I found Huang to be an elusive subject, in some ways the most difficult I’ve ever reported on. He hates talking about himself and once responded to one of my questions by physically running away. Before this book was commissioned, I had written a magazine profile of Huang for The New Yorker. Huang told me he hadn’t read it, and had no intention of ever doing so. Informed that I was writing a biography of him, he responded, “I hope I die before it comes out.”

Still, Huang offered me access to a great number of people to report this book. I spoke with almost two hundred people, including his employees, his cofounders, his rivals, and several of his oldest friends. The beloved and even somewhat goofy family man who emerged from these interviews bore little resemblance to the unapologetically carnivorous executive who made Nvidia succeed, but it is these same attachments that spur Huang’s ambition: he spoke frankly with me of his insecurities, his fear of letting his employees down, his fear of bringing shame to the family name. Some executives speak of profit as “keeping score,” but not Huang; for him, the money is only temporary insurance against some future calamity. There was something a little touching about hearing a man worth a hundred billion dollars talk in this way.

TWO: Large-Scale Integration

“When LSI’s customers wanted new functions, most of the designers would simply respond, “There’s no way.” Huang would say, “Let me see what I can do.”

Huang would spend hours fiddling with the simulator, attempting to arrange the list of components to enable what the customer wanted. This was painstaking work, conducted without the assistance of graphical user interfaces or even color monitors. His focus was admirable, but Horstmann knew many engineers who could become similarly absorbed in technical problems; what set Huang apart was his ability to avoid dead ends. “Similar people, they get lost, right?” Horstmann said. “They just get lost in these deep, deep ratholes. He doesn’t. He has a great sense of seeing when a problem has reached a certain level of complexity, and he can’t easily make further progress, and he has to go in a different direction.”

LSI’s most demanding customers were the computer-graphics designers, whose appetite for faster silicon knew no point of satiation. To serve them, Horstmann, with Huang’s encouragement, began signing contracts to deliver products that, internally, the two had no idea if LSI could actually make. Older engineers advised the two to be more cautious. Do you know what you’re doing? they’d say. If this fails, it may be the end of your career. “It was true, but that never troubled us,” Horstmann said. Almost everything Horstmann and Huang promised was eventually delivered.

Spectators were important to Huang—when he dressed down an employee, he usually did so in public so that others could learn from the experience. (“Failure must be shared,” Huang said.) If a project was delayed, Huang would command the person responsible to stand up and explain to the audience, in detail, every single thing that had gone wrong.

Huang would then deliver a withering analysis of their performance. Such corporate struggle sessions were not for everyone. “You can kind of see right away who is going to last here, and who is not,” Diercks said. “If someone starts getting defensive, you just know that person won’t be long at Nvidia.”

Diercks believed there was a method to it. “He would never just yell at somebody,” he said. “He would wait for a meeting, with a bunch of people around, so he could make it an educational opportunity for everyone.” But Huang’s criticisms weren’t always constructive—sometimes they were just verbal abuse. One former employee recalled a time when he bungled a minor assignment.

Huang’s tirades inspired as much guilt as fear, and he often described, in detail, how in letting their customers down, Nvidia employees had let one another’s families down as well. (“I think I’m driven as much by guilt as anything else,” Huang told me.)

Nvidia conducted regular performance reviews of employees, and following the GeForce FX debacle, Clay feared that her next one would read RI: “Requires Improvement.” This, at Nvidia, was like being handed the Black Spot. For the GeForce FX, Clay had run four or five quality-control tests.

Many people at Nvidia told me that Huang’s anger enforced a kind of discipline within the company, in the manner of a military general or a pro football coach. “I’m not sure he yells more than any other Fortune 500 CEO,” one employee said. “Look, it’s not really his job to be your friend. It’s his job to push you beyond where you think you could ever go.