I’ve been fortunate to have a front-row seat to the run, including interviews with key Nvidia partners and executives—and co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who essentially willed Nvidia into existence three decades ago. His story has essential lessons for all tech investors and entrepreneurs.

IN ANOTHER LIFE, Jensen Huang might have been a teacher. His preferred medium is the whiteboard: At many of the meetings he attends at Nvidia, where he has been the CEO since he co-founded the company in 1993, he will leap up, his favorite chisel-tip, dry-erase marker in hand, and diagram a problem or sketch out an idea—even if someone else is speaking or whiteboarding themselves at the same time. In fact, he alternates between teacher and student, fostering a collaborative ethos among his employees to develop their thinking and solve the issues they face. His sketches are so precise that they could be turned into usable schematics for technical documents; colleagues call him “Professor Jensen” for his ability to explain complicated concepts on the whiteboard in a way just about anyone can understand.

At Nvidia, the whiteboard is more than the primary form of communication at meetings. It represents both possibility and ephemerality—the belief that a successful idea, no matter how brilliant, must eventually be erased, and a new one must take its place. Every conference room in the company’s two headquarters buildings in Santa Clara, Calif., has a whiteboard, signaling that each day and each meeting is a new opportunity, and that innovation is a necessity, not an option. Whiteboarding also requires active thinking and inevitably reveals how well (or not) any employee, including an executive, knows the material. Employees must demonstrate their thought process in real time, in front of an audience; there’s no hiding behind neatly formatted slides or slick marketing videos.

The whiteboard is perhaps the ultimate symbol of the unique culture at Nvidia—the microchip designer that has grown from humble beginnings in the 1990s, when it was one of dozens of computer graphics chip companies and known mainly by hardcore gamers seeking the best performance for the first-person shooter Quake and other games, into the premiere supplier of advanced processors for our age of artificial intelligence.

The architecture of the company’s processors is well suited for AI workloads because of its ability to perform mathematical calculations simultaneously—essential for training and running advanced large-language AI models. Nvidia’s early recognition of the significance of AI and its forward-thinking investments over the course of more than a decade—including enhancement of hardware capabilities, development of AI software tools, and optimization of networking performance—made the company’s technology platform perfectly positioned to capitalize on and become the primary beneficiary of the current AI wave. AI use cases are now plentiful. Companies are harnessing Nvidia-powered AI servers to boost programmer productivity by generating lower-level code that developers find tedious to write, automating repetitive customer-service tasks, and empowering designers to create and alter images on the basis of text prompts, enabling the faster iteration of ideas.

Nvidia’s reinvention has paid off: On June 18, 2024, the company surpassed Microsoft

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to become the world’s most valuable company, at a market capitalization of $3.3 trillion. It reached that milestone on the back of the immense demand for its AI chips; the company’s stock price had tripled over the previous 12 months.

To call Nvidia’s stock a historically good investment is to understate things. From its initial public offering in early 1999 to the end of 2023, Nvidia investors enjoyed a 33% annualized compounded return, the highest growth rate for any U.S. stock with at least a 20-year trading history. If an investor had purchased $10,000 of Nvidia stock when it made its market debut on Jan. 22, 1999, that stock would have been worth $13.2 million on Dec. 31, 2023.

Nvidia’s culture starts with Jen-Hsun Huang, who is known simply as “Jensen” to his friends, employees, suppliers, competitors, investors, and admirers. (This is how I refer to him throughout the book.) He had already found a modicum of fame before the AI boom, having been named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2021. But as Nvidia’s value reached $1 trillion, then $2 trillion, and then $3 trillion, his profile has grown commensurately. It is now common to see his trademark leather jacket and shock of silver hair, always combed into a simple side part, in articles and video clips, many of which described Jensen as the “genius you’ve never heard of.”

