Many of the world’s high companies have easy names. Steve Jobs named Apple whereas on a fruitarian weight-reduction plan, and located the title “enjoyable, spirited and never intimidating.” Plus, it got here earlier than Atari within the phonebook. Microsoft is an amalgamation of the phrases “microcomputer” and “software program,” whereas Walmart a mix of the final title of the superstore’s founder, Sam Walton, and “mart.”
Nvidia—which briefly held the title of essentially the most priceless firm on the planet this previous week—challenges these easy branding conventions. The consonant-ridden title and eerie, Nineties-esque op-art emblem recall its underdog, start-up roots slightly than its present actuality: a behemoth cornering the AI chips market.
No matter its unconventionality, Nvidia’s prominence calls for dialog, and dialog calls for pronunciation. So, what’s the appropriate technique to pronounce Nvidia?
In response to its web site, Nvidia is pronounced “en-VID-eeyah,” not NUH-vid-eeyah, as many have known as it.
The place did the ‘Nvidia’ title come from?
When Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang began the corporate along with his mates Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993, they hashed out virtually each element of their new enterprise, apart from the title. Sitting in a Palo Alto Denny’s—a venue chosen for its low cost espresso and for Huang’s expertise working there in his youth—the three cofounders drew blanks for the title of their enterprise.
So, as they continued constructing, they merely named their recordsdata “NV” for subsequent model, Huang beforehand advised Fortune. When time got here to include the corporate, the three had been compelled to discover a title. At first, they selected NVision, till they discovered {that a} rest room paper producer already took the title.
After going again to the drafting board, the cofounders scraped by way of all phrases with “NV” in them, till Huang advised Nvidia, riffing on the Latin phrase invidia, that means “envy.”
The title labored as a result of the three had hopes to design such a robust graphics chip that it might make rivals, as Priem beforehand advised The New Yorker, “resentful.”
The First ‘Nvidia‘
The primary “Nvidia” was Invidia, the Roman goddess of envy. Her coronary heart was “inexperienced with bile,” her tongue dripped poison, she had a “pallor smeared throughout her face, her total physique is gaunt, her eyesight squints at the whole lot,” because the Roman poet Ovid describes her within the Metamorphosis.
Firm branding doesn’t ofter draw from Roman mythology, a lot much less from a determine so unseemly. And but, the envy motif seems to be littered all through the corporate’s merchandise. The eighth technology of its graphics processing models had the slogan “resentful.”
Nvidia’s emblem, a inexperienced, spiraling eye, could have additionally drawn inspiration from the primary Invidia. Her determine was related to a piercing gaze, an “evil eye” that casts a curse upon these she envies. Folks of many religions nonetheless put on “evil eye” amulets, or recite prayers, to beat back the curse.
Many corporations now have motive to be jealous of Nvidia. With a market cap of $3.1 trillion, unprecedented market focus and seemingly limitless progress, Nvidia’s success is what each CEO desires of.
Huang could have foreseen this, and deliberately positioned envy on the forefront as a reminder of his rivals clawing at him. In response to The New Yorker, for years Huang opened each workers assembly with the phrases, “our firm is 30 days from going out of enterprise.”
Apparently, even after all of the success, the phrase stays the unofficial company motto.
