The Cerebras Systems IPO was a smash hit on Thursday, generating billions for itself, its founders, and its major investors.
Among the big winners is major shareholder Benchmark, which owns 9.5% of the company. One of the firm’s general partners, Eric Vishria, has been a Cerebras board member since 2016, the year the AI chip maker was founded, having co-led its $25 million Series A round.
But these billions only happened for Benchmark because Vishria met with the startup almost against his will, he told TechCrunch.
“It was five founders and a deck, and it was our first hardware investment in 10 years,” Vishria told TechCrunch about that first meeting. “I had been a venture capitalist for like, 18 months.” (Prior to being a VC, Vishria sold the social browser startup he co-founded, RockMelt, to Yahoo for a reported $60-$70 million in 2013.)
Benchmark is famously selective in the companies it chooses, and backs hardware companies so rarely that Vishria was kicking himself for giving time to Cerebras.
“Why did I take this meeting?” he kept muttering. At one point, he even messaged his assistant, who manages his calendar, and bugged her: “Why did you let me take this meeting?” Vishria recalls.
But his grumpy attitude vanished by the third slide, as co-founder and CEO Andrew Feldman laid out Cerebras’ grand plans.
“The first deck is the title slide. The second deck is the team. And I was like, ‘Oh, that team is really good.’ And the third slide is something along the lines of ‘GPUs actually suck for deep learning. They just happen to be 100 times better than CPUs.’ And as soon as he said it, a light bulb went off,” Vishria recalled. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, of course. Like, why would a graphics processor be the right thing for AI?’”
Still, this was years before Google’s famous Transformer paper — the 2017 research that laid the groundwork for modern AI — which eventually led to ChatGPT. Cerebras was pitching a new kind of giant-sized chip, designed for …