I wish I could be more technical in explaining how companies are built and run, but I built this one from the first day and it's much more personal. I frankly believe, you know, because people say it's not business, it's personal. It's always personal.
A few months ago, I sat down with Jensen Huang, the co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, one of the world's most valuable companies, and we released that conversation as an audio episode of How I Built This back in May of this year. Now, Jensen is obviously in the news, and it is a challenging time for him and for Nvidia. And this interview doesn't deal with any of that. But what you will see, I hope, is a fuller picture of who he is. This is a conversation about his family, about his upbringing, his demanding and even difficult approach to leadership, and why he says he wouldn't ever want to build Nvidia again. So, judge for yourself. I hope you find this conversation interesting at the very least. And here it is. My conversation with Jensen Huang, recorded in April of 2026.
You have been on the record as basically saying you've been asked, would you do this again? Would you do this all over again? And I'm sort of paraphrasing, but you said a version of no, I wouldn't. No way. So can you explain that? I mean, yeah, we've sort of have the outlines of all of the troughs, and there were a lot of troughs, and I'm trying to even imagine like quarterly ends rough. I'm trying to imagine quarterly earning calls in 2007 when your stock price is in the toilet and you're putting all this money into CUDA and people are saying what? And I'm trying to figure out how you can do that as a publicly traded company, withstand the pressure and, as you say, the embarrassment of it.
It was embarrassing, it was humiliating. You're the only face that everybody hates. Your employees are probably embarrassed for you. Your question about doing it again, you know, most people, when I just think they're being dishonest. So let me just tell you why. When somebody asked me, would I do this again? If your point, if your question is knowing how Nvidia turned out, knowing the contribution we've made to the world, knowing the consequence of the company today, how it impacts so many different industries, the joy that we brought to our employees, all of the benefits that we, you know, have accrued as a result of our success. Do I love those things? The answer is yes.
But that wasn't the question. The question is, I mean, who doesn't, you know, right? Who doesn't? And so, but the question is, suppose I knew everything then that I now know, how hard it is. And you didn't know what the outcome would be. That's, yeah, for example, I now know how hard it is to build Nvidia. I now know how hard it is to build CUDA. I now know how hard it is to get everybody in the world to use CUDA. And I now know how long it took and all of the pain and suffering and all the embarrassment and humiliation and all the setbacks. And you compress all of that and you just told that 30-year-old kid, listen, this is going to take a lot longer than you think. Whatever, however fast you thought your company was going to be successful, it's not going to be anything like that. And you are going to be the person who delivers most of the most horrific financial return news that anybody's ever explained. You'll have activists come after your company. You'll have, you know, so on and so forth. You'll be going out of business. You'll be, you have to lay people off. You have to deliver such enormously bad news. You have to do all of that. Would you start again? The answer, absolutely not. And so I think a lot of people forget that the pain and suffering necessary, the endurance necessary to do something great is because you're always looking forward and forgetting the past.
Yeah. I spend all my time forgetting yesterday. Yeah. In fact, you know, right now as we're talking, it is really quite hard for me to resurface those memories and resurface those feelings. And the reason for that is I spend all of my time, all of my life trying to forget yesterday, right? Does it trigger tension? Yeah. Yeah. It triggers anxiety. It triggers, yeah, that's why I don't love talking about my past because I spend all my time forgetting it. So that you can get back on that horse. That's in fact, what do they, what do they teach athletes? Forget the last point. Yeah. It's about forgetting. And so a lot of people don't realize that if you want to be a marathoner, if you want to, Nvidia is a, you know, Nvidia high-tech is a marathon sprint, and so you're full out every single day, and it did take 34 years. Yeah. And so, and we're still at it. And so I think the challenge is how do you look forward with promise and enthusiasm and deep belief, meanwhile all the pain and suffering and the setbacks, that's, you know, to somehow learn from it, codify that learning, make sure it goes into every fiber in your body, but leave it behind, just let it go. Yeah. You know. Yeah. And so that's, no, that's kind of... I think it's a really healthy way to see the world. I think it's hard and it requires a lot of discipline. And now I'm going to ask you about the past again, right, on the trigger. I know, but I mean, I again, yeah, I understand.
