Analyst sends message on Nvidia stock after private dinner with CFO originally appeared on TheStreet.

Making a tech company successful isn't easy. Keeping it successful is even more difficult.

A company that launches a successful product in huge demand can easily become complacent, giving competitors an opportunity to enter its space. Don't believe me? Just think of Nokia and BlackBerry's reactions to the launch of the iPhone.

Great companies don't allow the competition to out-innovate; so far, that's been true of Nvidia. Nvidia's CEO, Jensen Huang, has shown an uncanny knack for knowing when it's time to pivot or innovate, such as recognizing that the key to its success wasn't simply fast semiconductor chips, but software too.

💵💰Don't miss the move: Subscribe to TheStreet's free daily newsletter 💰💵

For instance, early on in the video gaming era of the company, it was all about graphics card drivers. Nvidia's release of the CUDA software development kit in 2007 sparked a significant shift by enabling general-purpose parallel programming on GPUs.

In layman's terms, CUDA made it possible to write applications that can "crunch the numbers" on many GPU cores, making calculations much faster than on the CPU.

This technology enabled Nvidia to capture the market quickly, and due to CUDA's proprietary nature, switching to competing products was difficult.

Its success in super-fast chips and software eventually allowed it to exploit the crypto boom successfully, as crypto miners flocked to its solution to mine digital currencies more efficiently. More recently, that advantage has also allowed it to profit handsomely from the boom in artificial intelligence - after all, CUDA supports neural networks.

Of course, it hasn't all been smooth sailing for Nvidia, including this year. The company is under pressure because of export restrictions on selling its AI chips in China.

Nvidia released its earnings for Q1 fiscal 2026 on May 28, and while they reported revenue of $44.1 billion, with an impressive yearly growth of 69%, the release also contained a note that worried some investors.

The U.S. government announced it would require a license to export Nvidia's H20 chip to China, making Nvidia unable to ship an additional $2.5 billion worth of H20 products during Q1.

Related: Surprising guidance sends CrowdStrike stock reeling

Those restrictions are expected to weigh down Nvidia's results in Q2. Still, management's fiscal second quarter outlook remains impressive: