[lukaesch]

I met him in person at the Nvidia AI inception event in Berlin a few weeks ago.

Very friendly and down to earth personality. He said that Nvidia had tough competition when he started (there was only on chip graphics acceleration in 1994) and literally no market for his product because no applications/games supported external graphic acceleration. Still, he and his team were convinced that general purpose computing (CPUs) for everything is not as good as providing a dedicated, specialized computing unit (in this case for graphics). So they just built it and made it. Even though they were nearly bankrupt for multiple times, they survived until 2023 and established themselves as a leader in their field.

He basically worked on this for 30 years. Not many founders show the same endurance.