FOUR: Thirty Days

“When David Kirk arrived at Nvidia’s offices for the first time, in 1996, he could see at once that the company was doomed. Kirk was a graphics expert who consulted throughout the Valley, which was like being a connoisseur of failure. He had watched a great many start-ups falter, including his own, and Nvidia exhibited all of the symptoms of a company hurtling toward insolvency. The employees looked haggard and demoralized, the quirky product didn’t fit with the market, and the supposedly chummy founders were now deadlocked in a “technical discussion” that was obviously more than just a discussion and obviously about more than just technology.

Garlick was given access to Nvidia’s code base. He was appalled at what he saw. “Basically, it was cancer,” he said. “Y’know, cancer cells aren’t efficient. They just mutate, grow, and expand.” At 3dfx, Garlick had taken pride in the elegance of his programming, developing orderly systems with lucid commenting, allowing other programmers to easily maintain and improve his work. “In the time we spent making it clean, we went out of business,” he said. Nvidia’s approach was slapdash, with blocks of code written during some delirious midnight crunch serving as the foundation for critical systems. “What a shit show! The code was crap, the tool-chain was a mess, and the thing was, they didn’t give a shit!” Garlick said. “They didn’t give a shit about anything but the next tape-out.”

In this manner, Nvidia had accrued a great deal of “tech debt,” repeatedly taking shortcuts that led over time to less maintainable code and creating problems for programmers later on. But as Garlick acclimated to these shortcuts, he came to see the value of the Nvidia approach. “There was a bizarre brilliance to it all: just iterate, iterate, iterate, execute, execute, execute,” he said. “The way I see it now, tech debt is the battle scar of the

Survivor.

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.

SEVENTEEN: Money

“Like many firms, Nvidia allowed employees to purchase stock at a discount to market prices. What set Nvidia’s program apart was that employees were allowed to purchase stock at a discount to the lowest price at any point in the last two years. These purchases were capped at a certain dollar amount, but as the stock went vertical, the program basically turned into free money, and those who maxed out their contributions each year made the trade of a lifetime. With the windfall extending deep into middle management, some newer employees expressed concerns that the nouveau-riche veterans were entering a state of “semiretirement.” Executives disputed this characterization. Jeff Fisher, who ran the company’s gaming side, had been among the first thirty employees. “Many of us are financial volunteers at this point,” he said, “but we believe in the mission.”

The lure of developing this revolutionary technology offered purpose beyond what money could buy. This was especially true of the old guard, who’d spent years explaining to baffled peers why they were working for a gaming company and who constantly had to correct the pronunciation of the firm’s name. AI had not been a consideration for these veterans, and they were as surprised to be working on it as anybody. “There was no way me, or anybody else, could have dreamed at the time that this stuff that science fiction writers might come up with has become a reality,” said Jay Puri, Nvidia’s head of sales, who started work at the company in 2005. The value of Puri’s shares exceeded $700 million by 2024, but he felt that the interesting work at Nvidia was only beginning. “Maybe I’m biased, but I think it really is the most important technology company of our time,” he said.

TWENTY: The Most Important Stock on Earth

“Management professors theorized that a chief executive should ideally have between eight and twelve direct reports. Huang now had fifty-five. He had no right-hand man or woman, no majordomo, no second-in-command. Huang also had no designated successor, and as Nvidia grew, its C-suite actually shrank, meaning that there was no scapegoat for mistakes. Board members spoke of his irreplaceability; it was not an exaggeration to suggest that Huang had personally saved the American economy from recession. The US stock market, over the course of Nvidia’s rise, had pulled away from markets in Europe and Asia.