The whole ARM acquisition attempt really smelt of subtle stock market games, because the alleged benefits of such a deal made no sense. With the Arm CEO being ex Nvidia I'm sure he was in on it. Looking forward to someone writing up an account of what really happened.

I think that the blocking of the deal by competition authorities shows the potential benefits of the deal (for Nvidia) in having control of Arm, in addition to making Arm-based SoCs, were real.

Also, Rene Haas (ex Nvidia) became CEO of Arm after the deal fell through. Simon Segars was CEO when the deal was announced.

> I think that the blocking of the deal by competition authorities shows the potential benefits of the deal (for Nvidia) in having control of Arm, in addition to making Arm-based SoCs, were real.

China was concerned about more US influence. The other regions were concerned about stifling of innovation. In reality, a successful acquisition would have meant that most customers would have started transitioning away from ARM and sooner to available RISC-V or Cadence/Synopsis solutions.

> Also, Rene Haas (ex Nvidia) became CEO of Arm after the deal fell through. Simon Segars was CEO when the deal was announced.

Rene Haas was EVP of the whole IP business (CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, etc) before becoming CEO. His influence with the CEO can't be understated.

I posit that this was an enormous gamble to boost valuations of both NVIDIA and ARM and that they knew from the beginning that the deal would not go through. Anyone who understands the ARM business model could have told you that.

> I posit that this was an enormous gamble to boost valuations of both NVIDIA and ARM and that they knew from the beginning that the deal would not go through.

You posit it without saying why the valuations would go up given that you think they - and everyone else given what you say - thought the deal wouldn’t complete.

Does it mention the investment from sega that saved Nvidia from going out of business. I think the Nvidia chips became part of some sega arcade boards, might be wrong about that.

That's at the beginning of the book, and it was apparently something of a debacle. The NV2 chip that was supposed to go into Sega's next-gen console never made it, but a $5M investment from Sega did keep Nvidia afloat until the Riva128 launched.

Despite buying a Dreamcast on launch day I only heard about this story in the last week or so ago in a YouTube comment with Jensen Huang congratulating sega on the new virtua fighter. Unfortunately he keeps calling it virtual fighter:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9NCp1BdWJG0&pp=ygUcSmVuc2VuIEh...

Yeah, it was a good book. I got an extremely heavy dose of nostalgia from its description of the late-90s Voodoo2/Riva128 era.

It was such a fast-moving era, too. Check this out: https://www.anandtech.com/show/178/2

A card released in September 1997 is described as "an aging and slowly dying chipset." I suppose it parallels AI today, where a model released a year ago is already obsolete on the high end...

I recall being on roughly a 6 month upgrade cycle for my pc back then. Alternating between cpu/mobo/mem and gpu.

One of the reasons why Nvidia managed to get ahead was that they managed to get a new chip out every 6 months without fail, so there was always a new Nvidia card to upgrade to.

Relevant context: In July of 1998.

Nostalgia for the 1990s is real. I loved that era. PC gaming was awesome. I bought tons of 3D graphics cards from Rendition Verite, 3dfx Voodoo and obviously Nvidia. Having John Carmack tweet about my book nearly made me faint (surreal!). I adored his Doom and Quake games so much.

I'll go one further - operations, marketing, sales, and culture _are_ what makes a successful business. Superior technology is a bonus on top of that.

Superior technology in a company that hasn't figured out how to operate, or market and sell may as well not even exist.

You missed Finance. There is lot of financial engineering going on to keep orgs alive and quickly adapt to ever changing needs. Dealing with cross border diff in taxes, subsidies, tariffs, regs, forex, interest rates, real estate/rent, labor costs and their constant changes is no joke.

Each of these specializations (just like tech) are evolving at their own rates and are all equally capable of outpacing each other depending on the environment.

And, god forbid, meta-issues like long-term cashflow planning when you're making big changes to your internal organizations and processes, which lets you worry less about funding. And/but investing in complex thinking about operations is part of the book's thesis.

I didn't. In my worldview, I put Finance as the majority stakeholder in "operating" the company even though there are plenty of teams and roles with somethingOps in their titles that might disagree.

The tech part of tech companies is the easy part in my opinion. Step out into these other domains where you have to deal with _people_ and a company's skill or lack thereof gets really obvious really quick.

You mean, like… Intel these past few years?

I'm very glad I read the book, but it did lean a little towards the hagiographic side. From the outside it looks like the same high-pressure culture that drives so much innovation at Nvidia also drove their conflict with Apple.

+1 with your assessment of trending towards a hagiography. The author is not Isaacson. I wish he had spent more time with the people that probably don’t have the best view of Huang’s methods, and approach to running the company. Showing the other side in a more vivid way so the reader can make their own conclusion would strengthen the book and provide a holistic, fuller profile of Huang and Nvidia. Probably the price for access, and still better than nothing…

Nvidia appears to be another pressure-cooker, dog-eat-dog SV company, that outlasted competitors thanks to shrewd bets and urgent execution. Clearly, a great accomplishment, but we’ve seen other companies succeed with similar culture… this isn’t a “new way”… a relentless, obsessive, ruthless technical founder with good business sense (Huang like Gates were able to secure partnerships/licenses of needed technology early on.. same mold as Musk, Zuck) who understands the technology and business implications in detail is a movie we’ve seen before..

I sigh a little whenever anyone mentions Isaacson. My book had a different goal. I wanted to write a serious, substantive business history of Nvidia and explore the reasons for its success. Walt has a different style and focus, which wasn't what I aimed to do.

Thanks for the kind words swimwiththebeat. I really appreciate it. I didn't get to the ARM acquisition failure and crypto boom given time constraints. There is so much to cover in Nvidia's three decade history, so I had to pick and choose.