darrick Horton Teaser 00:00

And so we set off with the singular goal of bringing a viable alternative to the market so that end customers actually had some choice and we could restore balance and make this a little more sustainable.

And that's what we did. That's where we're at now. We ended up partnering with AMD as our hardware provider.

After doing a lot of research in the space, we determined that they were the most likely challenger for NVIDIA.

Intro 00:30

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:55

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. And I have an awesome guest on the show today. I have Darrick Horton, Darrick, excited to have you on the show.

Darrick Horton 01:05

Likewise. I'm excited to be here.

Gresham Harkless 01:07

Yes, absolutely. Well, you're doing so many awesome things. So I'm super excited to have Darrick on.

And of course, before we jumped into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Darrick so you can hear about some of those awesome things.

And Darrick is the founder and CEO of TensorWave, a leading AI compute and cloud solutions company based in Las Vegas, Nevada.

As a serial entrepreneur, Darrick has successfully founded and led several successful technology startups focusing on data center, cloud infrastructure, and semiconductor technology.

His career also includes experience on Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works team where he worked on a nuclear fusion.

Prior to that he contributed to several research projects including NASA's funded plasma physics research as well as astrophysics research with the LIGO project.

Beyond his professional achievements, Darrick has served as the President of Engineers Without Borders, where he dedicated his efforts to support the development of disadvantaged communities worldwide.

One of the really cool things I was reading about before we were preparing for this is that under his leadership.

TensorWave has emerged as a key player in the AI computing landscape by pioneering the development of AMD's MI300X GPU in production cloud environments, which is pretty awesome to hear.

And I was really listening to how he compares to some of the bigger players, I guess you would say, in the market.

But one of the things I always say, if you run your own race, you can't lose. And I loved his response because they're really dialed into what they do and do it so well that there's really no other space.

You have that blue ocean strategy type of feel. So, Darrick, I love everything you're doing. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Darrick Horton 02:42

Absolutely.

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Gresham Harkless 02:43

Awesome. Well, let's kick it off then to kind of kick things off. Let's rewind the clock a little bit here, a little bit more on how you got started. What I call your CEO story.

Darrick Horton02:51

Yeah, absolutely. So like you said, I kind of started my career at Lockheed Martin. I was on a team there called Skunk Works.

And within that team is a group called Revolutionary Technology Programs. And in undergrad, I focused on physics and engineering.

Plasma physics was my specialty on the physics side, and I was doing mechanical engineering. I've always been a tech guy, but also I've always been interested in business as well. I've always had side hustles.

But I was working at Lockheed Martin on the Scum freaks team on a fusion reactor, which was like my, it was like a dream project.

It couldn't get any cooler than that, very transformational technology. And while it was a lot of fun from the technical perspective, you have like a blank check from the government to develop this, this transformation of technology.

I found it to be unfulfilling. And the reason was, uh, I was stuck in this giant corporate structure with, a lot of red tape.

I didn't really have enough agency control over the project. So, that is when I realized that I really wanted to be out doing my own thing for the rest of my career, where I jumped into startups and never looked back.

Prior to that, I had some side hustles, but I wasn't fully invested in running my own businesses. But after that experience, I left there and started doing startups and never looked back.

And then fast forward almost 10 years now, here I am after a few startups across the infrastructure space and computing space.

So yeah, that's just the quick high level. We can dig into that a little more if you'd like.

Gresham Harkless 04:47

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I appreciate you so much in sharing that. So I would love to drill down a little bit more, hear a little bit more on how you're making that impact, how you're serving your clients now. Can you take us through a little bit more on what you're doing with your business?

Darrick Horton 04:59

Yeah. So today, TensorWave is a cloud service provider focused on GPU-based AI acceleration. But it does things a little bit differently than everyone else, like you touched on earlier.

We don't use NVIDIA anything, right? And almost everywhere you see a GPU cloud or an AI cloud, they're all NVIDIA, right?

And there's a reason for that. NVIDIA historically has a lot of dominance in this space. It's the most popular choice at the moment.

But when we started this company in 2023, we saw a huge problem in the space, which was there was only one option, right?

NVIDIA was the only option, right? And at the time NVIDIA was having supply chain constraints, prices were sky high, right?

And so we were really seeing the effects of a monopoly, right? There was only one choice and that choice, it had good performance, but there are other things about it that just kind of sucked, right?

Like you couldn't get your hands on it, it was super expensive, right? There's a lot of demand from the end users for something else, right? Something else.

And that something else, it needs to be valuable, right? It needs to be cost effective, it needs to be performant, and it needs to be easy to use.

And so we saw that. And we said, this is a problem. This is unsustainable. First of all, it has to change at some point.

Somebody has to change it. It's just a matter of time. And we felt we had the knowledge and skill set and the background to make it happen.

And so we set off with the singular goal of bringing a viable alternative to the market so that end customers actually had some choice and we could restore balance and make this a little more sustainable.

And that's what we did. That's where we're at now. We ended up partnering with AMD as our hardware provider.

After doing a lot of research in the space, we determined that they were the most likely challenger for NVIDIA.

But there's still a lot of work to be done then. And even today to actually make that a reality.

Gresham Harkless 07:18

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There's always work to do as we sometimes know, whenever you're building something, there's always that next step.

I don't know if this is part of what I would call like your secret sauce, which is for you, the business or a combination of both.

But I think it's. So many times we get lost in technology, especially like in a technology industry where you kind of lose sight on what you're doing.

But I feel like you understand that on a really deep degree, the business technology and even the human part.

Do you feel like being able to kind of provide that synergy and understand that there's always kind of more work to get at to get to simple.

So that people can use it and then the technology can kind of take off from there? Do you feel like that's part of what sets you apart and makes you all unique?

