Nvidia's Unique History and Culture
An interview with Tae Kim, author of the "Nvidia Way"
I am excited to present an interview with Tae Kim, author of the ”Nvidia Way”. A new book coming out on Tuesday Dec 10th in the US. I really enjoyed this book. You got to read it. It goes by fast and is hands-down the best history on Nvidia’s rise and its astounding culture.
I lightly edited some of the conversation to remove filler words. Other than that it’s pretty much as I remember it.
Jon:
Welcome to the show. I actually don't do a lot of these interviews, but I'm excited to make an exception. So welcome to the show Tae Kim. How are you doing?
Tae Kim:
Good, good. Jon, thanks so much for having me. I'm so happy to be here.
Jon:
Yeah. You have a very interesting book. And I just ripped through it. It was very fun. How did it get started and kind of what's the story behind it?
Tae Kim:
I’ve been following NVIDIA for my whole life. From the 1990s, I was a PC gamer, building my own gaming PCs, and I’ve been following it. When I was on Wall Street, I invested in it at a hedge fund, so I’ve known NVIDIA from the early days. For the last 10 years, I’ve been in media—Yahoo Finance, CNBC, Barron’s, and Bloomberg Opinion—so I’ve been following it as a journalist also. I got an email in May of 2023. It was a cold email from an editor at Norton, and he said Matthew Ball, who wrote the famous Metaverse book, said that I could do a book on NVIDIA. Would I be interested in that? The first thing I did was ask, what’s Norton? I didn’t know Norton, and they’re actually a very well-regarded publishing house making books for Nobel Prize-winning academics and Ben Bernanke. The people in the newsroom were like, yeah, Norton’s a really big deal.
The second thing I did was go to Amazon. I said, there’s no way no one has written a book on NVIDIA. It’s the biggest chip designer by market cap in history. Every internet company in the world has multiple books on Amazon—Facebook, Apple, every major tech company. There was no book. I couldn’t believe it. No book on NVIDIA. I’ve been buying their graphics cards for 30 years. I know the business side, the finance side, and the technology side. I’ve been in media for 10 years. I thought, I can do this. I can write this book.
I had a meeting with the editor at Bryant Park, and within weeks, I had a book deal. It went by so fast, and I was off and running.
Jon:
It’s kind of crazy, right? You talked a little about how Jensen reluctantly somewhat agreed to the book. Did he say anything? Has he read it yet?
Tae Kim:
No, he hasn’t read it yet. I’m sure they’ll read it in a few days. I’ve known Jensen from the beginning. I met him 20 or 30 years ago when he was raising capital with Morgan Stanley on the secondary. He probably doesn’t remember me. I talked to him a little bit. He’s a very intense person and takes things personally. I wrote negatively about NVIDIA during the whole crypto boom, so I’m sure that’s in the back of his mind.
For the first few months, I’ve had a good relationship with the company. They let me talk to the CFO every quarter. But when I told them I was writing this book, they were very noncommittal at first. They were like, “Well, we’re not so sure.” So I just went to work and started interviewing all the early NVIDIA employees and senior management. Surprisingly, they were ecstatic to talk to me. They said, “NVIDIA is such a great company. I had such a great experience there. There are all these amazing stories, and no one has told the story. It’s great that someone’s writing a book on it.”
After six or eight calls, word got back to NVIDIA that I was being very serious and substantive about it. They decided to cooperate. They gave me access to their senior management team and helped facilitate interviews with co-founders, which was fantastic. It worked out really well in the end.
Jon:
I did a video about NVIDIA a long time ago during their graphics card rise. This is so much more detailed than what I could have done at that time. There was so little information. It is very strange. A lot of that stuff would almost be lost to the sands of time otherwise.
Tae Kim:
Yeah, it was really difficult the first 10 years because the internet didn’t really take off until the early 2000s. There were websites in the late ’90s, but many have disappeared. There’s some material in internet archives, but it was really hard to even find press releases.
That was difficult, but I got the entire senior management from the first 10 years to talk to me because they were so happy to share their stories. It was an honor to compile all this computer history. I’m a big fan of early computers, business history, and strategy, and being able to talk to the co-founders of 3dfx was incredible. I don’t know if you were into PC gaming back then, but they were the dominant graphics card company for several years. It’s amazing that NVIDIA was able to overtake them. Talking to the 3dfx co-founders about why they faltered was so cool.
