June 2007, Santa Clara, California.

It's lunchtime and several dozen financial analysts are tucking into sandwiches and a tent set up in the parking lot of NVIDIA's headquarters.

They've spent this morning listening to presentations about NVIDIA's latest bet,

Kuta, a platform that allows computer programmers to turn NVIDIA's graphics chips

into the workhorses of high-end computing.

For years, NVIDIA used its engineering prowess to design GPUs, graphical processing units,

to make video games look and play better.

Now, it's chasing a different crowd,

scientists and technical professionals whose work demands incredible amounts of computing power.

But many of the analysts here today think it's a waste of time. At one table,

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is getting grilled by a skeptical analyst. Even the rosiest estimates

put the market opportunity for this at $100 million. You've spent almost five times that just

bringing it to market.

How will this ever deliver returns for investors?

Huang puts down his sandwich and trots out the official company line.

We're creating an entirely new customer base for our company.

Our graphics chips offered 10 to 200 times the performance of general purpose chips.

We're about to enter the era of the GPU.

The analyst isn't swayed.

You're sacrificing profit margin on a long shot.

Our revenues and profits are still growing.

We are delivering for shareholders today while also ensuring we deliver for them tomorrow.

...