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BT Ben Thompson Ben Thompson Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter analyzing the business strategy behind tech and media companies, and has built a reputation for framing how platfo...

“If NVIDIA never got to be a bullet train, they just built the fastest freaking car on the planet. Which meant no good governance, no succession plan, none of this. But that's also why they were such a dynamic company.”

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026

“If NVIDIA never got to be a bullet train, they just built the fastest freaking car on the planet. Which meant no good governance, no succession plan, none of this. But that's also why they were such a dynamic company.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson

Context

Thompson was using an analogy of walking, bike, car and train for how companies get more efficient but less flexible as they grow. Applied to Nvidia, the missing governance and succession plan is the price of its speed.

Transcript

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson Around 28:33 into the episode
Ben Thompson

Right. You're such a city coastal elite. I think I've been using my head. So I'm outside. Just like a prairie or something. Going upstairs. Okay.

Andrew Sharp

Continue through the corporate progression. What's after bicycle?

Ben Thompson

Maybe like a motorcycle. Okay. Much more powerful, go much faster. Maybe not quite as flexible or weaving in out of traffic or whatever as you can on a bike. Then you're in a car, kind of need a road. Might go off-road a little bit, but not too much. Eventually, then you're in a truck. Eventually, you're a train. You're like a bullet train where you move so fast and you're so efficient, but you can only go in one direction, right? And you see this with like these aggregators, right? They seem like these impenetrable business models. And then you ask them to do one thing slightly off of their business and they just utterly completely fail. They just like, they're so tuned to do what they do. And everyone in that company is a cog in the machine. And then they just can't. This is what happens to companies. They get more efficient. This is where the analogy of the F1 car goes further. If NVIDIA never got to be a bullet train, they just built the fastest freaking car on the planet. Right. Which meant no…

Andrew Sharp

Yeah.

Ben Thompson

And well, you don't want to do an F1 cars crash. Right? So the. Well,

Andrew Sharp

I mean, we've seen this in literal F1 cars where the Red Bull is tailored to Max for stopping and historically has been basically impossible for any teammates to drive. And Max can push the boundaries in all sorts of great ways and knows how to drive it. Jensen clearly knew how to drive NVIDIA. And…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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