NVIDIA CEO says its secret sauce is one part persistence, resilience, belief and a huge vision

NVIDIA's rise to fame has been decades in the making, but it's absolutely undeniable that the company has had this much success and influence on the planet and its inhabitants.

In a recent interview with venture capitalist Navin Chaddha, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said that the "secret sauce" of the company is ordinary people with huge visions, as well as "persistence, resilience, and belief," added Jensen.

Jensen had a lot to say:

So we competed with like 110, 120 graphics companies over time and what made us different was perspective and some people would say that that's vision but it's simpler just to say that it's perspective. We say the world differently so let me give you an example.

Whereas people were thinking they that they were building compute graphics chips or they were building computer graphics systems or they were trying to build the world's best and you could see it that their mission statement says we're going to build the world's best 3D graphics technology, we always saw it as an application problem that the goal was to make the application richer or more or enjoyable or possible in many cases and the way we express it is accelerated computing.

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The thing that I dropped over time is this word in front of it which is application accelerated computing and it's really about the application. We always realized that it wasn't about the 3D graphics chip only. The 3D graphics chip and the architecture underneath and the domain-specific that we invented, OpenGL is of course one of them, we didn't invent that but OpenGL is one of them. We invented CUDNN which is used for AI, we invented Rapids which is used QDF for data processing, we invented Q-Quantum for Quantum Simulation. There's a whole bunch of algorithms and domain-specific libraries that we created over time but that platform, that library, the chip is in service of the application.

So, we, from the beginning, instead of just having graphics chip designers, we always had people who were working with the application industry to inspire them to use the technology to work with them to refactor their applications so that they can take advantage of the technology that we invented or algorithms to make their computer graphics games better. We were always in that mix of intersection between the application and the architecture we created.