The Operating System
27 Ecosystem Play

Win the Developers First

Customers follow developers, so Nvidia spent two decades making itself the first thing developers write for.

It wasn't three people that made CUDA successful. It was 43,000 people that made CUDA successful.

On the Acquired podcast (October 2023) Huang said “we were always a developer-oriented company.” On the Lex Fridman Podcast (#494, March 2026) he went further, and gave advice to anyone building today: “if I were a developer today, I would target CUDA first.” The pullquote above, from the same episode, makes the other point: the platform was built by the whole company, over years.

The mechanism. Developers pick the platform where their work will reach the most users, which depends on the install base, which depends on having developers. Nvidia broke that loop by putting CUDA on consumer GPUs that researchers already owned. When AlexNet won the 2012 ImageNet contest, it had been trained on two GTX 580 gaming cards, which was the university lab’s choice, not Nvidia’s plan.

The scale. Nvidia reported about 42,000 employees at the end of fiscal 2026, around 31,000 of them in R&D.

Doesn’t transfer quickly. Developer ecosystems take a decade and keep costing money long before they pay. Nvidia funded CUDA through years of thin margins. For most companies, the honest version is to be excellent for a small, specific group of builders. Becoming everyone’s default comes later, if at all.

Across the chapters