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.

The product was known as a “graphics accelerator,” and at least thirty-five competitors were trying to build one. Huang worried there was no space for a thirty-sixth. The leading expert in computer graphics was Jon Peddie, who had written several textbooks on the topic. Huang had reached out to Peddie to get a sense of the market, and the two soon became friends, with Huang calling incessantly, asking questions late into the night. Peddie advised Huang that the space was too crowded and that many of the best engineers were already working for other start-ups. “I told him not to do it,” Peddie said. “That was the best advice he never took.

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.

Of more than a hundred former and current Nvidia employees I spoke with for this book, almost all had a tender story about Huang to relate. One employee—the same one whom Huang had humiliated in front of dozens of people, asking for a full refund of his salary—told me that when he was later diagnosed with a serious medical issue, Huang offered to pay in full, out of pocket, for his treatment. When Ben Garlick decided to leave Nvidia for a start-up, he was startled to receive an impassioned, personal plea from Huang to stay.

Disruptive technologies, Christensen had observed, often grew out of hobbyist communities. They were developed using “bootlegged resources” in which “off-the-shelf components” were redeployed for something other than their intended purpose. They started out wonky but rapidly improved along attributes of performance that established players ignored.

But even once you had absorbed this lesson, it wasn’t easy to implement. Pursuing niche markets cost profits, making investors question your sanity. This, too, Christensen had foretold: “One of the reasons managers at established firms find it difficult to serve emerging markets is that their investors and customers tell them not to.”

That was the real secret of The Innovator’s Dilemma, which readers often missed. It was not a book about how to succeed; it was a book about how not to fail. Christensen’s book wasn’t a how-to for start-ups but a counterinsurgency manual for senior managers at stagnating firms. Thirteen years in, Huang felt that Nvidia was at risk of becoming such a firm, and it was as much paranoia as optimism that led him to pursue the mad-science market.