To those of us who have covered the semiconductor industry, Jensen has been a known quantity for some time. He has run Nvidia for its entire three-decade history, the longest tenure of any current technology CEO. He has driven the company not only to survive, but also to surpass all of its competitors in the unforgiving and volatile chip sector, and to surpass just about every other company on Earth, as well.

I have been following Nvidia in a professional capacity for much of my career—first as an equity analyst and now as a journalist—and I have seen how Jensen’s guidance and strategic vision have shaped the company over the years. Even so, my view has remained that of the outside observer, dependent as much on interpretation as on concrete fact. To learn the secrets of Nvidia’s success, I would have to talk with many people, inside and outside the company. I would also have to speak with Jensen himself: to become his student, much like his employees do.

I GOT MY CHANCE JUST four days before Nvidia became the most valuable company in the world. Nvidia knew I was writing a book, and, in early June 2024, a representative offered to arrange a meeting with Jensen to occur immediately after his commencement address to the California Institute of Technology’s graduating class of 2024. I agreed, and a few minutes before 10 a.m. on Friday, June 14, I found myself in front of a stage, waiting for Jensen to appear. It was a perfect California day, clear blue sky and warm sunshine. The students and their families took their seats under a large white tent. David Thompson, the chair of Caltech’s board of trustees, introduced Jensen and joked that the Nvidia CEO had drawn so much attention earlier in the day, as the two made their way around campus, that it felt like he had been walking alongside Elvis.

During his speech, Jensen suggested to the students that their graduation from Caltech would mark one of the peaks of their lives. He mentioned that he knew something about peaks, too. “We are both at the peaks of our career,” he said. “For all of you who have been paying attention to Nvidia and myself, you know what I mean. It’s just that in your case, you’ll have many, many more peaks to go. I just hope that today is not my peak. Not the peak.” He vowed to work as hard as ever to ensure that there would be even more peaks ahead for Nvidia, implying that the new graduates should follow his example.

After Jensen concluded, I was whisked over to the Keck Center for Space Studies and led into a wood-paneled conference room with black-and-white photos of pilots, astronauts, and presidents on the walls, where he was waiting for me. We chatted a bit before I got to my prepared questions. I explained that I was a PC gaming nerd who had been building my own computers since the 1990s. I first encountered Nvidia while researching graphics cards and invariably chose its products. And I mentioned that earlier in my career, at a Wall Street fund, an investment in Nvidia became my first big winner.

“Good for you,” Jensen deadpanned. “Nvidia is my first big winner, too.”

We launched into a wide-ranging discussion of the company’s history. Jensen knows that many of his former employees look back on Nvidia’s beginnings with nostalgia. But he resists overly positive accounts of Nvidia’s start-up period—and his own missteps.

“When we were younger, Tae, we sucked at a lot of things. Nvidia wasn’t a great company on day one. We made it great over 31 years. It didn’t come out great,” he said. “You didn’t build NV1 because you were great. You didn’t build NV2 because you were great,” he said, referring to the company’s first two chip designs, both of which were flops that nearly killed Nvidia. “We survived ourselves. We were our own worst enemy.”

There were several more near-death experiences. But each time, amid the stress and the pressure, the company learned from its mistakes. It retained a core of die-hard employees, many of whom remain in the fold to this day. Of course, there were also people who didn’t stay, requiring the company to integrate new hires. “Every single time, somebody left, and every single time we picked ourselves up. We healed the company into existence,” he said.

He slipped into the third person. “If Jensen wasn’t even involved in the first 15 years of our company, I would really like that,” he laughed, meaning he wasn’t proud of how the company was managed then or of his own naiveté and lack of strategic thinking.

I was put in the unusual position of defending Nvidia’s past to its founder. I pointed out that the early decisions—about which I had learned a great deal by this point in my research process—weren’t all bad ones. While mistakes were made, some of the misfires were tied to factors that were unpredictable or out of his or the company’s control. With hindsight, many of them appeared to have been unavoidable.

“Yeah, that’s fine,” said Jensen. “I don’t love talking about our past.”