Jon:
Yeah, it’s actually one of the things I really appreciate about the book. You get to see the other side—from the competitors competing with NVIDIA. That’s very unique. I don’t see that often, and it’s very thorough here.
Tae Kim:
They’re very honest about how they lost. They got too fixated on features instead of the schedule. They wanted to make the perfect chip. Jensen was the exact opposite—he made the schedule the feature. They aligned with PC makers and how they buy chips, reducing the cycle from 18 months to six months. It was such a genius strategy. They’re doing the same thing now with AI GPUs, going from a two-year to a one-year cycle.
Think about AMD trying to compete with this—accelerating product cycles makes it incredibly difficult to keep up. That’s exactly what happened to 3dfx, Matrox, and dozens of other graphics companies like S3. They just couldn’t compete with NVIDIA’s relentless execution.
Jon:
Did you feel like there were opportunities where other competitors could have done, to sort of beat Nvidia back in video or sort of kind of like, defeat them? Because there were such times that they stumble, right?
Tae Kim:
The two major competitors, I would say, were 3dfx, and 3dfx had really good engineering and made two great graphics cards, but they couldn’t handle the 2D side, which is ironic because that’s the easier part. You need both 3D and 2D, and they couldn’t manage the 2D. Then they made a terrible strategic decision by buying STB Systems, which was 3dfx’s biggest board partner.
When they bought STB, it became hard to manage. Board partners buy graphics chips, put them on cards, and sell them to PC makers and consumers. But when 3dfx bought STB, they wanted to become the brand and couldn’t handle the inventory. It was a complete debacle. Inventory piled up, and they couldn’t manage the supply chain.
And obviously, all the other board makers competing with STB decided to switch to NVIDIA.This actually helped NVIDIA because it gained all the board partners that left 3dfx. That critical mistake directly led to 3dfx’s bankruptcy, as they couldn’t manage supply chain and inventory effectively.
Jon:
You mentioned a second competitor
Tae Kim:
The other big competitor was ATI, and it’s kind of funny how it’s connected to 3dfx. Jensen told me that one reason they messed up after acquiring 3dfx was the NV30, the infamous “leaf blower” chip—bloated, overheating, and requiring super loud fans. Jensen said the NV30 was a disaster because they hired 100 3dfx engineers at the same time, and it was hard to integrate them. The NVIDIA team and the 3dfx engineers didn’t communicate well, and they didn’t work closely with game developers. They skipped features that were really important to game developers, leading to significant communication and cultural issues.
On top of that, NVIDIA had legal disputes with Microsoft, and Microsoft withheld the DirectX 9 tech specs. This forced NVIDIA to design the NV30 essentially blind, which was a complete disaster. Meanwhile, ATI bought ArtX, the team that made the GameCube chips. They were skilled at designing graphics chips and created the R300, which outperformed the NV30 in every way. It delivered better framerates, was faster, quieter, and sold at the same price.
Dierks, who heads software engineering at NVIDIA, told me this was a critical moment. If ATI had been more ruthless on the business side, they could have bankrupted NVIDIA. The R300, particularly the Radeon 9700, had higher margins, and ATI could have cut prices, which would have crushed NVIDIA, as NVIDIA was barely making money selling the NV30 at $399. Dierks said that if Jensen had been running ATI, he would have bankrupted NVIDIA because he would have known exactly what to do.
There were so many near-death experiences like this for NVIDIA, and Jensen’s resourcefulness was key to their survival. In 1998, they were literally weeks away from running out of cash.
They had this manufacturing problem with TSMC. Intel was breathing down their neck, and Jensen was able to convince their three board partners to give them money. He said, “Our technology is good. We’ll give you 10 percent off the IPO when we eventually IPO. Just give us some money now.” He was able to pull that together in weeks. The CFO admitted this was all Jensen, not him.
