In 1995 Nvidia $NVDA was 6 months from dead. They’d bet on the wrong graphics method, Microsoft made triangles the standard with DirectX, and the Sega contract they were building for fell apart. Shoichiro Irimajiri at Sega put $5 million in anyway. Huang has said outright that without it Nvidia wouldn’t exist. That money bought them 6 months. They used it to build the RIVA 128, which shipped in 1997 and sold a million units in 4 months. Nvidia IPO’d in 1999 at $12 a share, valued at $300 million. Sega sold the whole stake for $15 million. Tripled their money. Perfectly sensible decision at the time, and Sega needed the cash because the Dreamcast was failing. Huang’s estimate is that stake would be worth about $1 trillion now. The two of them were back together in a Tokyo arcade in July, 30 years on. Huang thanked Irimajiri in person. Worth remembering Sega didn’t do anything stupid here. They 3x’d an investment in a company that had nearly died. Almost anyone would have taken it. That’s the part people miss about these stories. The mistake is never obvious at the time…