[2025-06-26]

While the AI wave is still going strong, at the moment it feels like the Nvidia sentiment has plateaued for a bit - so it's a good time to discuss the book on its history. Or Jensen's history to be more precise.

How basically the only semiconductor developer from the 90s survived 30 years of brutal competition to become the most valuable company in the world today.

The first thing to highlight is very simple - it's a quite novel history of Nvidia as a company, but maybe more so the description of how intertwined it is with the single person, Jensen Huang, the CEO and co-founder.

In one way, it's a Silicon Valley story - the company being born and developed through the boom of PCs and the Internet (not really the Internet though) of the early 90s, through the dotcom bubble, up to the AI leader it is today.

Undoubtedly, the author presents the story in a majorly positive form - with long-term optimism, extreme dedication to work, and the power of resilience being the main factors of not overnight success but unwavering improvement focus during the booms and downturns.

Make no mistake reading the above though - the working style described is far from sustainable (in a work-life balance sense), where even now (or especially now) literally nobody is safe from 'what did you get done this week?' style emails from the CEO, direct but fair feedback, and reminders that bankruptcy is always looming nearby.

Also - it reads as the story of tech generations, and for like 80-90%+ of the company's life it was mostly a personal hardware/gaming company as far as 2022-2023.

So one can imagine quite a bit of the book describing the optimizations of hardware for new generations of games, competition, production failures, etc. At the same time, it's not really an insider story, which would've had its benefits - more like a boosted compilation of journalistic sources rather than a 'Hard Things About Hard Things' styled description of personal accounts of 'staring into the abyss' and such.

Consequently, it's not strictly a business description either - i.e., what changes in a company in 10 years going from a $10bn market cap to $3tn? How did it affect the workforce, product lines, logistics, R&D, etc.?

The above I see as the summary of what makes it a 'good' book to read, to know the story a bit better. There are some details on great personal principles and management approaches. But there are 'great' stories waiting to be told in my opinion, from a number of personal accounts - how did the rollercoaster of brutal competition work for 10-20-30 years at a time? And also, how does a billion-dollar company scale to a trillion-dollar one practically? What happens day-to-day on every line of business being stretched 10-100x?

I guess we'll see and wait.