How Nvidia’s CFO became one of the most influential women in Silicon Valley

Nvidia CFO Colette Kress has been a key part in turning the company into Wall Street’s hottest stock.

Transcript

00:00NVIDIA became a nearly $3 trillion company and a Wall Street favorite.

00:04Founder and CEO Jensen Huang started the company in 1993 and has pioneered accelerated computing.

00:10But after a record-setting year, it's CFO Colette Kress who deserves a lot more credit.

00:14When Kress first joined the company in 2013, it was worth less than $10 billion.

00:19A decade later, it hit a valuation of $1 trillion.

00:22She then spent the next 25 years working at major tech companies like Cisco and Microsoft

00:27before joining NVIDIA as EVP and CFO in September 2013.

00:31At the time, NVIDIA was known mainly by gamers as the company that supplied

00:34graphic processing chips for computer games.

00:37Huang persuaded Kress to come aboard and she was also encouraged to join NVIDIA

00:40by her then 8 and 10-year-old sons whose favorite games were powered by the company's chips.

00:45Although Huang is the figurehead of the company, Kress can be attributed to a significant share

00:49of its success over the past decade by managing the financial relationships with suppliers.

00:54Fast forward to today, Kress has become a key player in the growing AI industry and

00:57sits at number 16 on Fortune's Most Powerful Women list.

01:01And this is the story of how