I spent enough time during the Christmas and New Year holiday to finish reading The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant by Tae Kim.
It is a very good book capturing the story of Jensen Huang and Nvidia from the 1970’s until today. As a student of startups and the video games industry I got to enjoy the merging of some of the history of Sun Microsystems in the 1980’s, the founders meeting in late 1980’s/early 1990’s, the first fundraise in early 1990’s, the 3D graphics card ‘war’ of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, all the way to today’s AI world.
Overall, it is a very good book and quite an easy read to get an overview of the history of Nvidia and how it operates.
The success Nvidia has had is an exception by any measure. And while studying great startups and founders doesn’t make anyone a great founder, there is always value in learning what and how the best did it. And in startup land that would be people and companies like Jensen Huang and Nvidia, Steve Jobs and Apple, Bill Gates (and later Sataya Nadella) and Microsoft and so on.
To build a very large company you need to be right about something important and be the best. Which means you need to see the possible future before (most) others, understand it, and make the investments required to be the best when (if) the future comes. And those investments will have financial costs today, and the payoff will be uncertain. Nvidia really succeeded with that when it came to chips for AI.
Another takeaway for me is that if you have the right founder/CEO operating in founder mode with great clarity on mission and strategy, extremely high standards, being in the details and skipping organizational layers (i.e. not by standard organizational principles), that is likely a major factor in becoming a legendary company instead of ‘merely’ a very good one. (Unfortunately for most founders I think it also goes the other way around and increases the likelihood of the company imploding because the founder/CEO is not “the right one”.)
