Nvidia, with former CEO Jensen Huang at the helm, was often a caustic presence toward the community that raised both man and company up. Say what you will about the man who made Nvidia what it is today (you can say a lot, frankly), but with Huang stepping down following a rising crescendo of scandals and without his evident love for technology, it’s only going to get worse for gadget lovers.

Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer since 2013, is replacing Huang as interim CEO. The money person, who up till now only liked to talk about the company’s trillion-dollar AI ambitions, now leads what is still one of the most innovative firms around. We don’t know if that can last.

Let’s take a step back and ask where Huang came from. Before the Taiwanese American was rolling out the AI training chips fueling the intelligence boom and bust cycle, he was at the forefront of extolling graphics acceleration technologies that helped the video game industry blossom into 3D graphics. Nvidia’s tech was one of the main lynchpins for computer graphics thanks to its CUDA parallel computing platform, which allowed computers to use the graphics processing unit (GPU) for more than just pushing polygons.

All evidence pointed to Huang being more than a mere figurehead. He relied on a “flat” corporate structure with few examples of middle managers. He reportedly had 60 people in his organization directly reporting to him, meaning that whatever the CEO thought was interesting or compelling was often what was worked on.

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