I previewed this in a post already (#866775), so clever stackers could piece together that a published review was incoming. (Psst, @siggy47, this is how you'll know when it's The Big Print reading time! #877595)
I didn't love this book. It's a little too puff-piecy, and a little too rushed by the author. Plus, it almost exclusively relies on interviews about what current characters remember from back in the '90s and '00s. I wish the author had put in a more serious investigative effort—but alas, this is where we are.
It doesn't really shine through in the article itself, since there was nothing really materially wrong with it as far as I could tell, and plenty of other interesting topics to discuss.
Some extracts:
All of us ’90s kids with a penchant for gaming have heard of Nvidia — excellent graphics chips for high-end, performance video games. But what truly propelled Nvidia from a large company successful in this original niche was the AI revolution.
To most of us, the deep-learning/neural network software that we often sloppily call artificial intelligence arrived on the world scene a few years ago. While at first it had some mania tendencies of a typical Garter hype-cycle variety, it now seems here to stay, promising almost daily to overhaul this or that industry. What’s so incredible about the Nvidia-AI story is that Nvidia’s long-time CEO, Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang, saw this coming a mile away — well before anyone but nerdy computer scientists and chess engine builders knew what neural nets were.
The Nvidia Way is what Kim calls the sort of corporate differences ruling Nvidia:
The story Kim weaves together is one of hard work and Jensen’s eccentric personality. Per the title, the Nvidia “way” is Kim’s attempt to characterize what makes Nvidia different from other companies. He identifies three components: a strive for excellence (and pretty astonishing work ethics, with workweeks in the 70-80 hours, and record-low employee turnover); hiring practices, where Nvidia goes out of its way to attract and maintain the best people; and generous and widespread stock programs, especially directly connected to achievements rather than as a vague, broad-brush end-of-year bonus. Encouraging for the revival of American corporate culture is that all the people Kim talked to “reported that the company was largely free from the internal politics and indecisiveness typical in large organizations.”
What I found most interesting was the counterfactual history/what-if type questions that were on my mind for most of the book:
The company, too, was lucky to overcome the constant financing problems of the early years; lucky to recover from the failure of the NV1 and NV2 chips and production problems surrounding RIVA 128: “Nvidia barely survived its first ten years,” writes Kim summarizing part II of the book. It takes him to the second-to-last page to spell out the themes on my mind reading most of the book: “In writing the history of Nvidia, I was struck by the times it verged on failure and outright destruction. If things had gone just a little bit differently in a few instances, computing would have taken another course.”
Whatcha think, Stackers? Anyone read the book? Anyone riding the NVDA stock ride??
/J