When Greg Estes retired last year after nearly 16 years at Nvidia to spend more time with his family, walking away from work proved trickier than expected.
“It’s really hard to go from a job like that, doing amazing things, and you just stop, and you’re unemployed, looking at avocados at Safeway,” said Estes, who worked closely with CEO Jensen Huang as vice president of corporate marketing and developer programs.
Now, he’s writing his next chapter at EverGreen — a community of former Nvidia employees that advises and invests in AI startups, which formally launched in March.
Estes previously led Nvidia’s Inception startup program, which provides more than 40,000 companies with cloud credits and access to Nvidia technology. He said EverGreen enables him to stay tethered to the startup ecosystem he spent so many years cultivating.
The community’s founding partners also include former Nvidia product leaders Devang Sachdev and Vishal Lulla, and former general manager Jeff Brown, who left the company years before the AI boom to focus on startup advisory and venture investing. EverGreen comprises a team of strategic advisors and hundreds of active investors, Brown said, and the partners are building it alongside their other professional pursuits.
The network is named for the fact that many former employees are still “bleeding green” long after they leave, Brown said.
EverGreen provides a network for ex-Nvidia employees
EverGreen spun out of a broader Nvidia alumni community that spans LinkedIn groups, email lists, and live events — and has grown to roughly 30,000 members, Brown said.
Similar communities have emerged around other tech giants, including Google’s Xoogler Community and the Microsoft Alumni Network.
Within the network, a subset began discussing how they could pay forward their knowledge to the next generation of AI founders.
“It’s the ability to give back but also to invest — to put your own money to work,” Brown said.
EverGreen
EverGreen focuses on companies that work with Nvidia and are not direct competitors, across sectors such as infrastructure, developer tools, and robotics.
So far, it’s invested in security startup Protopia AI, cofounded by former Nvidia researcher Eiman Ebrahimi, and orbital computing company Sophia Space, which got a shoutout during Huang’s GTC keynote in March.
Investment is only part of EverGreen’s pitch.
“The value of EverGreen is the network. It’s not our money,” Estes said.
To this end, the group hosts startup showcases and facilitates one-on-one mentorship. And unlike a traditional venture capital fund, EverGreen does not manage a single pool of funds; instead, it evaluates startups on a case-by-case basis and then invites members to invest.
Many Nvidia employees choose to stay
Founders don’t have to be Nvidia alums to join, though that was an early goal, Estes said.
“There’s not that many of them,” he said, adding that Nvidia employees tend not to leave.
He also pushed back against the idea that Nvidia employees are retiring early after striking it rich. Many, including billionaires on the CEO’s executive staff, are financially secure enough to retire but stay on because they enjoy the work.
“Jensen is somebody that you can learn from, no matter how many years you have,” he said of the CEO.
While EverGreen is not affiliated with Nvidia, Estes said the two have a complementary relationship. And before joining, he said he met with senior leaders at the company and got the green light.
“If you’re on the venture side within Nvidia, we’re deal flow for you,” Estes said of Nvidia’s NVentures investment arm, adding that EverGreen also connects startups to the company.
“There was no success model if Nvidia didn’t love the fact that we existed,” he said.
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