The success rate of parallel computing was zero percent before we came along,” Huang said, rattling off a list of forgotten start-ups. “Literally zero. Everyone who tried to make it into a business had failed.” Huang ignored this dismal record, pursuing his unconventional vision in open defiance of Wall Street for more than a decade. He looked for customers besides gamers, ones who needed a lot of computing power—weather forecasters, radiologists, deep-water oil prospectors, that sort of thing. During this time, Nvidia’s stock price floundered, and he had to fend off corporate raiders to retain his job.

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.

Huang had managed to stay ahead of his competitors so far, but his asset-light “merchant” business was essentially just a collection of engineers sitting around a Silicon Valley office park. If those engineers weren’t constantly developing new, difficult-to-replicate technology,

manufacturers in Asia would start knocking off his chips, and Nvidia would cease to exist. “If we don’t reinvent computer graphics, if we don’t reinvent ourselves, and we don’t open the canvas for the things that we can do on this processor, we will be commoditized out of existence,” Huang later said. Not to gamble was the biggest risk of all.

By 2012, the situation was becoming dire. Nvidia’s stock price had not appreciated in more than a decade, and although revenues and employment at the company had grown considerably, profits remained flat. Huang was bringing supercomputing to the masses, but the masses didn’t want it.

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.