Big bets and pivots…
A few weeks ago, I shared the story of Genentech, a company I greatly admire.
This time, I’ll tell you the tale of a business that overcame massive early failures to become one of the largest in the world.
In 1993, Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem sat at a 24 hour Denny’s, drinking coffee and making grand plans. They were working on a chip that could render realistic 3D graphics on personal computers, based on the belief that accelerating graphical capability would shape the future of computing. These conversations laid the foundation for NVIDIA, officially founded on April 5th, 1993, with a mission to bring 3D graphics to the gaming and multimedia markets. Huang, an engineer by training, had reasoned that mainstream CPUs would eventually hit limits, making specialised graphics processors an inevitable necessity. Armed with this conviction, the startup began a journey that continues to this day.
From day one, NVIDIA’s culture was defined by daring innovation and perseverance. Huang constructed an environment that encouraged creativity, risk-taking and continuous learning, and early employees were given space to experiment, even when that meant defying long-held industry beliefs.
Still, the company’s initial product, the NV1, was a commercial flop, nearly sinking the young company. The team focused on the lessons they could learn, and those insights were enough to encourage Huang in a bold move. One of NVIDIA’s key early partners was SEGA, and the CEO approached them with a request to cancel the remainder of the NV1 contract but still be paid in full, so they could get back to work on a better chip. Incredibly, SEGA’s CEO agreed, giving NVIDIA one more shot at success. The result was the RIVA 128 - an improvement, but not a runaway success.
Then, in 1999, NVIDIA unveiled the GeForce 256, the world’s first GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), which delivered a breakthrough in 3D rendering performance. The GeForce was strides ahead of its competitors, firmly catapulting NVIDIA to a leading position in the graphics market - a market that, in Huang’s opinion, was beginning to catch up to NVIDIA’s vision.
As the company grew, the team’s focus on boldness, creativity and learning continued to shape their decisions. By the mid-2000s, NVIDIA dominated the gaming GPU sector, but worked hard to maintain a startup mindset of continual reinvention. Noticing that researchers outside of gaming were repurposing their graphics card to handle heavy-duty computation of other sorts, the NVIDIA team launched CUDA, a platform to allow developers to program GPUs for general computing. On the back of this, a global community of scientists and engineers eager to experiment with GPUs began to grow, forming a natural ecosystem. In Huang’s words, “researchers realised that by buying this gaming card called GForce, you essentially have a personal supercomputer.” This ability to listen and adapt to their customers marked NVIDIA out as different to most hardware companies, who assumed that most of their customers didn’t really understand the technology they were building.
In 2012, it was time for another big pivot, this time into AI. This was the very early days of the revolution, and the move was met with skepticism, but NVIDIA stayed true to their long-term vision and by now baked-in resilience. Investing heavily into R&D, advances to CUDA eventually led to the birth of the deep learning revolution, turning NVIDIA into the linchpin of the AI era.
The culture formed in the early 90s, focused on visionary thinking, technical excellence and perseverance directly led to NVIDIA’s commercial dominance and transformation from a niche 3D graphics company to the engine room of scientific supercomputing and artificial intelligence. Today, NVIDIA rank as one of the world’s most valuable technology companies.
Unsurprisingly, in recent interviews Jensen Huang clearly credits the sustained success of the business he and his friends started at Denny’s to not only great technology, but to the people and culture behind it. Over a decades-long rise, NVIDIA has shown how a clear vision and a culture of innovation and risk-taking can build a trillion-dollar enterprise.
One of the biggest issues I see with companies today is that they think too short-term. It took organisations like NVIDIA decades to succeed, and all the VC money in the world wouldn’t have got them there sooner. Vision is hard, and we give ourselves excuses to shy away from it. Ultimately, it’s those that succeed over an extended period of time that really change the world.
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