Another big instance was when they had their first couple of chip disasters. Their first two chips were complete failures, yet Jensen kept raising money. Their third chip, the Riva 128, had a critical fault. Curtis Priem, one of the three co-founders, explained they didn’t have the ability to make a really good VGA core, which was a big problem. Doom was the biggest game of the day, and even though it wasn’t a 3D graphics game, people still played Doom and Doom 2, so you needed a solid 2D VGA core. NVIDIA didn’t have it, nor did they have anyone who could make one.
Jensen somehow licensed a 2D core from one of their main competitors, Weitek. After securing the license, he hired their top VGA expert, Gopal Solanki, who became critical. At a point where the company was about to die, Jensen found a way—convincing someone to give them money, a license, or a solution. This happened repeatedly.
Jensen is relentless, especially in recruiting. People say no to him again and again, but he keeps pursuing them until they agree. He’s constantly learning. One of the three pillars of the NVIDIA way is insane work ethic. People work like crazy. There’s also talent cultivation and speed and velocity. We’ve discussed speed and velocity, but talent cultivation is equally important.
For example, when Jensen was talking to Scott Sellers, co-founder of 3dfx, he was already trying to recruit him before 3dfx even started. He asked, “Who’s really good that you’ve worked with? Who are the rock stars?” Sellers mentioned Dwight Diercks, who Jensen eventually hired. Jensen constantly gathers knowledge and uses it later.
Jensen is the reason NVIDIA has survived in this brutal industry, where nearly every other company either went bankrupt or got acquired. Out of 80 to 100 companies making graphics chips, NVIDIA is the lone survivor.
Jon:
You talked a little bit about Intel. And I actually tweeted about the Intel thing. They had to kill Intel. Kill Intel. What, what was, what was that? What went on with that?
Tae Kim:
Intel, the big Goliath, was 860 times larger than NVIDIA in revenue at the time. As the chip king, they noticed NVIDIA making money with the Riva 128 and gaining traction. Intel decided to act like the dominant player, essentially saying, “We’re going to snuff them out.” They told PC makers, “We’re coming out with the i740. It will have better image quality, it will be faster, and it will be great. Why are you buying chips from NVIDIA? Just wait and buy ours when it comes out in February or March of ’98.”
This completely destroyed NVIDIA’s pipeline. PC makers hesitated, thinking Intel might offer something better. Jensen was alarmed and realized the situation was dire. At a company meeting, he famously said, “We’re always 30 days away from going out of business.” This time it was true. He told employees, “Intel is out to get us. They’re out to kill us, and we have to acknowledge that and fight back. We have to kill Intel.”
That might sound superficial, but the employees really took it to heart. One of the unsung heroes of the book, Caroline Landry, who was almost like a moral compass for NVIDIA in their early years, remembers feeling invigorated and riled up after Jensen’s speech. She started working even longer hours than she already was—past midnight, all weekends, waking up at 4 or 5 in the morning. Even though she wanted to go back to sleep, she’d tell herself, “No, we must kill Intel,” and head back to work to help make the next chip better.
When Intel’s i740 finally came out, it wasn’t that great and faded into oblivion. This was a common tactic in the computer industry, though. Microsoft did something similar in the ’80s—it’s called FUD: Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, and Vaporware. If a third-party software company launched a great product, Microsoft would announce a similar product and say, “Why are you buying this?” It would kill the sales of that third-party product. Jensen was able to recognize this tactic and figure out how to rally his employees to respond and do better. He’s done this throughout NVIDIA’s history.
Jon:
You also mentioned CUDA. I found that really interesting because when I did my video, I barely mentioned it. You gave so much more depth. What sort of direction did they have when they were making CUDA? What drove its adoption?
Tae Kim:
CUDA is such an amazing story because it took so long to take off. It’s obvious now that it’s a huge part of NVIDIA’s moat and the reason they’re doing so well, but back in 2006, it wasn’t obvious. It was a huge expense, a massive R&D cost. They dedicated a significant part of the chip die to it, which made it expensive and hurt their gross margins.
Early on, it was just a concept—a parallel computing platform and ecosystem. It was Jensen thinking about the future and where the computing industry would go. He believed performance computing would eventually move to parallel computing devices like GPUs that could split workloads across thousands, and later tens of thousands, of cores, compared to CPUs that typically ran serially with only four to eight cores. He knew that as computing became more data-intensive, accelerated computing would win out.
