FEAR AND ANXIETY BECAME JENSEN’S favorite motivational tools. At each monthly company meeting, he would say, “We’re thirty days from going out of business.” It was hyperbole, on one level. The tense, high-stakes RIVA 128 process was not a complete outlier—as we’ll see—but it certainly wasn’t a regular occurrence. Yet Jensen didn’t want to allow any complacency to creep in, even in successful periods. And he wanted to confront new hires with the kind of pressure they would face going forward. If they didn’t have what it took, they needed to self-select out sooner rather than later.
