Jensen Huang, the 60-year-old founder and president of Nvidia, recently shared three mantras that helped them cross $1 trillion market cap to become the world's most valuable listed semiconductor company. Addressing graduating students of National Taiwan University, Huang shared that Nvidia's resilience and future-thinking have made it a success in spite of the company reaching the brink of dying three times in 30 years.
1.) Sega and 3D chips
"At Nvidia, I experienced failures -- great big ones. All humiliating and embarrassing. Many nearly doomed us," Huang said.
The first involved a key early contract the company won to help Sega get 3D chips for its new gaming console. Rapid changes in the industry forced Nvidia to give up the contract in a near-death brush with bankruptcy, which Sega’s leadership helped avert.
“Confronting our mistake and, with humility, asking for help saved Nvidia,” Huang added.
2.) Expensive long-term investment
Nvidia's second brush with death was in 2007 when the company decided to put CUDA into all its GPUs, enabling them to crunch data in addition to handling 3D graphics. It was an expensive, long-term investment that drew much criticism didn’t pay off for years until the chips started being used for machine learning.
“Our market cap hovered just above a billion dollars,” Jensen Huang recalled. “We suffered many years of poor performance. Our shareholders were skeptical of CUDA and preferred we improve profitability.”
3.) Charging into mobile phone market
The third instance was the decision in 2010 to charge into the promising mobile-phone market as graphics-rich capabilities were coming into reach. The market quickly commoditized, though, and Nvidia retreated just as quickly, taking initial heat but opening the door to investing in promising new markets — robotics and self-driving cars.
“Our strategic retreat paid off,” Huang said. “By leaving the phone market, we opened our minds to invent a new one.”
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