Francesco Carucci, the man behind Nvidia graphics: “The secret? Knowing what you're doing”

At six, he writes lines of code. At seven, on his first elementary school essay , titled: “What did you do on the weekend?” , he doesn’t tell a story: he writes a program . He copies it by hand and gives it to the teacher.

Today, at 52, Francesco Carucci works at Nvidia, the technology company with the highest market capitalization in the world, led by Jensen Huang: a charismatic CEO, capable of transforming a graphics card company into one of the engines of the artificial intelligence revolution .

He works in graphics and rendering , leads a team of engineers, and develops tools to improve video game performance. A key role in a company where, according to some estimates on Blind, less than 1% of those who apply receive an offer. Yet, it took him just a week.

" My job is one that very few people do today. There are about a hundred of us who write high-level rendering engines. There are maybe ten of us in the world who do mobile graphics optimization."

To get there, Carucci went through the most influential big tech companies in history: he worked four years at Microsoft , seven at Apple («when they called me, Steve Jobs was still alive»), four at Google , ten months at Meta , two years at Samsung . And now Nvidia.

And if you ask him what his secret is and what he has learned along the way, he doesn't hesitate: " Don't be an asshole. Don't be an asshole ."

He then adds: " There are two ways to make a career in tech companies: you know what you're doing and if you're good at it, things happen. Or you don't know what you're doing, but you're good at politics ."

Born in Taranto , raised in Imperia , Carucci studied software engineering in Turin . As a child, when asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, he answered: “video games”. After a school trip to Brighton, he decided that one day he would live in England . And so it was.

He began working in the world of video games many years ago, writing code for rendering and real-time graphics. He developed his first two titles for Lionhead Studio, acquired by Microsoft, in the United Kingdom. Then he moved to Germany, where he worked on Crysis 2 and met his future wife, a Georgian photographer . "At a certain point I got tired of spending all night in the office. I did it for fifteen years. So I sent a CV to Apple ." They hired him in one day. "I landed in Cupertino on Thursday morning, did all the interviews that day and that same evening they made me an offer. I called my wife in Germany and said: 'We're moving to California'".

He immediately enters a project that does not yet exist for the world: the Apple Watch . He remains locked in the offices working in secret, while outside no one knows what it is about.

"You can't even talk to your family, or they'll fire you. When my mother asked me, 'What exactly do you do?' I would answer, 'I do things.'" One day, her son, who was a year and a half old at the time, came into the office. And he was one of the first to see the clock before it was announced.

« I wrote all the analog interfaces for the first three models. Then there was Minnie [one of the possible watch faces that can be set for the Apple Watch ndr ]. Do you remember her? My niece Emma loved her. So, in two days of work locked in a room, I wrote the code and delivered it just before the deadline. It ended up in the official update».

Carucci deals with what is called real-time rendering . It means making graphics in real time, writing code that allows a complex image to appear on a screen in a fluid, clean, light way. It means optimizing every line, every calculation. «If a video game consumes less battery, the user plays more and is monetized more».

In the 90s, when it started, there were no tools like Unity or Unreal Engine.

"If you wanted to make a video game, you had to write everything yourself. In '94 there was nothing. There was no Internet, no one explained how to do it ." This is how he developed his way of thinking, linked to visual logic . Over time he stopped developing games himself and started helping others do it. It happened at Google, where he traveled the world supporting different teams: Cambridge, Milan, Moscow, Shenzhen, Tokyo. "In Korea I didn't write code, in China I did. It depended on the team. In the end it was always about making them run better, faster, with less waste ."

After Google comes Meta. "They offered me a lot of money. I couldn't refuse." The job is interesting: he deals with avatars . "The day after we launched them, Zuckerberg posted an image with his new avatar. I replied: you're welcome, Zuck ."

From Meta to Samsung. «It's a wonderful place, it was great, but there was nothing to do ». So he sends his CV to Nvidia, a week of interviews and in December 2024 he enters. Today he leads a team of engineers. «I hope to stay here until the end».

Public speaker, photographer, artist. Yet as a kid they told him he couldn’t draw. At school they teased him: “They told me: you’ll never be an artist, you only know how to do math.” They were wrong. Today Francesco Carucci photographs landscapes and volcanoes . “That way they don’t bore me and I don’t have to listen to them.” When we interview him he is in Hawaii, on vacation with his wife (also a photographer) and their children, to photograph the Kilauea volcano.

He exhibits in several countries, wins prizes everywhere and speaks naturally of visual reasoning . «I find it very beautiful. It is the same principle that guides real-time graphics and that has to do with photography: putting elements together, giving order to visual chaos ».

And Italy? Will you come back?

“I always say: I wouldn’t have wanted to be born anywhere else . We have a wonderful culture, that the whole world envies us. And when you do interviews, you understand how much it matters. We have the best food in the world. Think about how many billions of people have never eaten lasagna in their life. We have espresso coffee: I got myself a portable coffee machine, I grind the beans and make it wherever I want. But living and working in Italy… no, I can’t . After the pandemic we thought about moving and buying a house in Como, near my brother. We looked for a school. But after 45 minutes of arriving, I said: I can’t do it.”

If you try to understand why, he answers like this: «Nothing personal, but Italians make me nervous. At a certain point in my career I worked in Milan, in the Italian headquarters of a big tech company. It was summer, I was walking around in shorts. As soon as they saw me, everyone spoke to me in English: I couldn't be Italian if I wore shorts to work. Prejudices . People around me often spoke badly of colleagues who were at home at that moment. In California, no one would think of doing something like that».

And then there are the meetings . "Here you start at 9 and you finish at 9:30. When I had meetings with Italians, at 9 we didn't even know who would be there. And then when everyone was there, maybe we continued talking until 11."

Carucci has two children. The youngest has already decided that he will be an engineer. "He tells me: 'I will be a nerd and work at Nvidia.' The oldest was already reading at two years old, gets very high grades on math tests, and yet he thinks he is not good. I just want him to understand that he is. Then they can do what they want."

To the younger ones, he says: " Become very good at what you like to do. The famous rule of 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in something. Then I don't know if it really works like that. But I know that if there is something you like, and you want to do it for a living, you have to spend a lot of time on it ."