THREE: New Venture

“Sun Microsystems had declined to pursue the consumer marketplace for PC video game hardware. So had Lori’s former employer Silicon Graphics, the industry leader in three-dimensional graphics. (Employees there were busy animating the CGI dinosaurs for Jurassic Park.) The failure of the major players to invest in PC gaming created a vacuum in the marketplace, which a brigade of start-up businesses was now scrambling to fill.

The concept was to take the hardware used to paint the wire-frame skeletons of model airplanes and dinosaurs and repurpose it to create controllable animated figures in three-dimensional games.

SEVEN: Deathmatch

“Wall Street loved it. Nvidia shipped new cards on a six-month cycle, twice as fast as any other vendor. The company introduced a new product line for the back-to-school cycle each fall, then updated that product in the spring. Demand accelerated when flat-screen monitors arrived, and within a few years graphics accelerators were standard on most PCs. In early 1999, fewer than six years after its founding, Nvidia went public with a $600 million valuation. Sequoia, which had initially valued Nvidia at $6 million, tallied a hundred-bagger, subsidizing the losses from countless other speculative investments.

EIGHT: The Compulsion Loop

“The accounting scandal occurred during one of the worst bear markets in history. Suffering under the simultaneous bursting of the dot-com bubble, the 9/11 attacks, and the Enron bankruptcy, the S&P 500 lost nearly half its value. Coincident with these misfortunes, Nvidia started squabbling with Microsoft. The dispute was attributed to pricing and intellectual-property issues, but Nvidia’s growing sense of entitlement played a role. Nvidia employees were unabashedly elitist. They considered themselves the best—and they were—but their pride could sometimes sound like narcissism.

In a series of chunk transactions between 2004 and 2006, Priem sold all his Nvidia shares. “That’s why the stock flatlined,” he said. “We basically sold into strength whenever it started going up.” Had he held those shares and done nothing but play cowboy for twenty years, Priem would today be worth more than $100 billion, making him one of the wealthiest people alive—but he told me he didn’t regret his decision. Doing so would have required him to have 99.9 percent of his net worth invested in the volatile stock of a risky tech company he no longer worked for, which didn’t seem like a good idea.

Channeling George Bailey, Priem asked me to consider where his vanished windfall profits had gone. “The shares went out there, but it’s not like they disappeared. It’s in pension plans. It’s in people’s houses. It’s sort of like I contributed $100 billion to our economy,” he said. “I’m on track to give away half a billion in my lifetime, and that has taken most of my time and effort. In the back of my mind, I’m trying to figure out what I would do with a $100 billion foundation, and it is not easy. I wouldn’t even know how to give that away.

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.