"Build install base first; architecture quality is secondary To attract developers to CUDA, Nvidia made the counter-intuitive decision to ship it on millions of consumer GeForce gaming cards even though it crushed gross margins — dropping the company's market cap from roughly $8 billion to $1.5 billion. Huang's reasoning: 'install base defines an architecture — not everything else is secondary,' pointing out that the x86 survived despite being widely criticized as 'less than elegant' while beautifully designed RISC architectures largely failed. For anyone launching a platform, developer tool, or marketplace, reaching the largest possible user base early matters more than architectural purity. Source: Jensen Huang, Lex Fridman Podcast, Jensen Huang: Nvidia, AI, Robots, and the Future of Computing"