The Nvidia Way

Jensen’s strategic brilliance ensured that competitors would have difficulty breaking into a market that Nvidia had created and which was effectively based on its proprietary hardware and software. Nvidia’s current position—among chip designers and in the national and global economies—seems unassailable. As Amir Salek put it: “The moat is CUDA.”

As Nvidia increased spending on CUDA, the global financial crisis destroyed consumer demand for high-end electronics as well as corporate demand for GPU-powered workstations. The combined pressures caused Nvidia’s stock price to fall by more than 80 percent between October 2007 and November 2008. “CUDA added a ton of cost into our chips,” Jensen ac

former senior executive at a large software company said that he was always struck by how you could talk to multiple Nvidia employees and

The “Era of the GPU” would create so many opportunities that Jensen saw it as his mission to prepare Nvidia to take advantage of it—even if no one could know exactly what those opportunities would be. Everything else, including corporate financial concerns, was entirely secondary.

He gives his employees a high degree of independence over their individual projects, but only if they can keep those projects perfectly aligned with the company’s core objectives. To reduce ambiguity, Jensen spends a great deal of his time communicating with his employees and ensures that everyone at the company knows the overall strategy and visio

Hara meant it, too. John McSorley, Nvidia’s former head of human resources, said that the company had a policy of hiring quickly—but also of firing fast if a new employee wasn’t working out. Jensen’s primary guidance to all of his hiring managers was simple: “Hire someone smarter

“But the reason they could do the famous papers was because they were getting the time on supercomputers,” Walker said. “Other people who had great ideas never got the time and couldn’t make their impact. It wasn’t how good your science was, but it was whether you could get access to computing time.” It was a catch-22: the only way to get supercomp

they would never contradict one another. The message from the top was consistent, and Nvidia staff learned it and made it their own. He drew a contrast with almost every other company he’d ever worked with, whose representatives sometimes argued with each other in front of external clients.

resources across the company, from Jensen to senior engineering staff, may be brought in to solve the issue. “ ‘No one loses alone’ is particularly pertinent in the sales organization,” said Jay Puri, head of global field operations. Referring to the head count on his sales team, he added that “We are so small compared to our competitors that when