Coxe and Stevens agreed that it was Huang, specifically, rather than Nvidia’s proposal that attracted their attention. “The reason we backed these dudes is because they were world-class computer scientists,” Coxe said. “The average CEO will try to listen to the customer, but in computing, that’s a big mistake, because customers just don’t know what’s possible. They just don’t know what can be done!” Coxe observed that Intel and Microsoft had later struggled under more conventional management: “Jensen, from the beginning, was a world-class engineer who could see what was possible.

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.

TWENTY-ONE: Jensen

“Jensen contradicted himself frequently, sometimes offering opposing viewpoints within the same interview. He wasn’t playing devil’s advocate, exactly—he just liked to attack ideas from both sides. “He’s not trying to be a politician,” Horstmann said. “He’s not trying to stay on message. He’s trying to process real-time input, and he’s willing to entertain a contradictory thought for a while.” What might appear to be a definitive pronouncement was often just Jensen thinking out loud. Only once he started to repeat himself was it time to pay attention. When an idea really struck Jensen, it slowly built up steam over a period of days or even weeks. It cycled into his vocabulary and was repeated at every meeting. Concepts like the “zero-billion-dollar market” or the “speed of light” hadn’t come to Jensen in a flash; they’d arrived as polished nuggets of wisdom after spending months being tossed in the rock tumbler of his mind. Having arrived, they were then drilled so thoroughly into his employees that his staff sometimes sounded like characters from The Manchurian Candidate, repeating Jensen’s catchphrases verbatim with a glassy look in their eyes. Even employees who hadn’t worked at Nvidia for years could still recite the catechism from memory.