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Startups·2 min read

Not that Jensen Huang: Lycana founder turns his Nvidia name into buzz

A 24-year-old founder in Singapore shares a name with Nvidia's boss. People ask him for GPUs and tease him about affairs, and a LinkedIn post of his went viral.

A young software developer at a laptop in Singapore, with a LinkedIn post on screen and a graphics card on the desk.
Image: Business Insider
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Jensen Huang gets messages asking for Nvidia shares. Friends ask him how many women it is this time. He is not the Nvidia boss, though. He is a 24-year-old software developer in Singapore who runs an AI startup called Lycana, and he has decided to make the most of the confusion.

He says he has followed the news about the famous Jensen Huang since primary school. At 16 he asked his mother for a GPU (a graphics processor) and got a GTX 1080, which he used for gaming and for building his own apps. Years later, at the start of the AI boom, people began to point out the name. The usual lines: "Your name is just like that guy's," or "Give me some Nvidia shares." Some AI companies asked whether he had any GPUs to spare.

What happens when you share a name with the Nvidia CEO?

Mostly, people remember him. At networking events someone greets him as "the Nvidia CEO." In most job interviews of the past four years, he says, the same thing came up, and he believes it gave him an edge.

Then the Nvidia chief stepped down and reports of affairs followed. His first thought was that his name was being dragged through the mud. His opinion of the man has worsened, he says, though he still credits him with visionary work. His response was a LinkedIn post, written on a whim, that went viral. Some commenters joked. Others thought he really was the Nvidia chief and asked why he had cheated.

Did it help his startup?

A little, by his account. The post sent about 5,000 extra visitors to his site, and a few of them signed up for subscriptions. Screenshots of the post turned up on Reddit and on the Chinese platform RedNote, where people used it to discuss Nvidia. He found that the strangest part.

He has applied to Y Combinator and other accelerators run by venture capital firms. His guess is that some investors pick founders partly on how well they sell themselves, and if a borrowed name gets him noticed, fine. He admits a future employer might read the post and frown. His Nvidia shares, he adds, are down, after being his most profitable holding for a while.

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