Call/Meeting Summary: Extended Conversation with NVIDIA Creative Leader

Overview

Gary had lunch with Mark Heaps, a creative director and developer engagement leader at NVIDIA with extensive experience at Apple, Google, and Groq. The conversation covered Mark's unconventional path through tech, his work on groundbreaking Google projects, Silicon Valley networking culture, marriage and family philosophy, and core principles around reputation and keeping promises.

Key Topics Discussed

Mark's Unconventional Path into Tech

• Self-taught pattern recognition: "I'm definitely not very smart... I didn't go to school for this, I don't have a PhD. My degree in fine art, my minor in theater." Yet when AI emerged: "Everything just made sense to me... I can architect stuff with this."
• Music parallel: "Nobody ever taught me music either and I played 12 instruments... I've performed like thousands of shows. Same thing sort of happened with tech."
• Google hiring story: Director over book scanning project said "I know you do digital imaging, and I know you're creative and I have 1,600 people that need a department leader... And I think you're it." Mark responded he had no idea what the role entailed, but after seeing the architecture on a whiteboard: "Oh my God, did you guys think about this?" and wrote extensive additions, leading to immediate hiring.

Groundbreaking Google Projects

• Book scanning: Built hardware from scratch - "I spent my first four months literally building and welding a rack and putting Nikon lenses on sensors and building stereoscopic decurling and denoising algorithms for old pages, had to design the lighting environments."
• Trained models for: Copyright symbols, images, chapter recognition, title pages
• Streetview expansion: "They were like, wait, could we do this with Streetview? I'm like, oh, hell yeah."
• Ghost Bike Project: Autonomous motorcycle from Mountain View to Las Vegas with no rider - "We were successful. We made it happen... That was like almost 20 years ago."
• Hilarious failure story: "We were doing the first test... oh my God, we've gotten out of the city... And then we lost satellite signal and just out of nowhere on the freeway... hooked a left and went into the desert."

Silicon Valley Culture: Then vs Now

• Past magic: "I literally met Steve Wozniak at a Mexican restaurant on El Camino Real and I sat and talked with him for like three hours."
• Sotham Singh's garage meetups: "1800 square foot house in Sunnyvale... you would open it and there would be like Mark Zuckerberg and like, Larry Ellison. And like, these guys are all there, drinking wine... I'm like, there's billions of dollars in this garage."
• Today's contrast: "Now it's become a strategy. It's a networking strategy. And that's kind of, it's not that it's unauthentic, but it's so much noise."
• Why Austin: "When I got here in 2010, it felt like Silicon Valley in 1997... smaller, there's less happening. But it's like the right people who are thinking the right way."

NVIDIA Leadership Relationships

• Jensen Huang: Loves Mark's community work. At Supercomputing conference in St. Louis, Mark was asked to DJ for Jensen's bar appearance - found interview where Jensen describes his favorite music and used AI (Suno) to generate songs.
• Ian Buck: "Today he was like, dude, what you're doing? He goes, it just makes my heart happy."
• On NVIDIA colleagues not understanding: "A lot of people in Nvidia don't get it. They're like, why are you going to meetings with these little communities?... And I'm like, you don't get it. Like this is what matters."

Marriage and Partnership Philosophy

• Meeting Christina: She was 18, he was 20, at her sister's wedding where he was photographer. "She was like, 'Are you gonna dance with me, or what?'... I love a strong, aggressive woman."
• First date: McDonald's drive-through, then kids' playground swings talking until 5am. "I went home... He was like, 'Where were you all night?' And I said, 'I think I just met my wife.'"
• What attracted him: "She was from a really poor family... working at Costco, working at Sam's Club... She's just been accepted to all these different colleges. She had already paid off a car loan. She was just a die hard hustler."
• Christina's approach: "Dude, I'm doing my thing. Like, I'm gonna thrive. You can either be a part of it or get out of my way."
• Complementary partnership: "I'm very invested in things emotionally, and she's extremely non-emotional. I'll go out there and hustle hard... but she figures out where do we invest it, how do we hold it... She's the planner, and I'm the dreamer."
• Radical trust: "To this day, right now, I literally couldn't tell you how much money I have. I have no idea."
• Christina's philosophy: "I just let Mark rip. Mark's going to go make money, Mark's gonna find projects, he's going to do crazy shit, and he always meets rad people. I need to not get in his way."

Integrating Family Life

• Rejecting conventional wisdom: "When we decided to have a family, everybody told us how it was all going to stop... But we had our daughter on a flight with us to Croatia when she was like six months old."
• Core principle: "No, no, you have to figure how to integrate, not stop."
• Christina's commitment example: Flight canceled before daughter's taekwondo tournament. "She went in the airport, went down each airline... got her into Dallas at 3:00 in the morning, rented a car, drove from Dallas all the way down here, to get in the car with us to then road trip to Oklahoma."

