Stephen Witt

And by the mid 2000s, Jensen who had dominated the gaming market was now terrified of all these Asian startup companies that were going and building cheaper tools.

And he said, I have to invest counterintuitively in a low margin business with very few customers.

It's exactly what Clayton Christensen advises in his book.

And actually Jensen hired Clayton as a consultant.

I have to go invest in a market that is small, that does not return immediate capital because my competitors won't follow me there.

That's the only way to save this business.

So for Jensen, the risk of inaction, the risk of not doing this is actually higher than the risk of just continuing to, you know, as he understands it, especially in tech, especially in tech, and especially in semiconductors, you cannot sit still, right?

Only the paranoid survive, as Andy Grove said.

So I have to build a business that's adjacent to, oh, and by the way, my business, we don't manufacture anything here.

It's all done in Taiwan.

This is just an R&D laboratory.

So if I'm not constantly designing innovative new products, I have no purpose to exist and I'll be competed out of existence.

That's right.

In fact, it was literally true several times at the beginning.

It was tough sledding for Jensen.

If you look at the first 15 years, even as a publicly traded company, it looks like an electrocardiogram of somebody having a heart attack.

The stock went down 90% twice.

Yeah.

Like it was tough, tough, tough, tough.

Like, and he almost lost his job.