I mean, the sacrifice, right? I mean, you've got a family, like you probably missed a lot of things. You probably did 12-hour days, seven days a week for years. And after you sort of really began to focus on AI, it doubled again. I mean, it was, and you'd already been here a long time. And so I imagine the personal sacrifices on your health, probably you probably didn't get to exercise every day or do, I mean, you probably didn't get to eat every day. I mean, there were things you probably didn't get to see your family as much as you wanted to see. All those things, all true.
All true. And during the time when the kids were still young, I was finishing my master's at Stanford, and so I was busy on multiple levels. And when the kids were still young, I missed, yeah, I missed all their karate tournaments. I missed a lot. I missed a lot. Yeah. And we didn't have laptops at the time, so you couldn't really do work at home for many years. There wasn't, you know, obviously there were no iPhones, and the internet had barely gotten off the ground yet, and Windows 95 hadn't come. So most of us didn't have PCs at home, and if you wanted to do any work, you had to come to work. And so that was back in the old days.
Yeah, I don't know that I've ever asked them what it was like on the receiving side of it. But, you know, if not, I mean, this is, if you're going to build a company, you need somebody strong and you need somebody amazing like my wife, and she took care of everything. Lori took care of everything. Took care of me, took care of the kids, took care of everything. And I don't remember her complaining even one time, one nanosecond, or even one instance. I don't think she's ever mentioned it once, and that's the gift that she gave me. And both kids love Nvidia to their core, and both work here. Both work here. They both went off in their own careers for a while, and we were lucky to attract them back. And both kids have read every shareholder letter, gone to every shareholder meeting, been to every single conference that I've ever done. I've missed most of theirs. They've been to all of mine, and both of them have loved Nvidia since they were born. And the one's 35, Spencer's 35, Madison's 34, and the company's 33 years old. And that kind of puts it in perspective. I mean, they've had, you know, Nvidia in their lives the whole time. And despite the fact that I was gone a lot, they found a way to always love the company. And I'm really lucky.
Your story to me is just the, it's a story, and even now in a different way, it's a story of pressure, right? And now it's like, you know, you did not intend or anticipate that this is going to be the company it is, and it is where it is, and it's not just Nvidia in Santa Clara, in Santa Clara County, in Northern California, in California. Its importance is global, and that's a lot of responsibility.
Yeah. And humility is helpful. Yeah. Being grounded is helpful. Yeah. Not doing this job from a yacht is helpful. Yeah. And the fact that the company was built stone by stone, you know, with the people that are here and everybody else. So everybody's so grounded. I think it's helpful, but you also have to realize that the company also evolved over 30 years. You know it recently, but this is one of the oldest technology companies in the world.
I know that we have talked a lot about you and your life, but the guy who wrote a biography of you and Nvidia, Steven Witt, said you were one of the most challenging people to report on because you generally don't like to talk about yourself. Great reservation doing so. Yes. And I wonder, is that because you just find it to be self-aggrandizing, or I don't know, just you find it to be, you know, being self-reflective? I mean, going back to what you said about forgetting everything that happened, just moving forward. Is that part of it? Is it part, is it that you don't... I notice that when you talk about your kids or even your parents and the struggle, sacrifice they make, you do, you know, get a little bit emotional, and I wonder whether part of not liking to talk about yourself is maybe some of that.
Yeah, even that, that's a hard question. Why don't I like talking about myself? I didn't do anything by myself. Somebody else decided where I went to college. I was clever to maneuver myself next to the best girl in school. You know, that was just smart calculus and smart strategy. It was, you know, maybe the smartest thing I've ever done. And so, I was fortunate to have two amazing friends, Chris and Curtis. I'm surrounded by amazing computer scientists here. I made a lot of good decisions. I've made a large number of lesser good decisions. I just don't find any of that to be very special or that interesting. You know, it barely interests myself. And so I think I'm just uncomfortable talking about it. Maybe I don't know why, Guy. I don't know why. Maybe I need therapy, you know, to help me figure it out.
I want to ask you about your childhood because I know that you spent, you were born in Taiwan, but you spent some of it in Thailand. Yeah. And there was, the story is that there was like, there's political unrest in Thailand at the time. This is in the early '70s, and your parents sent you and your brother to Kentucky to go to school there. What do you know about, you were only 10. What do you know about why Kentucky? Why? How did that happen?