I FOUND THIS TO BE a pervasive attitude within Nvidia: that the culture of the place discourages looking back, whether at errors or successes, in favor of focusing on the future—the blank whiteboard of opportunity. But you cannot understand what Nvidia is today without understanding how it got to this point.

During the course of my reporting I began to understand what makes Nvidia special. Its defining characteristic is not its technological prowess, which is more a consequence than a root cause. It is not the financial resources and the new opportunities that come from a high market valuation. It is not a mystical ability to see the future. It is not luck. Rather, it is a unique organizational design and work culture that I have come to call “the Nvidia Way.” This culture combines unusual independence for each employee with the highest possible standards; it encourages maximum speed while demanding maximum quality; it allows Jensen to act as strategist and enforcer with a direct line of sight to everyone and everything at the company. Above all, it demands an almost superhuman level of effort and mental resilience from everyone. It’s not just that working at Nvidia is intense, though it certainly is; it’s that Jensen’s management style is unlike anything else found in American corporations.

Jensen runs the company in the way he does because he believes that Nvidia’s worst enemy is not the competition, but itself—more specifically, the complacency that grips any successful company, particularly one with a long and impressive track record such as Nvidia. In my work as a journalist, I have seen that companies tend to become dysfunctional as they succeed and grow, largely because of internal politics, with employees focused not on driving innovation or serving customers but on advancing their bosses’ careers. This jockeying distracts them from doing their best work and leaves them constantly looking over their shoulder for the threat from the next office over. It is something that Jensen has structured Nvidia to eliminate.

“Over the years, I realized what was happening, how people protect their turf and they protect their ideas. I created a much flatter organization,” Jensen said. His antidote to the backstabbing, the gaming of metrics, and the political infighting is public accountability and, if needed, public embarrassment. “If we have leaders who are not fighting for other people to be successful and [who are] depriving opportunities to others, I’ll just say it out loud,” he said. “I’ve got no trouble calling people out. You do that once or twice, nobody’s going to go near that again.”

Nvidia’s unique culture might sound strange or unusually grueling, even for the tech industry. But among all of the former Nvidia employees I talked to, it was hard to find a dissenter. They all reported that the company was largely free from the internal politics and indecisiveness typical in large organizations. They mentioned how difficult it was to adjust to working at other companies where direct, blunt communication is rare and there’s far less urgency to get things done. And they described how Nvidia not only empowered them, but also required them to fulfill their professional calling, as a necessary condition of employment.

In a sense, that is the Nvidia Way in its purest form. It is the unwavering belief that there is tremendous reward in doing your job the best you can. It is the drive to persevere amid adversity. Or, as Jensen put it when looking directly into my eyes: The secret to his company’s success is nothing more than “sheer will.”

MORE PRECISELY, IT IS JENSEN’S personal will that has shaped Nvidia. He has made the most consequential decisions in its history. His ability to place the right major bets on emerging technologies stems from his deep technical knowledge—a founder with an engineering background. I have tried in this book to distill the Nvidia Way down to a set of principles that anyone can learn from, if not use. But behind them all lurks a question: Can you really separate Nvidia from its CEO?

As of this writing, Jensen is 61 years old. He has run the company for 31 years—more than half of his life. Nvidia is bigger, more profitable, and more crucial to the global economy than ever before. Yet it still relies on Jensen, as a business leader and a tone setter. Apple

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survived the ouster of Steve Jobs in 1985 and his death in 2011; Amazon.com

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, Microsoft, and Alphabet

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all did well after Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to move on. Someday, Nvidia will have to face a similar transition. It is not quite clear what the company might look like post-Jensen—whether its culture will survive, whether it will maintain its momentum.

After all, a whiteboard is only as useful as the person who holds the marker. It can reflect genius, but it cannot create it.

Excerpted from “The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant” by Tae Kim. It will be published on Dec. 10. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.

Write to Tae Kim at tae.kim@barrons.com