The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant

by Tae Kim

Whiteboarding also requires active thinking and inevitably reveals how well (or not) any employee, including an executive, knows the material.

The whiteboard is perhaps the ultimate symbol of the unique culture at Nvidia—the microchip designer that has grown from humble beginnings in the 1990s, when it was one of dozens of computer graphics chip companies and known mainly by hardcore gamers seeking the best performance for the first-person shooter Quake and other games, into the premiere supplier of advanced processors for our age of artificial intelligence (AI). The architecture of the company’s processors is well suited for AI workloads because of its ability to perform mathematical calculations simultaneously—essential for training and running advanced large-language AI models.

I FOUND THIS TO BE A pervasive attitude within Nvidia: that the culture of the place discourages looking back, whether at errors or successes, in favor of focusing on the future—the blank whiteboard of opportunity.

is not a mystical ability to see the future. It is not luck. Rather, it is a unique organizational design and work culture that I have come to call “the Nvidia Way.” This culture combines unusual independence for each employee with the highest possible standards; it encourages maximum speed while demanding maximum quality; it allows Jensen to act as strategist and enforcer with a direct line of sight to everyone and everything at the company. Above all, it demands an almost superhuman level of effort and mental resilience from everyone. It’s not just that working at Nvidia is intense, though it certainly is; it’s that Jensen’s management style is unlike anything else in corporate America. Jensen runs the company in the way he does because he believes that Nvidia’s worst enemy is not the competition, but itself—more specifically, the complacency that grips any successful company, particularly one with a long and impressive track record such as Nvidia.

“Over the years, I realized what was happening, how people protect their turf and they protect their ideas. I created a much flatter organization,” Jensen said. His antidote to the backstabbing, to the gaming of metrics, and to political infighting is public accountability and, if needed, public embarrassment. “If we have leaders who are not fighting for other people to be successful and [who are] depriving opportunities to others, I’ll just say it out loud,” he said. “I’ve got no trouble calling people out. You do that once or twice, nobody’s going to go near that again.”

In a sense, that is the Nvidia Way in its purest form. It is the unwavering belief that there is tremendous reward in doing your job the best you can. It is the drive to persevere amid adversity. Or, as Jensen put it when looking directly into my eyes: the secret to his company’s success is nothing more than “sheer will.”

After all, a whiteboard is only as useful as the person who holds the marker. It can reflect genius, but it cannot create it.

Tacoma was once called the “City of Destiny,” because it sat at the end of the Northern Pacific Railroad, but by the 1970s it was about as far from the dynamism of New York City as it was possible to get: damp, dreary, and smelling of sulfur thanks to the paper pulping and processing plants that lay on the outskirts of town.

had to clean the bathrooms,” he said. “You can’t unsee that kind of stuff.”3

“The one experience that pulled me out of my shell was waiting tables at Denny’s.”

“I did more bathrooms than any CEO in the history of CEOs,”

The second was LSI Logic, which made customizable microchips called application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, for technical and scientific uses.

assigned to a start-up called Sun Microsystems, where he met two engineers, Curtis Priem and Chris Malachowsky, who were working on a secret project that promised to revolutionize how people used workstation computers—high-performance computers built to perform specialized technical or scientific tasks, such as three-dimensional modeling or industrial design.

“People with very high expectations have very low resilience. Unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” he later said. “Greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character.”17 And character, in his view, can only be the result of overcoming setbacks and adversity. To Jensen, the struggle to persevere in the face of bad, and often overwhelming, odds is simply what work is. It is why, whenever someone asks him for advice on how to achieve success, his answer has been consistent over the years: “I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”

The first PCs used a Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA) card, which could render only green text on a black background that was eighty characters wide and twenty-five characters tall. Subsequent models used Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) cards, which gave PCs the ability to manipulate individual picture elements (pixels) at a resolution of up to 640 × 200 and a depth of up to sixteen colors.

Priem’s PGC offered more colors and at higher resolutions than any other IBM PC graphics card on the market: it could render up to 256 colors at once at resolutions up to 640 × 480 pixels. The card could also run graphics routines independently of the main central processing unit (CPU), leading to faster rendering times. Priem had the card boot in CGA compatibility mode and only activate its advanced features when needed.

He thought the SPARCstation should have state-of-the-art displays that could render a million pixels and hundreds of colors. To achieve that, however, he would need to move graphics processing out of the CPU and onto separate graphics-accelerator chips—like the PGC from Vermont Microsystems. And he would have to do it behind his boss’s back.

Tell me what to do, what needs to be done, and I’ll go figure out how to do it.”