So, it was 1973, and periodically Thailand would have a coup, and this just happened to be one of them. And they had to send us away. And there weren't that many boarding schools in America that would take international students. But somehow Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky, Clay County, Kentucky, population, I think it was 600 at the time. Today, their population is 600. Incredible town, little tiny town, no stoplight. And there was a school on this small mound, you know, kind of a small hill. But probably the most important feature was that it was a boarding school and it was incredibly affordable. Yeah. Because my parents, you know, didn't have much money, and here we are, they're in Southeast Asia trying to put kids in school in America. So you could just imagine it was beyond their reach. And so they found the most affordable boarding school in America for us. And so we went there, and every kid that lived there had to work. And so they had no custodians. And so we took care of ourselves, and my job was to clean the bathrooms. And apparently I was the youngest kid that ever went there. I still am, I think.
Because you were 10. I was nine when I went there. Yeah. I've got great memories of it. I loved the place. It was a tough school because they invited kids from all walks of life. Yeah. And so, you know, my roommate was, I was nine and my roommate was 16. And so, yeah, and it was a tough school because none of the closets had doors and none of the drawers, you know, because everything had to be out in the open, you just don't know what the kids are going to have. So, wow. Yeah, it was incredible. That was, yeah. Welcome to America. Yeah. Right. But I loved it. It was incredible. I was on the swim team and the soccer team, and then afterwards the coach would, you know, take you out to give you a treat. And I remember recording, we used to record a tape, we sent it back to our parents. There was, you know, we didn't, long-distance phone calls cost too much money, and so for like, we never spoke to them live until they came to the United States almost two years later. And so we would record, you know, what happened this last month, send it to them by mail, they'd record it, send it back to us, and we were, you know, ping-ponging with that for a couple years. And I remember telling them that after a swim meet, the coach took us to this incredible restaurant, and lights everywhere, it was like from outer space, and all the food was in boxes, and it was McDonald's. It's McDonald's. Yeah. Which was magical. Yeah. Incredible. Yeah.
Yeah. You eventually reunite with your family in Portland, which is where your dad settles, and he grew up there. And you went on to, this is the early, late '70s, early '80s. You go to Oregon State, and this is like the beginning of what would become the computer revolution. You are studying electrical engineering because I don't think they had a computer science program. No, not there at the time. And that's also where you would meet the person who would become your wife.
Yeah. So, when I was in high school, I know I wasn't very outgoing, and so I didn't have that many friends. All of my best friends were in a club together. We were in two clubs. One club was the math club, and then the other club was the computer club. Nice. It was the same four kids. Same guys. Same four kids. Yeah. And my best friend in high school, I asked him where he was going to college, and he said Oregon State. And he asked me where I was going to college, and it never crossed my mind to go out of town. You know, the idea of going to a great university, it never crossed my mind. So he said he was going to Oregon State. I said, 'Yeah, that sounds great. I'll go to Oregon State.' And so we were roommates, and we both enrolled in electrical engineering. And our lab, the class had 200, must have been 250 kids. It was a big class, and there were three girls, you know. And so I know this Lori, you know, is a super pretty girl, and I was probably the youngest kid in class then as well. And I went to school rather early. I skipped two grades in school. So I was just a tiny kid. And we were in lab together, and I found a way to arrange myself into the same lab as her, same group as her, and so we became lab partners, and here we are.
Yeah. Both of you, after you graduate, moved to California. This is like 1984-ish, I think, which is the center of the revolution, right? I mean, your first job was with AMD. Yeah. And I think she also had a job. Silicon Graphics. Silicon Graphics. Yeah. And you were, I mean, you were, what did it look like to design computer chips in 1984? I mean, was it CAD? Was it, what did that actually physically entail?
Yeah. Well, at the time, I was the last generation of chip designers that did it by hand and the first generation of chip designers that used software to design chips that ran into the computers that ran software. And so it was an incredible time. You know, kind of the perspective at the time, the chip I was working on had a few thousand transistors, and now we design chips that are 200 billion, a trillion transistors. Insane. Yeah, so the scale of the problems that we work on now compared to where we started is incredible. But anyhow, my office mate went off to work for a startup company called LSI Logic. And that startup company, I didn't know anything about it, and she called me and said, 'Hey, you know, this is really quite a special company. You ought to come take a look.' And so I went to take a look at LSI Logic, and it turned out this is an extraordinary company and completely revolutionary in what they were doing. Really, in a lot of ways, invented the modern way of designing chips. And so I got there, I joined them, I guess I was probably employee number 150 or 170 or something like that. And you were like 22 probably at the time. Yeah, I was just the kid. I was just the kid. Yeah. And I happened to join a revolutionary company at a perfect time, and it really shaped how I think about technology. And from what I've read, I mean, they... So far, my life has been just one stroke of luck after another. Yeah.
