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

by Tae Kim

In writing the history of Nvidia, I was struck by the times it verged on failure and outright destruction. If things had gone just a little bit differently in a few instances, computing would have taken another course—we would be living in an altered world. Some of Nvidia’s success was pure serendipity. Chris Malachowsky might have decided to pursue a career in medicine after taking the MCAT. He might have gone in for that next interview with Digital Equipment instead of accepting the offer from Sun Microsystems, which was supposed to be just a practice run. Curtis Priem might have decided to make the NV1 chip more like everything else on the market, and it might have succeeded. But that would have deprived Nvidia of the chance to learn from its failure and respond with the RIVA 128—the chip that saved the company. “Nvidia would have been a failure if NV1 had not failed,” Priem said.

How beautiful this paragraph is! A reminder of how relative our succeses or our failures are and how much they could be substituted by one another only if we choose a wider frame.