Factor quickly realized that Aviator could do more than just pass the time—it could also help Sun move workstations. The game was a fantastic means to demonstrate the GX’s graphical capabilities, running at a high resolution (1,280 × 1,024 pixels) and at 256 colors, at a time when most other PC games could only manage resolutions up to 320 × 200 pixels. Aviator also allowed clients with multiple networked Sun workstations to play against each other in real time, using Sun’s new “multicasting” protocol—a kind of rudimentary local area network (LAN) that presaged the LAN party craze of the 1990s and 2000s.

CURTIS PRIEM AND CHRIS MALACHOWSKY’S idea for a graphics-chip venture was perfectly timed. In 1992, two major developments—one in hardware, one in software—accelerated the demand for better graphics cards. The first was the computer industry’s adoption of the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus, a type of hardware connection that transferred data among the expansion cards (such as graphics accelerators), the motherboard, and the CPU at a much higher bandwidth than that available from the prior Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus. The process of designing higher-performance cards would be easier, and there would be a far larger market for the resulting products.

The second development was Microsoft’s release of Windows 3.1, which was intended to showcase the very latest in computer-graphics capabilities.

It introduced TrueType fonts, which rendered pixel-perfect text across all Microsoft programs, and it suppor...

would not manufacture the chips or circuit boards themselves, to keep costs down. Instead, they would focus on designing the best chip possible and would outsource production to semiconductor firms that already had the expensive production infrastructure in place.

“I love my job, you hate your job. I’m doing well, you’re doing crap. For what reason do I leave with you?”

The Sun hardware processed instructions in a manner that Microsoft’s operating system could not understand. It took a full month of work to remap the GX’s graphics registers to work with Windows 3.1, but eventually the team solved the problem. Naturally, the first game they ported over to Windows was the latest version of Priem’s Aviator, which they renamed Zone5.

On April 5, 1993, Nvidia was officially born. That same day, Priem drove to the Department of Motor Vehicles to order a vanity license plate: NVIDIA.

Two things have remained constant about venture capital, however. The first is that founders whose start-ups already produce revenue are far more successful with their pitches than start-ups that have no products in the market—and this was especially true in the early ’90s, when venture interest in early-stage companies was at a ten-year low. The second is that, as with many things in the business world, success depends as much on who one knows as it does on how strong one’s business is. In Nvidia’s case, the founders’ connections were extensive enough to make up for the company’s nonexistent revenue stream.

when Corrigan heard about Jensen’s vision for a new generation of graphics chips, he asked him a question: “Can I invest?”6 Corrigan grilled Jensen on the start-up’s addressable market and strategic positioning: “Who plays games?” “Give me an example of a gaming company.” Jensen responded that if they built the technology, more game companies would be founded. Existing companies in the space, such as S3 and Matrox, typically made 2-D accelerated-graphics cards, and games with 3-D graphics were only beginning to take off.

When he called Valentine after his conversation with the young, departing engineer, he didn’t pitch Jensen’s start-up idea; he pitched Jensen.

For all their ambition to take over the PC graphics market, Nvidia had to focus its resources on the single best opportunity rather than spread themselves thin chasing all possible ones.

The Sequoia founder had sat through enough pitches to know that entrepreneurs loved showing off their technology and would always present well. He believed, however, that even more important than a flashy product was a real understanding of the product’s potential market and competitive position.

“What are you?” Valentine asked the three cofounders. “Are you a gaming-console company? Are you a graphics company? Are you an audio company? You have to be one.”

Priem and his team planned to build a chip that could display graphics at a resolution of 640 × 480 pixels, with high-quality textures and fast rendering speeds. But they would have to invent their way around the PC’s limitations. The biggest hurdle involved the cost of memory. If they used standard chip-design methods on the NV1, the chip would need four megabytes of onboard memory, at cost of $200. This alone was enough to make any graphics card that used the chip unaffordable to most gamers, who were used to much cheaper prices. Before this first era of powerful 3-D PC chips, most 2-D-focused graphics chips cost under $10 and used limited amounts of memory.

In the end, Jensen prevailed. Intel went with a more open standard, one with better capabilities and that encouraged innovation. It was a victory not only for Nvidia but also for the graphics industry as a whole—with an open standard, peripheral card makers could dictate the pace of technological improvements without having to wait for Intel to catch up. According to Gelsinger, Nvidia owed its future success to “the open PCI platform that enabled his graphics devices to really race ahead of everybody else.”

The NV1 had all the ingredients for a successful launch. It had a unique marketing angle, as a single-chip multimedia accelerator with several new texturing and rendering features.

