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.

Christensen’s insight was that it was easier to go up the escalator of profitability than down. Going down meant voluntarily shrinking profit margins by deliberately making inferior goods, which tended to upset investors and made executives feel like they were jogging in place. This led Christensen to his most enduring and most counterintuitive recommendation: “There are times when it is right not to listen to customers, right to invest in lower-performing products that result in lower margins, and right to pursue small, rather than substantial, markets.” It was a point that the buzzword discussion of “disruption” in the popular press

usually missed.

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.

Two fringe strains of computer science, starved of investment, hated—no, detested—by industry and researchers alike had somehow unified to form a thriving, sprawling entity now careering toward sentience. “I just thought, there is no way that Nvidia is this lucky,” Aarts said. “There’s no way that deep learning just fits this perfectly because Nvidia has never put any effort into it!”

Huang called it “luck, founded by vision.”

For Dally, it was Huang’s tireless work ethic that made Nvidia succeed. Even Dally, who left no spare second in his day, could not quite believe the superhuman efforts of his boss. “The rest of us are just here to reduce the bandwidth demands on Jensen,” Dally said. “I mean, when does he sleep?” Diercks agreed: “His hobbies are work, email, and work.”

Plenty of people worked long hours, though. Jens Horstmann attributed Huang’s success to his adaptability. “I’ve often asked myself, how is it that we started in the same cubicle, you know, with a similar IQ, both working equally hard,” Horstmann said. “How is it that this person not only built this amazing company, but also a network around him of people that—that would just die for him if needed?” Huang, Horstmann believed, had changed himself many times. He recalled Huang at LSI, pushing the simulation software to its outer limits. “Now, he’s still doing the same thing, but what he’s engineering is himself. He was not born as a great CEO; he was not destined to be one. He transformed himself into one, just by abstracting! Just by problem-solving the inputs and outputs of what a good CEO should be.