For the first few years, CUDA didn’t generate any significant revenue. Some scientists used it for simulations, weather prediction, or molecular biology analysis, but it wasn’t bringing in big money. Internally, some people thought it was a waste of time, and Wall Street was pressuring him to cut it. Even in 2011, six or seven years in, it wasn’t a major revenue driver. But Jensen kept pushing.
Eventually, it started gaining traction for high-end engineering and scientific simulations. It was a slow grind, but Jensen never gave up. The real breakthrough came when AI started taking off—about three years ago. Even then, it didn’t fully explode until a couple of quarters after ChatGPT came out. That kind of long-term thinking is similar to Reed Hastings at Netflix. Hastings had an intuitive sense that the market would eventually move to video streaming over the internet. He didn’t know exactly when the technology or infrastructure would be ready, but he positioned Netflix to take advantage of the opportunity when it came. Meanwhile, he built the DVD rental business as a bridge.
NVIDIA has done this repeatedly—with 3D graphics, programmable GPUs, CUDA, tensor cores for AI, and full data center solutions with Mellanox. Jensen is always looking five, 10, 15 years ahead. He has an intuitive sense of where the market will go and positions NVIDIA with the best technology, ecosystem, and assets to seize the opportunity when it arises.
Take DLSS, ray tracing—it took 10 years. No other company invests in bleeding-edge R&D like this and successfully commercializes it. There are many examples of companies in history, like Kodak inventing the digital camera but failing to capitalize on it, or Xerox creating the Windows GUI. [NVIDIA, under Jensen, ensures they don’t just innovate but also dominate the markets they create.]
Jon:
You talked in one of the most fascinating parts of the book—the email culture at NVIDIA and the “Top 5 Emails” system. Can you explain what that email culture is like at the company? It seems very distinct
Tae Kim:
It’s called “Top 5 Emails.” This has been around since the beginning. Jensen loves email and is constantly on it. To this day, people who left NVIDIA 20 years ago can email him, and he’ll instantly respond, often within a minute. When Blackberry came out, he was on it constantly.
This system was a way for him to break through the bureaucracy that usually happens in large companies. In most companies, as they grow, managers create status reports, and those reports are cleaned up by layers of management to remove anything negative. By the time the CEO sees it, the report is often useless and doesn’t help steer the company.
At NVIDIA, they started the “Top 5 Emails” system where, every week or two, every employee writes an email to their team, manager, and various distribution lists that Jensen can access. These emails outline the top five things they’re working on or the top five things they’ve observed. It could be a major competitor’s move, a new technology, or a cool AI paper. Everyone knows what their team is working on, and Jensen reads hundreds of these emails every day.
This gives him the pulse of what’s happening across the company. No one can hide whether things are going well or poorly. He knows what people are working on and whether the vision he’s laid out is being executed because he’s constantly reading these emails, often all weekend or on Sunday evenings.
I don’t think other companies do this. In large companies, bureaucracy often filters out bad news because people don’t want it to reach the top and cause trouble. At NVIDIA, there’s a strong emphasis on intellectual honesty. Whether the news is good or bad, you must be honest. If someone hides something and it blows up six months later, that’s considered the worst thing you can do.
There’s a saying at NVIDIA: “No one loses alone.” If you’re falling behind, you need to tell your team, and they’ll help you. It’s one of the Jensenisms at NVIDIA. This “Top 5 Emails” system has been his way of staying informed about what employees are working on for decades.
It’s not one-way communication either. If Jensen reads a Top 5 Email that interests him, he’ll send a quick reply: “What’s this? What are you doing here? Why aren’t you doing it this way?” That’s his management style, and it’s why he has 60 direct reports—something unique in corporate America. Most CEOs have a small group of five or six executives reporting directly to them. Now, for Jensen, because he has this email culture where he can send quick emails very quickly, all day long, and he works more than anyone else, that’s why he can manage 60 people directly.
Jon:
Does he jump, uh, you kind of mentioned this a little bit in passing, but does he jump, um, titles, I guess, does he jump levels, uh, within the company to reach out to people directly?