Kids and Tech

• High-level access: "My kids both have like higher level NDAs than most human beings. And they go on tours with me and stuff and they're just like, 'I don't know, it just seems kind of basic.'"
• Daughter meeting Sergey at Google: Asked what she thought of Google, she said "It's stupid... it just makes you do more work... I ask it something. It doesn't tell me. It just gives me like..." Mark: "She invented Gemini."
• Son's abilities: "He wrote his second mobile app by the time he was 11... learned to write it all in Java and Python."
• Son's rejection of tech: "Now he's like, I do not want to be in tech... I asked him why... he's like, 'I just don't want your life.'" Son is passionate about plants and animals instead.
• Mark's prediction: "His hobby passion doing tech on the side will bleed into whatever he does... he'll go into that field, and yet his hobby passion doing tech on the side will be an integrator."

Reputation and Keeping Promises

• Core principle: "The best thing that I could hear about that. I hold that so much as rule number one, that I have sacrificed all kinds of things to do that."
• Philosophy: "The amazing thing about the biology of humans is you can recover and heal. Broken promises are hard to recover... physically, you can heal. Hard to heal broken promises."
• Career result: "I'm nearly 50, I think I've applied for two jobs in my entire life."
• Second lesson learned: "Be careful of what you promise. Because I was not good at that when I was young. Because you're excited... and then you're like, oh, why do I have to do this?"

Career Regrets and Lessons

• Yo Yo Ninja Boy story: Created Flash animated series, Less Than Jake recorded his opening credit song on their album. Company let him go without explanation, then sold mascot license to Duncan Yo Yo for half a million dollars.
• Lesson learned: "I gave everything, thinking success is always shared. And I learned as I got older, like, it's not."
• New filter: "The promise that I made myself five years ago is, I'm gonna stop working so hard to make everybody else rich."
• Young people's mistake: "I didn't know how to negotiate... what is extra compensation, what does licensing mean, who has rights to what?"

Meta/Corporate Culture

• Groq API conflict: Meta signed deals to use Groq as additional endpoint for Llama without disclosure. "They were in violation of contract and they were like, 'Are you gonna say no to us?'"
• Mark's description of Meta: "Mark Zuckerberg already thinks he owns everything, and we just have to figure how to fit in his world."

On Modern Dating

• Gary mentioned: Getting introduced to someone the next day
• Mark's perspective: "My wife says, Mark drives me nuts. But I can't even imagine dating in this era with their apps and everyone being able to look you up online."
• AI dating platforms: Discussed Mo Gawdat's startup using AI for matchmaking
• Mark's view: "I really think there are hundreds of thousands or millions of people that each of us could marry... I kind of still think [the Jewish grandmother approach] is like the best algorithm."
• Arranged marriage friend: Indian roommate's family arranged marriage - "My family have lived longer than me. They know me really well. I trust them completely." Result: "She literally looked like an Indian Tyra Banks."

Life Philosophy

• "Do all the things": Core mantra throughout conversation
• On tech careers: "Most people don't understand that this will never, ever be a nine to five for you. If you're in tech, it's literally your way of life."
• Managing neurodivergence: "It helps when you're autistic ADHD as well. If it doesn't stop... Brain never stops, but you know, you figure out how to like manage it just be crazy and do stuff."

Key Quotes

On self-perception:

• "I'm definitely not very smart... I didn't go to school for this, I don't have a PhD... But nobody ever taught me music either and I played 12 instruments."

On keeping promises:

• "The amazing thing about the biology of humans is you can recover and heal. Broken promises are hard to recover... physically, you can heal. Hard to heal broken promises."

On Silicon Valley then vs now:

• "Today it's become a strategy. It's a networking strategy. And that's kind of, it's not that it's unauthentic, but it's so much noise."

On marriage:

• "She's the planner, and I'm the dreamer. And together, that's a pretty rad partnership."
• "I just let Mark rip. Mark's going to go make money, Mark's gonna find projects... I need to not get in his way."

On family integration:

• "Everyone told us how your life stopped because of these kids. But we were like, no, you have to figure how to integrate, not stop."

On Meta:

• "Mark Zuckerberg already thinks he owns everything, and we just have to figure how to fit in his world."

On career regret:

• "I gave everything, thinking success is always shared. And I learned as I got older, like, it's not."

On reputation:

• "I'm nearly 50, I think I've applied for two jobs in my entire life."

Action Items / Takeaways

• Mark represents valuable connection to NVIDIA ecosystem and Austin tech community
• Philosophy of "integrate, not stop" applicable to Gary's life design
• Keeping promises as reputation-building principle worth emulating
• Caution about over-committing to corporations/others without proper agreements
• Austin as alternative to Silicon Valley noise for authentic relationship building
• AITX and local community building valued even at highest levels of NVIDIA