Nvidia was founded by

    Jensen Huang
    Chris Malachowsky
    Curtis Priem

Jensen Huang has bee the CEO the whole time.

Malachowsky is still there as a Fellow, member of executive staff and a senior technology executive for the company.

Priem left the company in 2006 and sold all his shares.

"If Curtis Priem, Nvidia’s first CTO, had held onto all his stock, he’d be the 16th richest person in America. Instead, he sold out years ago and gave most of his fortune to his alma mater Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute." https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2023/11/26/this-nvidi...

Thanks. Whenever I feel badly about leaving in 2012 and dumping shares I’ll think about Curtis

Jensen Huang was their first CEO!

Haha that really changes things a bit. I’m sorry. I’ve been using their cards since the Riva TNT and I didn’t know the CEO had never changed

I guess it just shows that Jensen has had a (perhaps admirably) low profile until recently.

Oh, he's always been flamboyant.

It's just that when the company was just one gpu maker in a crowed, tiny and not very profitable market, no-one paid much attention.

Now they are making the shovels and pickaxes for the current gold rush, and correspondingly are competing for the spot of the largest company in the world, a lot more people are paying attention to his antics.

Fair comment. I'm in the middle of reading the Isaacson Musk bio so maybe the contrast between the two made me think of Jensen as shy and retiring.

Read my comment above on the Isaacson comparison. His focus is very different than mine. I wanted to write a serious and substantive business history of Nvidia and explore why it became successful.

Hello Tae and thanks for a terrific book! My comment only compared Elon and Jensen, not Isaacson's book and yours. I completely understand that you had a different set of objectives and you did a fantastic job in setting out what makes Nvidia special without turning it into a Jensen hagiography.

Jensen is a founder and has been at the helm from day 1