They gave you a lot of responsibility. I mean, you were eventually, you would be in charge of tooling, right? Like that was sort of what you oversaw.
Yeah. The way LSI Logic's business worked is they had all the technology, the tools, and they made the chips, but they would make it for somebody else who created computers. And so Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics and, you know, incredible companies at the time in Silicon Valley who were systems companies, but they needed a chip company to help them build the chips. And so the CEO of LSI Logic and the executive that I worked for, Brian Hela, recognized my talents and put me in front of all these companies to help them translate their idea of what a computer is into a chip that we would build for them. And so I spent a lot of time on campus at Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics and a whole bunch of other companies that were being started at the time. And I met some incredible people. They were history's brightest computer architects, and I was just a kid, and I learned a ton from them. And again, it was an incredible stroke of luck that I had that perfect combination of knowledge and skills, and it put me in front of some really amazing people.
Two of those people that you met, Curtis P and Chris Mal, were at Sun, and you had met them, I think, pretty early. And you were, I mean, you were, this was sort of like the PC boom, the Clone Wars. I mean, there was a lot of demand for what LSI was producing, right? I mean, it was an exciting time to be here, to be young, and to watch, you know, probably the next most exciting time would happen with the internet boom, right?
Well, LSI Logic was an extraordinary company because it happened at precisely the time, as you're exactly as you're saying, Guy, that during that time many mini computers, many supercomputers, all of those types of giant systems were being created by companies like Digital, and then the PC revolution started. And so we happened to be the company that helped everybody with their systems ideas, translate their system ideas into chips. And so I was really in the right place at the right time, and I saw new industries being created, worked with a whole bunch of amazing computer scientists. I saw a lot of great startups, and I was able to see firsthand, you know, companies being built and smart ideas, great technology, bad strategy, moderate technology, excellent strategy. I saw it all. I mean, it was quite an incredible thing. And then, of course, I met Chris and Curtis.
So going back to Chris and Curtis, the story is that these guys wanted to create at Sun Microsystems a chip specifically for games, for computer graphics, for games, and were rebuffed. And so as often is the case, they decided to start their own company. Yeah. And they approached you, and they wanted you to work with them. And this is around 1992, '93. And from what I understand, I mean, you had a great job. You were well paid. You were well on the path to upper management. Like, this could have been a great, stable career. You already had, I think, at least one kid at the time. Yeah. Spencer, Madison. Yeah. And your wife was looking after the kids, so everyone depended on your salary. And also, you know, I think we had a whopping $30,000 in the bank, you know. And also your parents had immigrated to the United States. I imagine that they loved that you had this stable job, you had health insurance, and you had a retirement plan, all these things. And maybe that was part of your psychology. When they initially approached you, I mean, did you think that, I'm not going to take that risk? I'm not going to leave this amazing job?
Yeah, I mean, they wanted to leave their jobs. You know, and the reasons that you mentioned, I was happy with my job, but they didn't give up asking me, and they were trying to figure out, so what should we do, you know? Because they wanted you to run this business that they had an idea for. Yeah. Yeah. You know, there was an idea. I think that the basic idea was really computer graphics. In retrospect, the technology was clearly wrong. But nonetheless, Chris and Curtis are two of the brightest minds that I've ever met, brilliant engineers, incredible computer scientists. And so all the time that we spent trying to figure out, is there an opportunity here? Could we create a company? You know, the more we spoke about it, the more they asked me about it, the more I thought about it, the more excited I got about it myself. But I think ultimately, what did we really get excited about? You know, in the end, what we got excited about was probably just the PC revolution in the end, that here's the first time a computer was going to be general purpose, and you're going to use it for all kinds of different applications. And if it had computer graphics like what people were seeing with Jurassic Park and Silicon Graphics, and if we could figure out a way to make it affordable and architect something that would fit into a personal computer architecture, you know, maybe there's a company here. I mean, in the end, that was probably just, you know, a simple big idea. Yeah. Almost that was the initial seed of what we were excited about. Everything about the company, you know, that manifested from that point, you know, is really where the great strategies came from, you know. I would say, you know, almost like everything else in life, you start down a journey and you found new paths from it, but that initial step on the trail, you know, whatever the inspiration was that took us there, it was a good idea. It was a good idea. We expanded, you know, it was good that we expanded the idea.