It was a single game, the first-person shooter DOOM, that sealed the NV1’s fate. At the time of the chip’s launch, DOOM was the most popular game in the world: its kinetic visuals and gruesome, fast-paced combat were unlike any other gaming experience ever produced. This was in large part due to the technical wizardry of John Carmack, the game’s designer and cofounder of its publisher, id Software. Carmack built the game using the 2-D Video Graphics Array (VGA) standard and leveraged every hardware-level trick he knew for maximum visual impact. Priem had been sure that most game designers would switch to the NV1’s 3-D accelerated graphics and leave VGA behind. So the NV1 chip only partially supported VGA graphics and relied on a software emulator to supplement its VGA capabilities—which resulted in slow performance for gamers playing DOOM.

“We thought we had built great technology and a great product,” Malachowsky said. “It turns out we only built great technology. It wasn’t a great product.”

Jensen realized Nvidia had made several critical mistakes with the NV1, from positioning to product strategy. They had overdesigned the card, stuffing it with features no one cared about. Ultimately, the market simply wanted the fastest graphics performance for the best games at a decent price—and nothing else. Computer manufacturers also told Nvidia that combining video and audio functionality onto one chip made it harder for Nvidia to win a contract.

“We were diluted across too many different areas,” Jensen recalled.8 “We learned it was better to do fewer things well than to do too many things even though it looked good on a PowerPoint slide. Nobody goes to the store to buy a Swiss Army knife. It’s something you get for Christmas.”9

He was asking him to consider how Nvidia would sell the new chip in a highly competitive industry. He knew that products had to be presented in the clearest, most precise terms in order to stand out.

but building a company is a new skill.” Jensen vowed that he would absorb as much

as he could about leading a business to prevent himself, and his fledgling company, from ever making the same mistakes again. In his search for answers to Jones’s question, he gravitated to the book Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout. In it, Ries and Trout argue that positioning is not about the product itself but rather about the mind of the customer, which is shaped by prior knowledge and experience. People tend to reject and filter out anything that doesn’t align with their existing worldview, which makes it hard to change their minds with reason and logic. But emotions can change quickly, and a skillful marketer can manipulate people to feel a certain way about a product, if a company uses the right message. According to the two authors, potential buyers didn’t want to be persuaded. They wanted to be seduced.

Three alumni of Silicon Graphics, Scott Sellers, Ross Smith, and Gary Tarolli, founded the company 3dfx in 1994, just one year after Nvidia’s incorporation. In the 1990s, Silicon Graphics, or SGI, was best known as a manufacturer of high-end graphics workstations used for computer-generated movie effects, including the dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. The founders of 3dfx intended to bring that same level of performance to the PC market at a price gamers could afford. In the fall of 1996, after two years of development, the company announced that it was ready to launch its first graphics chip, branded as “Voodoo Graphics.”

Knowingly or not, 3dfx followed the exact principles laid down by Al Ries and Jack Trout in Positioning. The company pitched its product as a clear alternative to the other cards in the marketplace and appealed to its customers’ emotions—the feeling of “beating the system” by getting outsized performance at a great price—rather than try to convince them with facts and performance statistics.

3dfx’s executives knew that Nvidia was under significant financial strain and considered making an acquisition play for their fading rival. Even though its first two chips had failed to gain traction, Nvidia still had some of the best graphics engineers in Silicon Valley on its payroll. In the end, however, 3dfx executives opted not to make a move. Its executives believed that Nvidia’s bankruptcy was inevitable, and that it would be cheaper to wait until Nvidia collapsed so that they could pick up its talent and assets for a bargain.

“The mistake that we made at 3dfx is we should have killed them when they were down,” said Ross Smith. “That was a huge tactical error on our part, not buying them. We had them on the ropes.”

Diercks, for his part, seriously considered the opportunity.17 But he remained at Nvidia for two reasons. One was curiosity: he wanted to see the RIVA 128 through to production before he considered leaving. The other was Jensen, who talked with Diercks and convinced him to stay. To this day, Jensen claims that he “saved” Diercks; in turn, Diercks likes to joke that if he had left, 3dfx would have bought Nvidia outright. Diercks is still at Nvidia three decades later, overseeing the company’s software engineering.

To survive, it had to do more than just create an above-average or merely good chip. It had to create the fastest graphics chip possible with the manufacturing and memory technology available—something that could win against 3dfx’s excellent Voodoo line.

“Guys, it’s time to quit polishing the turd,”

We just wanted to make sure this is the most powerful chip the world’s ever seen.”