Tae Kim:
Yes, that’s part of the culture as well. NVIDIA managers tell me that’s just how NVIDIA operates. In most companies, the CEO talks to a manager before engaging with an employee. At NVIDIA, all levels of the company are in the room at the same time, and Jensen loves talking to entry-level and junior employees because they’re often the ones doing the actual work on the ground. He’s constantly peppering them with questions.
NVIDIA managers say, “If you’re an employee under me, it’s fine if you’re talking to Jensen—just let me know what happened after the fact so I know what he’s asking about in my division.” That level of transparency is part of NVIDIA’s culture and avoids siloed mentalities. Jensen is constantly talking to people at all levels of the company.
Jon:
Interesting. What kind of productivity or work practices did you take away after interacting with them?
Tae Kim:
I’ve tried to be more blunt and direct. That’s difficult in a corporate environment, but it really does save time. So much of the workplace involves long meetings, followed by more meetings, and concerns about not upsetting or embarrassing colleagues. Then there are offline meetings and calls, all of which waste time.
If you’re blunt and direct—saying, “I have this issue, and I don’t think we’re going in the right direction”—it saves a lot of effort. I applied this during my book process. It’s better to be straightforward rather than coddling people’s feelings. It works. It gets everyone on the same page, and your colleague will usually align and move in the same direction because people generally want to be effective.
After this process, I feel like I have this “AI Jensen” on my shoulder telling me to be blunt and direct. Two important lessons from the book are: mission is the boss and speed of light.
Mission is the boss means making the right decision for the company and the customer—not what’s good for your boss’s boss. In corporate America, a huge percentage of time—30 to 50 percent—is spent doing things that don’t help the end customer but instead make your boss look good to their boss. Minimizing that and focusing on the mission, not someone’s bonus, is critical.
Speed of light means working with extreme speed and velocity. At most companies, when you do a project, you have KPIs, and you might say, “I did 10 percent better than last time” or “We’re 10 percent better than the competitor.” If you said that at NVIDIA, you’d get dressed down. They don’t care about what you did last time or how you compare to competitors. They care about what’s physically possible. If everything were perfect—no queues, no lag—what’s the absolute limit of physics?
For example, if there’s lag between one factory process and another or inventory issues, NVIDIA asks how to eliminate that lag entirely to the limits of physics. By operating this way, no competitor can match them. If everything is benchmarked to the ultimate possible speed and quality, they’re already operating at the fastest and most productive level.
If you do those two things—mission is the boss and speed of light—you’ll outperform nearly everyone. In large technology companies, there are horror stories. At Google, you need approval from five different stakeholders. At Intel, you might do the same PowerPoint presentation to half a dozen people, and nothing moves forward. At NVIDIA, you do one presentation to Jensen, with everyone relevant in the room, they make a decision, and you go execute. There’s no delay, no indecision paralysis.
Jon:
Is it a presentation or a whiteboard?
Tae Kim:
It’s primarily a whiteboard, right? Jensen loves the whiteboard and hates PowerPoint. At most companies, you go through slides and talk through them. At NVIDIA, they want you to take a marker, go up to the whiteboard, explain everything, and defend every single thing you say. If you propose a product or strategy, you must defend it with data and facts. It’s a very active process, and it’s completely different. I’ve been involved in companies where, as a management consultant, the end product was just PowerPoints. That’s not NVIDIA.
Jon:
You mentioned he likes a specific brand of marker sold in Taiwan. Do you know what it is?
Tae Kim:
I do have a photo of it. I can send it to you afterward. It doesn’t have English on it, so I can’t read the name, but I’ll share the photo.
Jon:
I asked all my friends in Taiwan if they knew the brand or recognized it. They were so confused. Do you have a favorite Jensenism other than the two you mentioned? He’s so quotable.
Tae Kim:
He’s very quotable. One Jensenism I like is: “Second place is the first loser.” I think he took it from the founder of Ferrari. He does not want to be in second place.
This story comes from a marketing manager who came from S3, another graphics chip company. In PC gaming magazines, they rank graphics cards based on benchmarks—naming the best, second-best, and so on. One magazine ranked NVIDIA number two. At his prior company, being number two was fine. The manager showed it to Jensen, and Jensen didn’t like it. He said, “No, we have to win. We have to be number one. Second place is the first loser.” That shows his extreme competitiveness and why he works so hard—he always wants to win.
