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[–] 1 point 2 hours ago (1 child)

One could say that Job's was much more influential in terms of how Apples products were designed and marketed and that was very important in gaining public mind share. Huang seems to just be a general CEO type that is easily replaceable and is only successful due to having the best hardware for a specific job, they literally have products that sell themselves because nobody else has this technology moat.

Nvidia is a $4 trillion + business now but it is pure luck that they feel into that position. Who could have know that introducing CUDA in 2004 would lead to them being a core component in AI in almost 20 years later? Yes, they maximized this position with some very questionable business practices but it is just pure luck they got there. 5 years ago most of the general public had even heard of Nvidia and if they had many of them called it Nevada!

What I am saying is, how much of Nvidia technology success on the back on Huang and how much of it is just that he happened to be the founder of a company that was in the right place at the right time?

It is a shame, I was waiting for the AI bubble to pop/deflate and to see Huang have to get up on stage and present a GPU that is just for gaming. That would have been fun to see.

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  • [–] 1 point 32 minutes ago* (last edited 26 minutes ago)

    How much of the success? Not sure. It seems like he was important to building a large GPU company, but they are where they are because they were making the best video cards when crypto and then AI took off. That doesn't feel like the same thing as really building the future, though I guess it's not nothing.

    From what I've read, the issue is that precisely because he wanted to be the Jobs and the Woz of NVidia, he has a good enough technical background that he micromanages the engineering side, but also wants the place to be a reflection of him, so there's no proper succession planning, the company stays flat (60 direct reports?!) specifically so it can pivot to whatever he comes up with, and he lives in an unusually resonant echo chamber because he is the end-all be-all.

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