But I mean, at the time there were like 60 companies trying to do this, right? And so clearly you had confidence in these guys, and you knew they were smart, but you know, you're 29, 30, and you got this great job and a couple of kids, and so you took the leap obviously to start this company with them. But what do you remember? I mean, imagine your wife was supportive. She said, 'Go for it.' Yeah. So was there any part of you, do you remember any part of you thinking, 'God, what if this doesn't work out?'
No. Yeah, I should have. It didn't really. No, I guess you were prepared for whatever would happen. Yeah. And whatever the consequences. Yeah. You get another job. What's the worst case? Get another job. I think the... No, it never once crossed my mind that it wouldn't work out. You know, once we... you know, it's kind of a weird thing, once an idea manifests and you think about it and you imagine it and you obsess about it, before you know it, it becomes a reality that is as real as anything else. Yeah. And maybe that's what's called vision. Maybe that's where determination comes from. But Nvidia manifested in my mind, and an industry manifested in my mind that was so crystal clear. I never once did it cross my mind it wouldn't work out. You know, of course, you know, it didn't work out, but...
Well, it didn't, right? So Nvidia is the company, which I guess comes from the Latin word envy, Nvidia. And you guys start working on the first product, which is going to be a revolutionary graphics processing chip that is going to make... We were the first 3D graphics company in the world that started with the idea that we bring 3D graphics to consumers. Yeah. Yeah. So that being said, 1993, it's founded, and you start to work on this product, and you guys raise a little bit of money. Yeah. To do it, and this is going to be a game changer, right? I mean, this is going to be like the coolest thing.
Yeah, we thought so. Yeah, we thought so. The technology that we created allowed us to generate images, but using a lot less electronics, a lot fewer chips, and a lot more affordable than these giant supercomputers that Silicon Graphics was making at the time. You know, at the time, the computer that generated the images for Jurassic Park would cost, you know, a million dollars at the time. And we needed to get something to fit into about 300 bucks. And so, right. And so that leap, that transformation, and yet generate beautiful images, that gap was so large that we had to reinvent the algorithms altogether. And it turned out the algorithms that we invented, you know, were just flawed.
I mean, it sold well initially. I think there's a lot of excitement about it. Well, we sold... Yeah, people got very excited about it. This is the NV1. Yeah. Yeah. We sold 250,000. I now, you know, I believe we could sell 250,000 of almost anything, but we sold 250,000 of them, but the algorithm didn't really work. And so we received 250,000 back. I mean, it all came back. I mean, it was not just our lesson, it was a disaster.
Yeah. It was a... it was a... it was a... it was probably a technology disaster, as great a technology disaster ever seen. You know, I think the right architecture, the right algorithm is inverse texture mapping. Ours was called forward texture mapping. We chose some approaches that were just fundamentally wrong.
I've read that that understandably created a lot of tension with you and your co-founders because it was two and a half years of work, and it looked like... And from what I also understand, all the architecture that you created for the next NV2 and NV3 was based on NV1. On NV1. And so, you know, this was... imagine, I mean, do you remember the three of you just going at it?
