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?

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.

The experience was liberating for Huang. Desperation, not inspiration, was the mother of victory. Huang encouraged his employees to preserve the mindset they’d adopted during the Riva crunch, asking them to constantly behave as if the company was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy even when it was making massive profits. For years to come, Jensen opened staff presentations with the words “Our company is thirty days from going out of business.” Even today at Nvidia, this sentence remains the corporate mantra.

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.

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.