Looking at Nvidia's success today as the world's third-most valuable company, you may be surprised to know that the company nearly collapsed completely in 1996 – just three years after its founding – and only generosity from a Sega executive at the time saved Nvidia from the graveyard, according to Wall Street Insights.
This is particularly surprising considering that Sega itself wasn't far from bowing out of the console business– in fact this likely contributed – but it plants an early seed for Nvidia's future place in the hardware industry as a leading PC GPU provider and Nintendo's go-to SoC manufacturer.
