Nvidia reported monster earnings. CFO Colette Kress deserves a lot of the credit.

Good morning Broadsheet readers! Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Fran Horowitz called the economy “uncertain,” Citigroup is looking to open its doors to smaller businesses, and Colette Kress is helping Nvidia post record earnings. Have a wonderful Thursday!

– Big wins. Investors eagerly awaited Nvidia’s second-quarter earnings report, with breathless anticipation usually reserved for the home team’s long-running Super Bowl victory.

And the company did not disappoint. In what some called “the biggest tech gain in years,” it beat expectations, reporting $30 billion in revenue — more than double what it reported this time last year. Although the company’s shares fell on news of minor production issues, they are up more than 150% year-to-date, and its market value is only surpassed by the likes of Microsoft and Apple. Investors and analysts have been watching closely for a signal of the health of the broader AI market.

It’s a remarkable story, amplified even more by the fact that few outside the tech and investment circles paid attention to the company a year or so ago. And while CEO Jensen Huang is the figurehead of the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker, a not-insignificant part of its success over the past decade can also be attributed to CFO Colette Kress. In fact, Kress was key to making Nvidia the hottest stock on Wall Street, my colleague Sheryl Estrada recently reported.

“CFO leadership at Nvidia from Colette Kress has been instrumental in Nvidia’s success with Wall Street and is key to Jensen’s vision,” Dan Ives, managing partner at Wedbush Securities, told Estrada. “She is highly respected both internally at Nvidia and in the technology industry.”

When he joined it, the company was mainly known by gamers who were amazed by its graphics processing chips. Now, it’s an artificial intelligence darling, making the chips that power AI services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and one of the world’s most valuable companies. Kress herself is one of the most influential women in tech.

Kress was “advised” to join the company in 2013 by her then-8- and 10-year-old sons, according to an interview she gave to the Israeli financial newspaper last year. Globes. With previous stints at Cisco and Microsoft, the move to Nvidia – a much smaller company at the time – was anything but the next logical step; but Huang convinced Kress to come on board as the company began to position itself as a key player in the growing AI industry.

“When I started at Nvidia, it was the smallest company I’d ever worked for,” Kress said. wealth in 2022. “It’s gotten pretty big, but the focus is on, how do you think about the future and making sure we’re ready to scale?”

The story continues

By all accounts, Kress and Nvidia were more than ready.

Alicia Adamczyk
[email protected]

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com