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Tae Kim

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59

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2025-03-07

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2025-03-07

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1. “Lot of it is just comes straight from the top. I mean, I've been involved with large bureaucratic companies. And what happens is it becomes more dysfunctional. There's a thing at NVIDIA called Mission is a boss. Make decisions, do actions that serve the customer and nothing else. And most large organizations and bureaucracies, you start spending a significant portion of your time, maybe 30, 40 percent on gaming metrics, on internal politics, on serving your boss's boss instead of the company. So you're kind of in a business unit or a division, and it's almost like you're competing against the other parts of the company and you want to get your bosses, bosses promoted or have him hit his numbers, right? At NVIDIA, if you start playing politics like that and serve your boss's boss, you will get dressed down in public. Like Jensen, if he just smells the sniff of politics on what you're doing, he'll...”

   2025-03-07 · We Study Billionaires · TIP704: The Nvidia Way w/ Tae Kim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “They did really well, but like Jensen is a perfectionist when he thinks about the past or history, he always sees the flaws. And Nvidia back then had a law of flaws, a lot of politics, he would say. And yeah, he wants to improve and be perfect at all times and win at all times.”

   2025-03-07 · We Study Billionaires · TIP704: The Nvidia Way w/ Tae Kim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “Very honest, transparent. I've seen him being interviewed like you know dozens of times on YouTube, and I was afraid he would go off. A lot of times he just goes off in the same 10, 12 stories that I could repeat verbatim. He didn't do that, thankfully. Every question I ask, he answered honestly, even the stuff that is pretty personal, like the fallout between him and his co-founder with Curtis Supreme. So that was fantastic. There was a period where he was very down on the first 10, 15 years of NVIDIA and even said that If Jensen wasn't involved with the first 10, 15 years, he'd be happy with that speaking third person. He was just bashing the politics and the problems that he saw early on. And I was like, wait a minute. You could say that you weren't fully formed the first 10 years, but it still was one of the fastest growing chip companies when it went public after 1999. I mean, it beat Broadcom, I think, to hit that $1 billion annualized revenue number. So it wasn't all bad.”

   2025-03-07 · We Study Billionaires · TIP704: The Nvidia Way w/ Tae Kim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “People don't tell people the intellectual blunt truth about things. So you're always dancing around people's feelings. Nvidia, that doesn't happen. Like it's a culture of telling you the unpleasant truths, being blunt and direct. So my interaction with Jensen, like there was a period where I'll be asking questions or going down a certain line of questioning. He'll be like, hey, you're not understanding NVIDIA here. And he just be very blunt and tell me off. So he's very serious. He's very blunt. I mean, first of all, you get a little emotional reaction, but then you realize it's a good thing because we can save time. We can focus on the right things. And you know exactly where he is at all times. And that's the same thing employees have said to me all the time. They appreciate Jensen being very blunt and direct because they know exactly where he is and they can focus on the important things and improve instead of playing this game of coddling emotions that happens at most other companies.”

   2025-03-07 · We Study Billionaires · TIP704: The Nvidia Way w/ Tae Kim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “So I actually met him back in the early 2000s when he was doing the first kind of secondary on NVIDIA, where I was a hedge fund then. And NVIDIA was actually my largest investment at the hedge fund. And when I told him this, when I met him, he's like, oh, that's really funny because NVIDIA is my biggest success story too when I told him that was my first big winner. He's like, oh, Nvidia is my first big winner too. So that was a fun interaction. He's very blunt and direct, which I think a lot of NVIDIA employees grew to appreciate because when you go to a different company, large bureaucratic companies, people play a lot of games. There's a lot of game of metrics.”

   2025-03-07 · We Study Billionaires · TIP704: The Nvidia Way w/ Tae Kim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “They want the NVIDIA story out there. And they too were kind of confused that this massive success story, the largest shipment in the world and no one has written a book about it. So they're super enthusiastic and very open. And that's all I did. I just kept on talking to people and going through people's networks. YouTube is another amazing resource. Jensen probably has like dozens of interviews, 30 years of interviews, the computer history museum. That's how I got in touch with the 3DFX people. So there's just so much information on the internet and LinkedIn was a godsend. The art of the cold email and reaching out through LinkedIn just did wonders for the book. And that's the only reason I was able to turn the book around in about a year.”

   2025-03-07 · We Study Billionaires · TIP704: The Nvidia Way w/ Tae Kim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “And no one has written the book on NVIDIA. So I thought about it for a few minutes and wait a minute, I know the technology, I know the business and finance stuff with my Wall Street background. And I've been in media for 10 years. So I have these three things where I felt I could write an amazing book on NVIDIA. I know it really well from the beginning. So I replied quickly. I met with the publisher at Brian Park. It was a short meeting. He's like, you need to get a book agent. I got the best book agent through the recommendations of friends. And within a few weeks, I had a book deal. And I was off and running. I didn't know how to write a book, but I figured first thing to do is talk to as many NVIDIA employees as you can. And the great thing is there's this thing called LinkedIn, where if you start talking to NVIDIA employees and you become their friends, you can look into their networks. So that's all I did. I just talked a dozens and dozens of NDIDI employees. And after every conversation, usually an hour or so, they were so excited to talk to me because”

   2025-03-07 · We Study Billionaires · TIP704: The Nvidia Way w/ Tae Kim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “And then you went to Quake Unreal Tournament, all these amazing games with these great 3D graphics cards that really pushed the envelope on graphics. So I was a passionate user of all these 3D graphics cards. I knew in NVIDIA from the early days. So I had that early technology knowledge. So in terms of research process, I got this email in May of 2003. This is actually a couple weeks before NVIDIA had the blowout guidance quarter. And it was a cold email from a publisher saying NVIDIA, question mark. And I read it and it was a business publisher called Norton. And it was from Editor there saying that Matthew Ball who wrote the metaverse book recommended me to write a book on NVIDIA. I was like, NVIDIA, like there has to be like five books on NVIDIA. Even by then, it was a large technology company. It was a large chipmaker in the world. I went straight to Amazon and then I found there were no books on NVIDIA. Every other tech company has a ton of books.”

   2025-03-07 · We Study Billionaires · TIP704: The Nvidia Way w/ Tae Kim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “I've been following NVIDIA from its exception. I started my career in consulting, went to Wall Street for a while, and then moved to media. And I've been a video gamer my whole life from the Atari 2600, moved on to Nintendo, Super Nintendo. And I also played a lot of computer games with Commorse 64 was my first one. And Commodore made this machine called the Commodore Amiga. And then the early 90s, I got into PC gaming 3A6, 4A6. I built my own computers, the Pentium. So all over the early 90s, and that's when the 3D graphics took off. And Nvidia actually wasn't the first one that did well. It was this company called Rendition Verity, who got the first support of GeoQuake going. And then this other company called 3DFX, which I cover a lot in the book, kind of dominated the mid to late 90s 3D graphics. But that was a glory days of PC gaming. You started off with Doom.”

   2025-03-07 · We Study Billionaires · TIP704: The Nvidia Way w/ Tae Kim · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT