He said the basic research unit was not affordable and needed to be downsized. He was quite concerned about IBM’s software business, mainframe business, and midrange products. As I look back at my notes, it is clear he understood most, if not all, of the business issues we tackled over the ensuing years. What’s striking from my notes is the absence of any mention of culture, teamwork, customers, or leadership—the elements that turned

out to be the toughest challenges at IBM…

I went home with a deepening sense of fear. Could I pull this off? Who was going to help me?

Huang eschewed drama and led by example, driving himself hard, refraining from gossip, and carefully apportioning credit for good work. If a product was going to be late or if LSI couldn’t deliver on some promised function, Huang would immediately provide a detailed description of what had gone wrong, who was responsible, and what he was doing to fix it.

“When he said he was going to do something, there was a reasonable likelihood that he would actually do it, y’know?” Malachowsky said. Malachowsky struggled to think of other Silicon Valley product managers who fit that description.

If Huang had a flaw, it was that he embraced candor in the extreme, sometimes crossing into the territory of insult. The bluntness was part of his charm, of course, but it could leave people’s feelings hurt. He didn’t have much patience for people who disagreed with him, and he also seemed genuinely surprised that there were people working in his industry who didn’t want to spend fourteen hours a day fiddling with the circuit simulator. Of course, for quarrelsome workaholics like Priem and Malachowsky, these traits were only further evidence of Jensen’s managerial fitness.

FIVE: Going Parallel

“Kirk and Huang each combined a commanding breadth of technical expertise with a talent for low cunning. As Nvidia succeeded, many of the other graphics start-ups failed. Huang, sensing opportunity, created a master list of competitors on the whiteboard in his office. Then, in consultation with Kirk, he identified the two or three best engineers at each company and began strategizing on how to poach them.

Kirk recalled showing off the Riva 128 to a competitor at a trade show. When the engineer saw what it could do, he gave up on the spot. “I hired him within a few days—and that killed that company, right?” Kirk said. “Because, you know, I removed its brain.” Kirk, mild and professorial, had a predator’s instincts. “We had all the geniuses from all the other start-ups, and as we were successful in overtaking more and more of these little companies, the remaining companies had a harder and harder time staying alive.

SIXTEEN: Hyperscale

“Nvidia had grown too large for Huang to really understand everything that was going on, but it was not his style to delegate. To maintain resonance, he needed to keep communication open with the frontline employees. Sometime around 2020, Huang asked everyone at the company to submit a weekly list of the five most important things they were working on. Every Friday from that day forward, he received twenty thousand emails. Brevity was encouraged; Huang would randomly sample from this pool of correspondence late into the night. In turn, he communicated to his staff by writing hundreds of emails per day, often only a few words long. (One executive compared the emails to haiku. Another compared them to ransom notes.) His responsiveness was superhuman. “You’d email him at 2 a.m. and receive a reply at 2:05 a.m.,” Dally said. “Then you’d email him again at 6 a.m. and receive a reply at 6:05 a.m.

Two fringe strains of computer science, starved of investment, hated—no, detested—by industry and researchers alike had somehow unified to form a thriving, sprawling entity now careering toward sentience. “I just thought, there is no way that Nvidia is this lucky,” Aarts said. “There’s no way that deep learning just fits this perfectly because Nvidia has never put any effort into it!”

Huang called it “luck, founded by vision.”

For Dally, it was Huang’s tireless work ethic that made Nvidia succeed. Even Dally, who left no spare second in his day, could not quite believe the superhuman efforts of his boss. “The rest of us are just here to reduce the bandwidth demands on Jensen,” Dally said. “I mean, when does he sleep?” Diercks agreed: “His hobbies are work, email, and work.”

Plenty of people worked long hours, though. Jens Horstmann attributed Huang’s success to his adaptability. “I’ve often asked myself, how is it that we started in the same cubicle, you know, with a similar IQ, both working equally hard,” Horstmann said. “How is it that this person not only built this amazing company, but also a network around him of people that—that would just die for him if needed?” Huang, Horstmann believed, had changed himself many times. He recalled Huang at LSI, pushing the simulation software to its outer limits. “Now, he’s still doing the same thing, but what he’s engineering is himself. He was not born as a great CEO; he was not destined to be one. He transformed himself into one, just by abstracting! Just by problem-solving the inputs and outputs of what a good CEO should be.