I suggest reading Tae Kim’s book on the company. Unless Mr. Kim is lying - and he has no incentive to - NVIDIA is very much an extension of Jensen. His management shaped it to the core. It would survive his ousting, but not unscathed. Comparisons to Jobs & Apple are not unwarranted.

Sure, and Jobs learned that he did not have unconditional power.

And when he left, Apple started circling the drain.

Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio were unmitigated disasters.

Amelio managed to make one of the greatest decisions in the history of American business and buy NeXT to get himself replaced by Jobs. How is that an unmitigated disaster? He could have bought BeOS.

Fair point.

Before that, he was known for spending most of his time, polishing his private plane.

it may turn out that his absense might be vital to the companies future.

He's been behaving like a sugar hyped child over the last 15-20 years imho.

The last 15-20 years, so basically when the company was at its most successful?

wait for it... wait for it...

Can you please elaborate on why? He seemed like a luminary from what little knowledge I have. (Very well spoken, wide domain knowledge, obviously made the right bets, etc.)

Nvidia focused on gaming for 20 years, made a ton of bets that didn't pan out (self-driving cars, set-top boxes, streaming, etc) and made unforced errors (Arm acquisition attempt). Nothing hints at him being a visionary beyond wanting to diversify.

Nvidia benefited from the AI boom by being right place, right time. And just yesterday, Mythos ported itself to AMD cards, showing there's no moat.

The ARM acquisition attempt looks better each day now that x86 is zooming into irrelevance and Apple Silicon remains exclusive to Apple products.

It didn't even start with AI, their exorbitant valuations go all the way back to the days of the cryptocurrency mining craze.

But as a counterpoint: AMD is very similar but hasn't benefitted nearly as much. They've been plastering "AI" all over their webpage for years, with little to show for it. So maybe there was something that Nvidia was doing right.

CUDA is what they did right. That and they focused on developers (tooling, support, drivers) outside of gaming long before it was obviously a relevant market. Jensen does deserve a lot of credit.

They didn't just focus on gaming though. They've spent the last two decades making sure they're the obvious choice for scientific and engineering number crunching, by creating and continuing to invest in CUDA. Which is also why they have been an obvious choice for the AI crowd.

They've benefitted from being in the right place, but being there was not (or, not only) luck.

Compare to AMD which did not do that and has not had the same level of benefit from the AI wave despite everyone obviously wanting a competitor to create price pressure.

The AI winter wouldn't have ended without NVidia cards. NVidia didn't benefit from the AI boom, they made it possible. CUDA is the be all and end all of the AI boom.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is welcome to try and get AMD cards working.

That’s an absurd statement considering Nvidia has been pushing CUDA since 2007. I doubt Nvidia was making a “bet” on set-top boxes as the next 100 billion dollar idea. It was simply gaming adjacent which was the main market for GPUs which is their business. Nvidia has maintained their position on GPGPUs potential for 15 years before they paid off. Literally no other company had that vision. If that was an obvious thing, where is Intel, AMD, Samsung, TI, or Qualcomm chips? They only had 15 years. It’s crazy to call it “right place right time” when they have been anticipating it for over 15 years.

Self driving cars are poised to be huge, Nvidia simply didn’t have good execution or plan there because they focused on the hardware rather than data collection. Not sure how the ARM acquisition attempt was an unforced error. Data centers are buying Nvidia GPUs and AMD CPUs. Could have been Nvidia both. It was just in an unfavorable political climate.

CUDA was just not that big of a commitment of resources honestly for a gpu company. It also broke even relatively early in terms of making money because of oil and gas. Jensen personally threatened to axe the entire project multiple times when we nearly failed to meet certain contracts.

I have no insights into internals of Nvidia, but it really doesn’t make sense to me how there is literally no alternatives that are even close to its maturity. I remember in the early days OpenMP and PPL being contenders early on, but I never heard about them after and only CUDA kept going. I was working on a graduate project in 2009 and I remember us looking into OpenMP and CUDA and going with CUDA because we found it easier to use. But also along with CUDA, only Nvidia pushed the whole GPGPU idea and AMD (and Microsoft to some extent) only paid lip service to the concept without any actual commitment like Nvidia did for a long time.

apple has a lot to do with it. Apple drove the early days of opencl, and pulled out some time in ~2012. Ian made a decision to cut opencl support at Nvidia at some point in time after that.

I can't speak to why AMD is so massively incompetent or why they weren't a factor in driving a competitor

> It also broke even relatively early in terms of making money because of oil and gas.

Beg your pardon? what does this mean?

This is circa 2009 or so

https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems3/part-vi-gpu-co...

Is successfully maintaining product leadership in a lucrative consumer category a failure to you?... Their self driving car tech is used in multiple products and clearly represents a future growth area. They've correctly predicted market movements and trends, built or bought up all the pieces needed to offer complete solutions with leading performance.

There would be no AI boom without Nvidia, their cards were instrumental to making it possible, that's why they're so dominant.

was arm a bad move in retrospect?

Because that's not how organizations work. Especially not organizations made up of MSc's and PhD's, each with specialized knowledge that the CEO has no clue about. It's a myth that the person with the most power is also the most important.

Instead of asking for elaboration ask yourself why you believe that the success of companies hinges on the qualifications of their CEOs? To the best of my knowledge no one has ever shown any correlation between CEO "quality" and company performance for a publicly traded company.

I guess we'll find out