Colette Kress Joined Nvidia in 2013 When It Made $4 Billion a Year. She Now Runs a Company That Made $216 Billion, and Her First Job Is Stopping the Slide

In September 2013, Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) hired a new chief financial officer from Cisco. Nvidia was a graphics chip company then, with $4.13 billion of revenue in the fiscal year that ended that January. On Thursday morning, Colette Kress became its interim chief executive.

Nvidia announced at 8:47 AM ET that Jensen Huang had resigned as president, CEO and a member of the board, effective immediately, after reports of two relationships, one with a woman U.S. officials suspect of spying for China. We covered the announcement and what history says about companies left without a permanent CEO here. Kress will keep her job as CFO while she runs the company, and the board is searching inside and outside Nvidia for a permanent CEO.

Nvidia opened Thursday at $151.01 and fell as low as $148.80, about $2.18 trillion below its October 6 record value, before rebounding. Nvidia was at $161.84 at 9:42 AM ET, down 6.8% from Wednesday’s close and 13.3% since November 6, about $1.87 trillion of market value below its October 6 record.

Who she is

Kress spent nearly 25 years in finance before Nvidia, according to the company. Its annual report lists her path: a series of finance jobs at Texas Instruments, then Microsoft, where she became CFO of the Server and Tools division in 2006, then Cisco, where she was senior vice president and CFO of its Business Technology and Operations Finance organization. She holds a finance degree from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.

At Nvidia she has run the finance organization for 13 years and delivered the financial commentary on its quarterly earnings calls, the executive who walks Wall Street through the numbers.

What happened on her watch

The numbers she reported changed beyond recognition. Revenue went from $4.13 billion in the fiscal year that ended in January 2014 to $216 billion in the year that ended in January 2026, about 52 times as much. Net income went from $440 million to $120 billion. Nvidia’s annual profit is now about 29 times what its total sales were when she arrived.

The stock went further. Adjusted for splits, Nvidia closed at about 37 cents a share on September 16, 2013. At $161.84, it is about 438 times that price. A $10,000 investment on that day would be worth about $4.4 million now, even after this week.

What the board said

“Colette has helped lead NVIDIA through a period of extraordinary growth and has a deep understanding of our business, customers, operations and financial position,” Harvey C. Jones said in the announcement. The board named Jones, a former CEO of chip-design software maker Synopsys, as its first-ever chair on the same day. Jones added that she is supported by an experienced leadership team.

What she faces

Kress takes over a company worth about $3.91 trillion that has never had a CEO other than its founder. Huang was the company’s public face for 33 years, with its largest customers, its suppliers and governments, and a regular presence in Washington. The board’s investigation into his relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore’s Megaspeed, is still open, and China calls the spying claim against her groundless.

Her advantage is that she knows the numbers and Wall Street already knows her. Her limit is time: she is doing two jobs at once while the board looks for someone to take one of them away. Analysts mentioned by Reuters as possible internal candidates include Kress herself and Ian Buck, who runs Nvidia’s hyperscale business.

For shareholders, the useful step today is the same one as on Wednesday night: know how much of your money is in Nvidia, inside index funds as well as shares you own directly, and size it to a level you can hold through a search that may take months.

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