Tech giant Nvidia was founded in 1993 by three computer-scientist-video-gamers in the middle of Silicon Valley. They developed their plans at a local Denny’s in East San Jose. With no money and no investors, they began working out of one of their small homes.

Today, 31 years later, Nvidia employs 30,000 people, is based in Santa Clara, Calif., but has offices around the world. Its market capitalization has recently gone over the $3 trillion mark, making it the second-most-valuable public company in the world, nestled between Apple and Microsoft.

Back in the 1980s, the idea that you could design chips and make money doing that was a fantasy. Yet today, designer chips and software are at the heart of the AI revolution and are changing much of the way we live our lives.

Nvidia gained its initial financial success designing the software for video games. Diehard gamers loved Nvidia’s products. Meanwhile, IBM and Microsoft were developing new technology that allowed Nvidia to invent new graphics and software.

Nvidia failed on several occasions, but became agile in resetting themselves as a company, exploring new technologies and designing different chips.

The Nvidia story is detailed in an excellent new book by Barron’s reporter Tae Kim: “The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant.” The fascinating Nvidia story can also be understood by viewing a series of talks and interviews with Nvidia CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun “Jensen” Huang. Some of these interviews, easily found on YouTube, were conducted by CBS, The New York Times, or presented at Stanford Business School and Las Vegas tech conventions.

The making of Nvidia is a classic case of risk-taking and entrepreneurship. Two of the computer engineers who co-founded Nvidia worked at Sun Microsystems and were frustrated in their work. They befriended Huang, a computer engineer who had worked for Advanced Micro Devices, and was, at the time, happily employed at LSI Logic.

Huang’s two colleagues eventually got him to quit his job and join them in inventing a new company.

They were extremely fortunate being in one of the computer and technology hotbeds in America. They got introduced to a brilliant lawyer who helped them get incorporated. They also got introduced to two venture capital funds, including the legendary Sequoia Capital and Sutter Hill Ventures, firms that had a record of successful investing in startups. These investors were reluctant at first but did provide the crucial seed money for Nvidia’s initial research projects.

Location mattered. A company like Nvidia was highly unlikely to have succeeded in North Dakota, New Hampshire or New Mexico. Silicon Valley attracted young engineers and “comp-sci” types, just as Las Vegas attracts gamblers and entertainment lovers.

Stanford and University of California at Berkeley had become leading centers for engineering and computer science. Hewlett-Packard was an early forerunner of what would become hundreds of spinoff companies from the universities.

Jensen Huang, who was born in Taiwan and raised for a few years in Thailand, immigrated as a youth to the U.S. He earned an electrical engineering degree from Oregon State University and then went south to the Silicon Valley mecca.

As a high school student, he worked at a local Denny’s restaurant washing dishes, waiting on tables (and cleaning bathrooms). He also became a nationally ranked ping-pong table tennis player.

He found engineering work in Silicon Valley and began studying for a master’s degree in engineering at Stanford. This took him several years to complete. Stanford University recently opened the Jensen Huang Electrical Engineering Center, which includes the much-praised Nvidia Auditorium.

Nvidia is reported to have about 75% of the market share in providing the critical chips needed for AI. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are among Nvidia’s biggest customers. Nvidia provides key supercomputers to OpenAI for their ChatGPT operations. The company is at the heart of cutting edge of work on robotics, autonomous driving vehicles, digital biology and the “deep learning” involved in machine learning.

CEO Huang is credited with much of Nvidia’s success and he thrives on the attention. But he insists Nvidia’s success depended on the computer geniuses he co-founded the company with, the incredibly smart people they have recruited, and the organizational culture he has helped institute — as well as considerable luck.

Huang’s distinctive leadership philosophy deserves attention.

He is an engineer who loves to talk about product development, new technological challenges and how companies like his are changing the world for the better. But he has also become the executive and administrative leader of a mega-firm, a celebrity cheerleader for artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning. It is an uncommon engineer who can develop these multiple talents.

Here are some of the central themes of his leadership style:

• You must allow yourself to be obsessed with your work. The mission is the boss.

• An “extreme work culture” is necessary in an industry with so much competition and such rapid changes. Huang likes to say, “People who train for the Olympics grumble about training early in the morning, too.” And he repeatedly emphasize that he and his colleagues needed to move with the “speed of light.”

• If you want to do extraordinary things, it will not be — and should not be — easy. Sixty- and 70-hour workweeks are common at Nvidia.

• Nvidia keeps trying to flatten the leadership pyramid and keep an open communications system. Huang himself has 50 or more “direct reports” and he instituted an e-mail culture where employees share five top concerns or developments on their wing. He loves meeting with large groups of employees, explaining problems and break-throughs on large whiteboards: Nvidia eschewed PowerPoint presentations. Colleagues have nicknamed him “Professor Jensen” for his uncommon ability to explain complicated technologies.

• Nvidia ruthlessly poached talent —  from rival companies and partners, from Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other major universities — and acquired other firms from places including Israel, Finland, Salt Lake City. The company consistently sought out the brightest people available.

• Huang became famous for being a “hard-a– boss.” He believes that praise is a distraction, and that to learn from mistakes, it is sometimes necessary to chew out colleagues, even publicly.

• Huang has tried to embrace conflict at Nvidia, calling it “honing the sword.” He is constantly worried about stagnation — the very real possibility of smaller companies catching up and becoming better at inventing the next new technologies.

Jensen Huang has become one of the 10 wealthiest individuals in the world, with a net worth of at least $120 billion. His company, Nvidia, does business with most other nations, including China.

The U.S. government, concerned with national security, has increasingly imposed regulatory restrictions on companies like Nvidia, explicitly restricting what technologies can be exported to China.

So far, Nvidia has adapted to these regulations. Yet it has fought back against the outgoing Biden administration, claiming these restrictions are too sweeping, and may encourage China to develop similar technologies on their own. As Huang puts it, “there are smart engineers all over the world,” and they too will develop large language and deep-learning models. The U.S. has the lead — at least for now.

The Nvidia story is a remarkable example of the American Dream, an inspiration, or aspiration, for many.

Has Nvidia become a monopoly in chip design? Has it become part of a “techno-oligarchy” that is gaining too much power in America? Will it be able to keep up with the AI revolution, to keep on predicting new applications that need new chips? Is it too dependent on Taiwan? Can it continue to lead the world while preventing China from catching up? Will it thrive after its charismatic CEO retires?

Perhaps we should ask these questions to our AI apps?