Darrick Horton 07:56

Definitely, there are a lot of cloud startups that don't understand that. And what that means is they offer just raw infrastructure.

And there's a number that have been successful. right? Almost entirely on the NVIDIA side. And the reason for that is NVIDIA already did the hard work to make it simple, right?

There's already decades of work behind the scenes to make it simple and so they're providing infrastructure and people already know how to get the best performance out of the infrastructure.

But we think that'll be a short-term phenomenon, right? For anyone else, right, for AMD or for other hardware providers that don't have that long history of ease of use and huge user base that already knows how to use their hardware, it's so important to focus on that ease of use.

That is the number one thing. If you come into the market just offering infrastructure, right, without any additional support, without any additional know-how, without making it easier to consume.

You might have some short-term wins when demand is crazy, crazy high, but as the market gets a little smarter, you're not gonna be able to keep your customers, right?

You're not gonna be able to scale or grow. And so it's very important for long-term success to have a focus on ease of use and making it super simple for the end customer.

Gresham Harkless 09:25

Yeah, that makes so much sense. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack.

So this could be like an app, a book, or even a habit that you have, but what's something you lean on that makes you more effective and efficient?

Darrick Horton 09:38

Yeah, I've been reading a lot more. past couple of years. It's a really good habit to get into. And I would encourage everybody to do it.

It's harder for some people than it is for others, I think. There's a lot of great books out there. I've been reading a lot of Ben Horowitz lately and some other common authors for business leadership.

Kim Scott has a great book called Radical Candor that is also very great. So there's a lot of good nuggets out there within reach. I would encourage people to just study that first.

But definitely reading and trying to learn from others is a way to start, right? There's not any one thing that is going to help you be extremely successful.

There are a few things, though, that kind of come up a lot. if you're actually trying to be successful as a business owner or an entrepreneur. And we can get into that. Yeah. Those common themes that pop up a lot.

Gresham Harkless 11:00

Yeah. So you already touched on this, but did you have any more kind of nuggets? I like to say it might be advice you would give to your favorite client or if you have to do a time machine, your younger business self. Is there any type of CEO nuggets you might give to yourself?

Darrick Horton 11:14

These are the big ones, right? Just constantly having this mindset, and the mindset really is key, right? You have to remind yourself sometimes, even after these things, you forget, right?

And so constantly reminding yourself what these fundamentals are, recognizing when you're getting stuck, when you're not moving as quickly as you need to be and just changing that, right?

And moving faster. It's also important as you start scaling, to think about culture a bit more, right?

As you start growing your team, once you get past a handful of people, when you're a small team, everything is pretty easy culture-wise.

You have a few people that you know, you already have your rapport, you communicate through osmosis, right?

But once you start scaling and get to 15, 20, 30 people, those things break down, right? And it has to put a lot more thought around how do we ensure that the team is communicating properly?

How do we ensure that we're building the proper culture? And how do we ensure that as we increase headcount, we can still move as quickly as we need to?

Because a lot of times as you grow, the more people you add, the slower you move. You think, oh, I'll add, 10 more developers and we'll move 10 times as fast.

And we actually move half as fast. It doesn't make any sense. And so there's challenges with scaling around that, but it all boils back down to figuring out ways to move quickly and be nimble.

Gresham Harkless 12:54

Absolutely. So I want to ask you now one of my absolute favorite questions, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO.

And our goal is to have different quote unquote CEOs on this show. So Darrick, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Darrick Horton 13:05

Yeah, absolutely. So that's a great question. Really what it means to be a CEO for me boils down to a couple of things. The first is setting a strong vision. That's kind of the core step one, being a CEO.

And then once you have a strong vision from there, building a team around that and spending most of your time figuring out what the biggest obstacles are to achieving that vision for you and your team.

And figuring out how to remove those obstacles, right? Most of my time as a CEO is those two things.

Set the vision and figure out what's in the way of achieving that vision and figure out how to overcome that obstacle, right?

And that's a joint effort between everybody on the team, but it's constantly the CEO's responsibility to just go through that on a loop, right?

And you can never communicate the vision enough. Especially as you scale, right? You always have to find more ways to make sure that it's getting communicated properly.

Because that is fundamentally what causes most of the breakdowns in communication. If people aren't on the same page about what it is we're trying to achieve, what our mission is, what our vision is, then we're gonna go off in a bunch of different directions.

And so what it means to be a CEO, setting the vision, and then overcoming obstacles to achieving that vision.

Gresham Harkless 14:41

Absolutely. Well, I appreciate you sharing your knowledge and wisdom and all the awesome things that you and your team are doing going far and fast at the same time.

So I'm super appreciative of your time. What I usually do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know.

And how best people can get a hold of you about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

Darrick Horton 15:03

Yeah, absolutely. Like I said in the beginning, TensorWave focuses on enabling AI through our cloud products, right?

So if any of your readers and listeners are in need of AI compute, we're definitely the place to go.

And you can find us as Google TensorWave, TensorWave.com. But really we are aiming to be the leader in alternative compute for AI, something that is accessible, cost-effective.

So as part of that we are also aiming to be thought leaders and so we have events and blogs that we'll be doing more and more regularly where you can find out more about the latest trends in AI.

I'd encourage people to check those things out if they want to be more in the loop.

Gresham Harkless 15:58

Absolutely. Of course, to make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes as well too, so that everybody can follow up with you.

Darrick, truly appreciate again your time, appreciate all the awesome things you're doing, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Darrick Horton 16:11

Thanks for having me.

Outro 16:12

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by CB Nation and Blue16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Check out the latest and greatest apps, books, and habits to level up your business at CEOhacks.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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