Yeah. Well, the argument was pretty stressful because we had a contract with a company called Sega, the video game company, and they contracted us for $12 million in 1995, 1994. And they were guaranteed to buy the NV2 and the NV3. Yeah. To use it for our game console, the Sega game console. And so we were contracted to do that on the one hand. On the other hand, at this point, there were probably 20, 30 3D graphics companies, and they were all doing it the right way, and we're the only one doing it this weird way. And Microsoft is about to announce Windows 95, and Windows 95 has an API called DirectX, and DirectX does it the right way, as it should. And we were doing it the wrong way, and we were incompatible with DirectX. But nonetheless, there were 30 graphics companies already, and we had invested two and a half years. And so the question is, how do we deal with this contract, which they can't... they were to cancel, probably. Well, at the time, they weren't cancelling at the time, but how do I deal with this contract? If we cancel the contract, how does the company stay alive? And if we don't cancel the contract, you know, the company doesn't go out of business. And as the company doesn't go out of business, we'll figure out the next strategy when the time comes. Right. And so there's the argument of, let's not cancel the contract, let's keep on going. Then of course there's the argument the contract is based on an architecture that is fundamentally flawed, right? And so why finish something the wrong way? And it would have burnt another two years, and in two years' time, those 30 other companies were so far ahead of us doing it the right way, we'll never catch up. And so this was the dilemma. And if we decide to change the architecture, we've got to go cancel the contract because the contract says we did it this way, right? And so I went to Japan, and I contacted the CEO, the Sega... Sega, his name is Madri, and I told him the whole story. I said, 'Look, you know, at the time when we signed up the contract, this was what we thought was going to be the best architecture, but with everything that's happened, I don't think this is going to be the best for you. My recommendation for you is that Sega finds another partner to build the 3D graphics system for their next game console.' That's my first recommendation. My second is an ask. I have a request, however, that even though we're not finishing the contract, I still needed the money. And because if we didn't have the money, the company would be out of business. And I really believe the company deserves to succeed and get a chance to go realize its future. And so I asked him if he would convert the rest of the contract to an investment in our company. And he says, 'But Jensen, you know, your company has 30 competitors. You're most likely going to go out of business. I don't even know what your business plan is.' And I'm like, 'I tell you, I'm not sure what my business plan is, but my first job as a CEO is to make sure we don't go out of business. And we got to get the technology on the right track. And if you could help me with this, I think we'll figure out a way. And I think it's going to be a great investment.' Anyways, I was just... I was 32 years old, I guess. And Eric Margerie said, 'I'll call you back.' He talked to his board, and they turned the rest of the $5 million of investment or contract into an investment in our company. I took that $5 million. We came back, and I was incredibly grateful. Came back, and here we are. The company was a little bit too big. I had to cut it back in half. You're like around 250 people or something. Yeah, almost. Yeah. And so I cut it back to... because you would hire all these people anticipating NV1, NV2, NV3. Those were going to be successful, right? And we're going to get all these Sega games, all these game console games into the PC industry. So anyways, I laid off two-thirds of the company, and it was incredibly hard to do. So that was the first thing. The second is we didn't really know how to build things the right way. And so I said, 'How hard could it be? If 30 other companies could do it, why can't we do it?' And so I ran down to... there was a store at the time called Fry Electronics. Yeah. And I went to Fry Electronics. I had, I guess, a couple hundred dollars in my pocket. And there was this book called 'How to Program OpenGL.' And it was written by some of the computer engineers at Silicon Graphics. Many of them, well, most of them now work here at Nvidia. And so the authors of those books did a really good job describing how the OpenGL pipeline worked. And so I bought three of those books, came back and gave it to three of our engineers. And they went off to design the chip. And then the next problem I have is that we have $5 million, but by the time that we were done designing the chip, the company would have run out of money before we even tape out the chip to go to fab to see how the silicon worked. And so we would have run out of money before the chip comes back.
And as usual being made in TSMC by this point, you had already started working with TSMC in Taiwan because initially your chips are made in Europe, I think that's right, but the capacity wasn't there, so you had to move it. So this is like around '97, you start to shift production to Taiwan. That's right. Okay. So... and you would run out of money before they were able to produce them.
