Shoichiro Irimajiri, the president of Sega who lent money to Nvidia when it was going bankrupt

The incredible story of a Sega executive who had broken a contract with a failed Nvidia, and still decided to invest in the company, to avoid its bankruptcy.

Today Nvidia is the third most valuable company on the planet, with a stock market capitalization approaching three trillion dollars. But Without the modest 5 million dollars that Shoichiro Irimajiri lent him to avoid bankruptcy, Nvidia would not exist today.

The curious story, collected for him The Wall Street Sightsdates back to 1996, when Sega was developing the console Dreamcastand hired the young company Nvidia to design its GPU.

We are in the time of the generational change from 2D to 3D graphics. The first GPUs that rendered hardware 3D graphics, like 3DFX Voodoo, were starting to hit stores, and games like Doom They proposed new ways to play video games.

The Sega CEO who saved Nvidia

I’m sure you know Ayrton senna, the legendary Formula 1 driver. For many, the best driver in history. What few know is that a good part of his victories were achieved with a Honda engine designed by Shoichiro Irimajiri.

This engineer dreamed of flying airplanes, but ended up designing Honda’s fastest engines for motorcycle and Formula 1 competitions in the early 1980s. “He had ideas that other engineers considered impossible,” according to the press of the time. He became the youngest president of Honda in history, in 1982.

Irimajiri left to supervise Honda’s subsidiary in the United States, but in 1992 he suffered a heart disease due to stress, and decided to leave the company.

In 1993, a friend of his convinced him to accept the position of vice president of Sega, with the challenge of competing with Nintendo. In 1996 he had already become CEO of Sega America, and in 1996, of the entire company.

Shoichiro Irimajiri took the reins of Dreamcast console designthe first console in history with an outgoing Internet connection.

He looked at a young company called Nvidia, which was emerging in the design of chips to generate 3D graphics. It had only been founded three years earlier, but Irimajiri was captivated by the determination and confidence of its young CEO, Jensen Huang.

At the time, Nvidia was a startup company. It was barely known in the GPU market, but Shoichiro Irimajiri was confident in its potential, so commissioned them to design the Dreamcast GPU.

Jensen Huang spent all his capital designing a chip that rendered graphics using squares. And Nvidia was wrong. The competition used triangles, a method that was more effective. So their GPUs were superior.

Nvidia and Jensen Huang faced the abyss, because they had run out of capital. They could tell sega that they had not been up to par, breaking the contract, and going bankrupt. Or they could go ahead with their GPU, knowing that it would be slower than the competition, so Sega wouldn’t buy it, thus going bankrupt. Both paths led to the same point: the closure of NVIDIA.

Shoichiro Irimajiri realized that the GPU was not up to par, yes. broke the contract with NVIDIA. The Dreamcast would eventually feature a PowerVR GPU from NEC.

But then something unexpected happened. Despite his failure, Irimajiri trusted Jensen Huang, so he decided to invest $5 million in NVIDIAwhich was what I needed to be able to finish a new GPU for PC.

Despite being the CEO of the company, Irimajiri had a hard time convincing Sega’s board of directors to invest in a company that had just failed with the design of a GPU.

Finally he got the money, and everyone won: with that investment Nvidia was able to make a PC card, which was a success. Over the years, it ended up leading the market. Sega, for its part, sold Nvidia shares three years later for $15 million, tripling its investment.

Unfortunately, the Dreamcast console was a failure, and Shoichiro Irimajiri was relieved of his position. At 84 years old, he still works as a consultant in his own company.

It had been more than 20 years since I had spoken to Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia. A few months ago he sent him an email inviting him to participate in a conference on AI in Japan.

Irimajiri did not expect a response, thinking that Jensen Huang had forgotten about him. A few minutes after sending the email, he received the reply: “Dear Irimajiri-san, I am happy to be at his service for whatever he needs.”

There are favors that are not forgotten, even if three decades pass. A favor that today is worth almost three billion dollars. But above all, it is the favor of someone who trusts you in your moment of greatest failure. That is not forgotten in a lifetime.