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Keep the founder in the building
Why founders matter
A company has many refounding moments. Think of what Meta would be without Instagram: that company might be gone. A founder who is still in the building is the person who can make the next turn.
Nvidia's turn
Nvidia began as a graphics chip company, and no company up to then had made it through two cycles in graphics chips. Nvidia did, which shocked its investors, and then it came up with a GPU that looked for many years like a faster CPU. One day the investors woke up and Nvidia was an AI company. Doug Leone calls it a complete refounding by the same founder.
Apple's second founding
Apple offers the other example. Turnarounds are difficult, and in technology they are almost unheard of. The first time Apple was founded, Steve Jobs had a co-founder, and the second refounding was by himself.
How did Nvidia's chips become AI's engine?
Nvidia coined the term GPU with its GeForce 256 in 1999, a chip built to speed up graphics. In 2006 it announced CUDA, which let programmers use those chips for general-purpose computing. In 2012, the AlexNet image-recognition network won the ImageNet competition by a wide margin after training on two Nvidia graphics cards, which turned researchers toward GPUs for deep learning.
Why did Meta buy Instagram?
Facebook announced the Instagram acquisition in April 2012 for about one billion dollars in cash and stock. Instagram had about thirteen employees and roughly thirty million users at the time. Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote at the time that the company planned to keep the photo app running independently.
How did Apple recover under Steve Jobs?
Apple bought Jobs's company NeXT in 1997 for about four hundred million dollars, which returned him to the company. He cut the product line to a small set of computers and released the colorful iMac in 1998. The iPod followed in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007.
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