NVIDIA's Pivotal Journey
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A story about how NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang handled early company crises and made strategic pivots that led to massive success.
"Back in the early days of NVIDIA, we got our first big chip contract with Sega. After a year of development, we realized we had picked the wrong technical strategy to make the chip that Sega needed. We realized our architecture was the wrong strategy.
I called the CEO of Sega and said 'I think you have to find another partner, but I also need you to keep paying us on the contract.' I was embarrassed to ask, but if we didn't have this money, we would go out of business. I asked if they could please pay out the rest of the contract - we needed these 6 months to survive. We screwed up, but I promised to do everything in my power to help them and make it right after. The CEO of Sega agreed and paid it out, giving us 6 months to survive.
Later, we were the leader in the mobile chip market, but it became so competitive with many people fighting for the same pie. We decided to sacrifice the mobile market to go for the AI machine learning market. It seemed like a terrible strategic bet - leaving the biggest market of cell phones for this unknown, risky thing. But that strategic bet paid off because we became by far the leader in this field, and now that became the biggest market everybody's bullish about."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.