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Former Sega president Shoichiro Irimajiri tells Inc. that Huang’s honesty, engineering ability, and ambition convinced him the struggling startup deserved another chance.
When Jensen Huang admitted that Nvidia’s graphics technology had failed in the mid 1990s, former Sega president Shoichiro Irimajiri still approved a roughly $5 million lifeline.
Irimajiri tells Inc. he was no longer betting on the product. He was betting on Huang.
“Jensen was exceptionally rare” in 1990s Silicon Valley, Irimajiri says. Huang was “a genuinely honest, straightforward individual who never played games and never misrepresented what he believed.”
Earlier this week, Inc. reported that Huang returned to Tokyo to thank Irimajiri for the decision that helped Nvidia avoid collapse. Irimajiri’s new account explains why Sega continued supporting the startup after Huang disclosed that its technology was headed in the wrong direction.
Huang told Irimajiri that Nvidia had chosen the wrong technical approach and asked Sega to release it from the project while still providing approximately $5 million. Sega confirmed to Inc. that it approved the $5 million around 1995 or 1996. Precise records are no longer available, and the company did not clarify whether the money came through contract payments, an equity investment, or both.
The admission strengthened Irimajiri’s confidence in Huang even as it ended his confidence in the chip.
“Even today, I vividly remember the sense of reassurance I felt whenever I spoke with him,” Irimajiri says.
Irimajiri, an aeronautical engineer who had developed motorcycle and Formula One engines at Honda before joining Sega, also saw technical substance behind Huang’s pitch. He describes the founder as an outstanding engineer with unusually deep knowledge of both the hardware and software behind computer graphics.
Despite being only in his early 30s, Huang also possessed “an extraordinary level of ambition and determination as an entrepreneur,” Irimajiri says.
“For that reason, I felt it would be a tremendous loss to see Nvidia fail with someone of his caliber at the helm,” he says. “I believed the company deserved the opportunity to continue pursuing its vision.”
The $5 million lifeline gave Nvidia about six months to abandon its existing architecture and develop the triangle-based RIVA 128, its first major commercial success. The chip helped establish the foundation for a company that would eventually become the world’s most valuable.
Huang reunited with Irimajiri in Tokyo this week as Sega announced that upcoming games would support Nvidia’s new RTX Spark computers.
“I am proud of the decision I made to place my trust in Jensen during those difficult times,” Irimajiri says, recalling that Nvidia then possessed only “faint potential.”
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
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