There’s also a funny story about one of NVIDIA’s CFOs in the early years, Jeffrey Barr, who was ranked in the top 50 chess players in the U.S. earlier in his life. Jensen knew this and wanted to beat him at chess. He studied like crazy, memorizing openings and strategies, and played against him. But Barr could tell what Jensen was doing, so he’d play unpredictably, doing things out of the ordinary. Jensen couldn’t react and got beaten every time.
Jensen couldn’t handle losing. Every time he lost, he’d flip the chessboard over and say, “Jeff, we’re playing ping pong now.” Jensen had been a ping pong champion growing up and was very good at it. He’d play Barr in ping pong and beat him badly, just to feel better. Jensen needs to win—he’s extremely competitive. It shows his character. Even when playing chess with a co-worker, something relatively unimportant, he needed to win.
Jon:
When you talk to other people at NVIDIA, do you feel like you’re speaking to mini Jensens? Do they repeat what he says?
Tae Kim:
There are a couple of people who adore Jensen and want to be like him. For them, it’s a life goal. But beyond that, there’s a wide variety of personality types at NVIDIA. The one consistent thing is the work ethic. People who stay at NVIDIA have an unbelievable work ethic. Those who don’t usually burn out within a few years.
Personality-wise, there’s diversity in how people relate and work, so the company isn’t full of “mini Jensens.” But everyone appreciates his work ethic and the culture at NVIDIA. Many people who leave NVIDIA struggle to adjust at other organizations. It’s hard to be blunt and direct at other companies because people get easily offended. It’s also hard to move fast with decisions because you have to get buy-in from multiple people.
That’s the big takeaway—people often have a tough time working elsewhere after working at NVIDIA.
Jon:
Do you think NVIDIA survives without Jensen?
Tae Kim:
I’ve been asked this a few times. I think it really depends on the CEO who takes over. I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon because Jensen keeps saying he loves NVIDIA, it’s his life, and he loves working. I don’t see him leaving NVIDIA anytime soon. But eventually, someone will take over, and it really depends on who that person is.
Are we going to get a Satya Nadella? Or are we going to get a Steve Ballmer or John Sculley? Every major tech giant’s future depends on the quality of its CEO. It’s hard to speculate on who could fill Jensen’s shoes at this point.
Jon:
What do you think motivates him to keep going? He’s one of the longest-tenured CEOs, and now NVIDIA is one of the biggest companies in the world. What drives him?
Tae Kim:
I think he’s just very competitive, and he loves what he does. He feels he’s having a huge positive impact on the world. He’s super excited about how NVIDIA is enabling digital biology, potentially curing diseases and cancers. I think that drives him.
He’s also extremely proud of what he’s built with his corporate family. He truly sees NVIDIA employees as his family. He’s very hard on himself about the few layoffs NVIDIA has had in its history—he still feels bad about them. But he’s proud of how he’s helped his employees and their families succeed. He knows his work enables them to pay off college educations and support their families financially.I think that pride in helping his employees and their families keeps him motivated.
Jon:
When speaking with him, when you're interviewing, what sort of questions you feel got him most worked up?
Tae Kim:
He didn’t like how the early employees kind of look back at NVIDIA's early years nostalgically. He did not like that. He even joked that he was kind of embarrassed by all the mistakes and mismanagement.
He doesn’t view NVIDIA’s first 10–15 years as a great origin story, even though I think it is. It was strange having to defend those early years to him. I told him, “You grew faster than any other chip company in history, and you’re calling it a mismanaged company.” But that’s part of why he does well—he’s so afraid of becoming overconfident and complacent that he tricks himself into believing, “You suck. You’re terrible. You’re not good enough.”
There’s a story where they had a blowout quarter, and Jensen walked into the room and said, “In the mirror today, I told myself, ‘You suck, Jensen.’” On the flip side, when things are really hard and he’s worried about how to tackle something, he tells himself, “How hard can it be? We’ll figure it out.”