That's right. And so the problem was back in the old days, you would design the chip, the chip comes back, you would write the software for the chip, fix whatever bugs you found, because without software, you can't fix the chip. And then you would make the chip again, and that would go around a couple times. Yeah. And back in the old days, it would take about a year and a half to two years to design a chip and get it to work and ship into production. Well, we didn't have a year and a half. We had about six months. We were on fumes. You had no choice. You had to do it. The chip had to be right. Which means you couldn't do all of the processes. We couldn't iterate. We couldn't just... Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't prototype. There was no such thing called prototyping. And so... how did you know it was going to work? And so we heard about this company. This company called IOS was building an emulator. And this incredible machine, this giant machine, it would pretend to be your chip. And so you would take all of your software and put it into this machine. And this machine would pretend to be the chip, and you would plug this machine into a PC and run the software, so you could see how it... so you could see how it would work. Okay. And it was super accurate. Yeah. Well, supposedly. And so I called the company and I said, 'Hey, listen, I heard you guys have this machine called an emulator. I would like to buy one.' And they said, 'Well, that's terrific, but unfortunately, we had no customer, so we're going out of business, but we have this one that's left over. If you want, you could buy it out of the creditor who now owns it.' And so we did. We bought this leftover piece of machinery from this company that ultimately went out of business. And I took half of our company's money. So we were already running on fumes. And so I cut that life short even further. Took that money, bought this machine that nobody else wanted to buy, brought it to the company. I said, 'Here we are. We've got to put Nvidia's chip, NV3, Riva 128, into this machine.' Anybody say this is crazy? I mean, this is nuts. You're taking half the money buying... I mean, you're the CEO. We don't even have... that was the money we had was already not enough, and we took half of that and spent it. But these engineers who are used to a process, right, and used to a way of doing things, you're basically saying, 'We're going to put it in the emulator, and that's going to be it, and then we're going to fabrication.' I mean, did anybody say this is not a good idea? It was the only idea we had. I got to tell you, I don't remember, it's been 30 years ago, so I don't remember anybody objecting to it. But I also didn't remember asking too many people whether they objected to it. You know, I think smart engineers reason about things. I don't think anybody ever thought it was... I guess we always knew it was existential. We always knew we were going out of business, but I just don't remember every day talking about it. I just remember us being super calm, super focused, and we just step by step by step reasoned that it was the only chance for us to be...
You're — this is sort of, I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but I think it's true. You were known to say at that time, 'Our company's 30 days away from going out of business.' And it kind of became a meme and a mantra for a while, but it was true. I mean, you were — so this had to work.
And I'm not revealing any secrets. It did work. It did actually work.
Good enough to save the company.
Yeah, good enough to save the company, right? To say, 'All right, now we've got something to build on.'
I know I want to just pivot for a second because, you know, here you are, you're still a young guy at this point, you know, in your late 30s, mid-late 30s, running a company. It's the first time you are the CEO of a company. It's not like you have any management training or you didn't go to business school, which is very normal, right? And you kind of had to teach yourself because you had a reputation for being like a hard ass, yelling at people, demanding excellence and really just tearing into people when you feel like they didn't do great work. But I read that you stumbled upon this book by Christian Clayton.
Uh, Clay Christensen, forgive me, he's no longer alive. A Harvard Business School professor, called The Innovator's Dilemma.
Yeah.
A very important book, and it had a huge impact on you. Like, you read this book because he has this example of like Honda. They were making motor scooters for kids and no one was paying attention to them. And so when they started making cars, they had this advantage because they could really scale quickly and get out there. And you read this book and you were inspired by it. What do you remember about that book that you thought, 'That's it, this is the thing that I need to think about'?
Um, the — it's, it's, um, uh, the single most important thing about technology is, is, uh, the moment it becomes good enough, when you overserve the market, uh, you're ready for disruption. And so, so, um, in fact, at the Nvidia journey, every single step of the way, um, we were always the disruptor. So I think the — I mean, the large lesson of Clay Christensen is really about disruption and how technology emerges, um, out of thin air that apparently looks like toys but went off to disrupt large markets. Uh, if you looked at Nvidia's RIVA 128, uh, the quality of it was okay, but it was good enough that it disrupted an entire market. Um, if you looked at Nvidia's first, uh, GPU that was designed for high-performance computing, it was not perfect, but it was good enough. And so example after example after example, the way that we went off to revolutionize large industries initially looks a little toyish, um, and, um, uh, but the outcome has always been the same. And so —
In 1997, right, or 1998, um, if we went back to that time and I saw you, would you have thought of what Nvidia was doing as building products for gamers, that that was your audience that you were serving and that was the business that you were in — video games? I mean, you weren't making them, but that's what you were enabling.
Yeah. Uh, in 1998, um, Nvidia did a lot. Okay, so anyway, we saved the company, that was good. Um, we learned a lot about strategy. We made a lot of great strategic decisions from the very, very beginning. We realized that, um, Nvidia's way of doing computing, that computer graphics field as a metaphor for all of computing — the way we went about doing it, designing the chip, creating an architecture, recognizing the importance of application developers or game developers so that we can help them realize the full potential of our chip while we make their application as wonderful as possible. So the way we saw the world, that the chip is important, but ultimately what makes people happy and what really creates industries is the applications that were on top of the chips that make new things possible. And so we were always worried about software. We were always concerned about the downstream application industry. What were the applications that would define a new industry?
