In this Rule Breaker Investing podcast, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner picks another set of five stocks he recommends putting in your portfolio, this time with the expectation that they'll be outperforming three or more years from now.
His theme du jour: Companies that offer you and instead of or, because David is not a fan of the trade-off mentality. In his view, most of the time, you can have your cake and eat it, too. And these five companies exemplify that philosophy.
No. 4 on his list is chipmaker NVIDIA (NVDA 1.26%), because it's led by CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang, whose vision about the future of GPUs has made the company enormously successful.
A full transcript follows the video.
This was recorded on Nov. 22, 2017.
David Gardner: Stock No. 4. Well, let me ask you before I present this company. Would you rather have a co-founder of a company who was a trained electrical engineer -- a brilliant one -- because this is going to be a tech company, a technology company -- or would you like to have a highly capable executive in that co-founder? Which one would you rather have? You can't have both.
And I think you know by now we're having a little fun here, because you can have both, and there are probably numerous examples of people who are both. But the one I'm going to focus on with stock No. 4 is Jensen Huang, who is the CEO and co-founder of NVIDIA, which is among the more successful companies of our time.
Jensen Huang -- who was born in Asia, but educated in the United States of America -- had this idea that the future of computing -- and he was thinking this like 20 years ago now -- would go from CPUs to GPUs. From traditional chips of the sort [from] IBM, and then Digital, and then Intel -- the long history of the growth of the brains inside our machines, the new evolution, would be toward graphical. Graphics processing units. That rather than just have something inside your computer that's crunching through all the calculations. It would actually be on the graphics card of that computer.
And so, he founded NVIDIA. I think the year was 1993 -- ironically, the same year we founded The Motley Fool. Jensen Huang has been a little bit more successful than we have here at The Motley Fool, judged by market cap. But would you rather have a company that's a chipmaker, or that's a leader in AI?
And fortunately, I'm happy to say with NVIDIA, you can have both. NVIDIA today enables computers to see, hear, understand, and learn. They basically have a CEO in Huang who recognized you could start hooking up computers to cameras -- all those cameras that are everywhere in our society -- you could do that.
And you could actually start creating smart grids, smart cities, and have a better understanding of traffic by having computers see and hear. And then, because you can start parallel processing -- you can hook 20 of these computers together and build something stronger -- they can start to understand, and the computers can then go on to learn.
And so NVIDIA, today, having started as a maker of graphics cards for video games -- video games, the killer app for NVIDIA 20 or 25 years ago -- today is powering autonomous vehicles, which will start to make their way onto our highways increasingly in the next 10 years, and a whole host of other applications for artificial intelligence.
He was just named Fortune's Businessperson of the Year. Now that's not always the best sign for those who know the Sports Illustrated curse, where you put somebody on the cover because they just won the Super Bowl and then they lose all their games the next year. When you put somebody on the cover, sometimes it means [they're] at the peak. I hope that's not the case. I do remember Reed Hastings being named -- it was either Fortune or Forbes -- as Businessperson of the Year in 2011, and shortly thereafter the Qwikster saga ensued, so that wasn't great timing, but Reed Hastings is a great CEO.
Anyway, Jensen Huang is, in fact, the Fortune Businessperson of the Year, and that stock, over the last two years, has gone from $30 to right about $200. We've held that stock for 12 years now, very patiently, having bought at $6. It's been an awesome investment for Motley Fool Stock Advisor members, but we're not looking backwards, my fellow Fools. We're looking forward, so I'm picking NVIDIA, now, with Jensen Huang on the cover, for the next three-plus years. NVIDIA, stock No. 4.