He uses these mental tricks not only on himself but also with others, using catchphrases like “How hard can it be?” It often turns out to be pretty hard, but by convincing himself mentally to avoid both overconfidence and despair, he finds balance. It’s almost like he’s his own personal psychologist.
Jon:
One of my favorite conversations you had was the one with Rick Tsai from TSMC. You mentioned the concept of “rough justice.” Can you explain more about that?
Tae Kim:
That conversation with Rick was one of the coolest things, and we had a nice, long conversation about other stuff too. That’s one of the coolest things about this book—you get access to these major historical figures, and you can ask them questions about everything, and they’re very open.
Rick said that when he was the main contact at TSMC for NVIDIA, he came to meet Jensen pretty often. They went to a mid-level restaurant—not quite Denny’s, but above that. They were having some issues with manufacturing. This was one of the early meetings between Jensen and Rick, and Jensen said, “Let me tell you this, I have this business philosophy of rough justice.”
What that means is sometimes, in any particular deal or interaction, one side might get 60 percent of the benefit, and the other side gets 40 percent. But next time, it might flip, where the other side gets 60 percent, and you get 40 percent. It’s never going to be perfectly 50/50. But if you work together and have a strong, trusted relationship, where over time it balances out to about 50/50, that’s a great partnership.
Rick thought that was really brilliant. He said sometimes TSMC might need to get the better end of an interaction, or NVIDIA might need extra help, like during low yields or other problems. The key was being there for the other partner at different times, and over a few years, it balances out to even. Rick said that’s exactly what happened.
Rick also said this is one of the strongest partnerships in technology history, lasting nearly 25 years. He compared it to a friendship—when your friend is having issues, you’re there for them, and they’ll be there for you when you’re going through problems. That’s how they did business.
Jon:
What things do you think NVIDIA didn’t do that were significant to their success? What missteps did they avoid?
Tae Kim:
They did try to get into mobile chips. There are stories about them trying to get Samsung to use their chips. I don’t know if they ever got the Samsung Galaxy contract, but I don’t think being a supplier, like Qualcomm in smartphones, would have helped them. That’s not really what they do. Their products tend to be high-performance and high-power, not low-power.
It’s kind of funny because NVIDIA is likely to do some AI PC stuff within a year, but mobile wasn’t their strength. It would have diverted focus and management if they had succeeded with Tegra. They didn’t, aside from the Nintendo Switch, which is a very small part of their business.
Jon:
Do you find it’s a challenge now that the company is so different? How does Jensen instill fear and drive when the employees are so successful, with many likely being multimillionaires from NVIDIA stock?
I think he just retains the right people. Many senior employees I’ve talked to have stayed for 15, 20, 25 years. They’ve been wealthy for a long time, yet they still work like crazy. These are people for whom this is their life. They love designing and engineering great products that are changing the world in so many ways, especially now with AI.
We’re not talking about video games anymore. We’re talking about robotics, digital biology, and other technologies that could change the world. Jensen brings in people passionate about the mission. From what I’ve seen, the people I’ve talked to are not slacking off at all. And if you do slack off, Jensen will be all over you. People who do want to slack off retire—many have retired.
Jon:
What do you want readers to take away from the book? What do you want them to think about and reflect on after reading it?
Like I said, the ideas of “mission is the boss” and “speed of light” are more effective ways to work and be productive. I believe that. I also want people to reflect on corporate culture. In many large corporations, the people who become CEOs are nothing like Jensen. They’re schmoozers, MBAs, and finance types. I wish every company would put technically competent people in leadership roles to make decisions, not just marketing or finance professionals.
Finally, NVIDIA’s story shows there are no shortcuts. Jensen talks about how success requires pain and suffering. It’s funny but true. It’s through trials that you learn, pocket those lessons, and improve. I want people to understand that. The internet is full of ads and influencers promoting “get rich quick” schemes. The Jensen story and NVIDIA’s history show you have to work hard, endure pain, and put in effort. Only then do you get the reward.
That’s the main takeaway: no shortcuts—just hard work and perseverance.
Jon:
Thanks. That really stuck with me as well. Tae, thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
Tae Kim:
Jon, thanks so much for having me. It was a blast. Thanks again.