Jensen Huang: commitment

Transcript context

…Today, in a way you do that here at Nvidia, too. You were a consumer products company back then, right? It was the end consumers who were going to have to pay the money to buy that. That’s right. But we observed that there was a segment of the market. At the time, the PC industry was still coming up and it wasn’t good enough. Everybody was clamoring for the next fastest thing. If your performance was 10 times higher this year than what was available, there’s a whole large market of enthusiasts who we believe would’ve gone after it. And we were absolutely right, that the PC industry had a substantially large enthusiast market that would buy the best of everything. To this day, it remains true. For certain segments of a market where the technology is never good enough like 3D graphics, and we chose the right technology, 3D graphics is never good enough. We call it back then 3D gives us sustainable technology opportunity because it’s never good enough, so your technology can keep getting better. We chose that. We also made the decision to use this technology called emulation. There was a company called ICOS. On the day that I called them, they were just shutting the company down because they had no customers. I said, hey, look. I’ll buy what you have inventory. No promises are necessary. The reason why we needed that emulator is because if you figure out how much money that we have, if we taped out a chip and we got it back from the fab and we started working on our software, by the time that we found all the bugs because we did the software, then we taped out the chip again. We would’ve been out of business already. And your competitors would’ve caught up.…

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