We were thoughtful then. I mean, we —
But I mean, in 1999 you wouldn't know that —
We were dumb about a lot of things. We were smart about some really important things.
But you had this sort of insight that there was something there, right? But your business was still serving the gaming industry, right? Like you were —
We were 100% focused on the gaming industry. We were the first computer graphics company ever created to focus on one application industry fully, which was video games.
So I want to kind of jump ahead for a moment because I know that there were some games like Quake, which was, I think, Quake, right? This is the first-person shooter game, which is kind of a big —
Changed every shift in video game graphics.
And you guys were powering that game. Um, but again, like, you know, this was still primarily about video games. And I guess — and I don't know if this is the exact story — but there's a guy at Stanford, um, Ian Buck, and he basically buys a bunch of Nvidia GPUs and he wires up — he basically creates a way to play Quake in 8K. This is in like 2001 or 2002 or maybe around then. Um, which is a different way of using these GPUs, right? It was something unusual, a different use case. Um, when that came to your attention, did that sort of strike you as a turning point, or what did you think about that?
Well, I didn't really know Ian until he was an intern at Nvidia. Um, during that time, before that time, our journey was, um, and ultimately what led my interest, you know, which is obviously independent of his interest and, um, uh, many, many others. Uh, during that time there were all kinds of different processors being created. There was the IBM cell processor. There were streaming processors of all kinds. Um, and, um, uh, people were trying to come up with new ways of doing computation. And then we realized that computer graphics, if it was just beautiful but the world was static, it was hard to create beautiful and immersive worlds. And so you really need to find a way to bring physics into that virtual world so that, you know, waters would flow and, you know, leaves would blow in the wind and explosions would look like explosions. And so we would try to use the processor, which was incredibly parallel already, to express fluid dynamics and particle physics and, you know, the types of algorithms that represent real-time physics today. And so that was really the beginning of our journey down that world of general-purpose programmability. Meanwhile, scientists around the world noticed that Nvidia's processors were super powerful.
Because you were thinking, okay, this could be used by game designers, maybe in the film industry, which it eventually would be, but still it was like you were thinking beyond people playing video games on their consoles or on their PCs.
We would use it for fluid dynamics and image processing and particle physics. And one of the areas that really caught my eye was the whole field of inverse physics or imaging. And, uh, two doctors — one of them just reached out to me just recently — two doctors at Mass General were using our graphics chips to do CT reconstruction. And so that really caught my eye. Meanwhile, of course, uh, Ian and the computer science department here at Stanford were experimenting with using Nvidia GPUs for other types of parallel processing algorithms. Uh, but I didn't know Ian until he became an intern at Nvidia.
So he comes in and you begin this project that would become known as CUDA.
Right. And this would become a hugely vital part of what you would eventually create. But this is like —
2005, 2004-ish time frame when you start to think about building this —
this architecture. So let's kind of jump into this for a bit because CUDA would be launched in late 2006, right? And so essentially, just to sort of describe this in very basic terms, you were pouring money into creating these GPUs that had dual use purpose, like a dual purpose, right? You could essentially flip a switch and it could do a lot of things.
But most people were still buying them to play video games. And so you were basically making these really expensive — I mean, you couldn't sell them, you had to keep the prices competitive, but you were pouring money into this project that didn't seem to resonate. I mean, it comes out and it's exciting, but people didn't really think much of it, I guess.
So I think you just go back to the inspiration that we had at the time, that, you know, it was as simple as wanting to create virtual worlds that were immersive and physical in nature, and that we also realized that it could be used for a whole bunch of other types of general-purpose computation, parallel computing. Image processing could be one of them. You know, there's a whole bunch of them. And it turned out seismic processing was the first killer application, CT reconstruction, and, you know, things like that, molecular dynamics. I mean, some of the early experimentation, but none of that paid the bills. Um, most of those applications were in universities and the researchers, you know, didn't buy too many of them to justify it. And so the only thing that really paid the bills was video games.
You understood that the GPU could do something — lots of things — but that we just had not imagined those things yet.
Yeah, we knew of some things, and of course I was always looking for — during that time I was constantly looking for algorithms that required parallel computing. I was always looking for algorithms that somehow only ran on supercomputers, but if we could just figure out a way to bring it into a personal computer, its exposure or its ability to reach more people could be incredible. Constantly looking for things like that.
