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

by Tae Kim

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.”