Jensen Huang resigned as CEO of Nvidia on Thursday after 33 years at the helm of the world's most valuable chipmaker, and the stock fell 10 percent in premarket trading within hours of the announcement.

The collapse unfolded in days. Over the weekend, Huang admitted to a past affair with a former executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore-based chip buyer now under U.S. government investigation over whether restricted computer hardware reached China. On Wednesday night, the New York Times reported a second alleged relationship, this one involving an Nvidia executive who reported directly to Huang. By sunrise on Thursday, he was gone.

For three years, Silicon Valley founders and business school professors had treated Huang's management model as gospel, according to Ash Kumra, the expert commentator behind the analysis. The system had three distinctive features:

• No chief operating officer was ever hired.
• Roughly 60 executives reported directly to Huang.
• He skipped one-on-one meetings entirely, settling every major product, strategy and pricing decision in a large group room with himself at the center of the table.

Why did the flat structure look like genius?

The model appeared to work because the stock kept climbing. Wall Street pays a premium for predictable systems, not solo acts, Kumra wrote. A structure where every road runs through the founder's desk cuts red tape, but it also plants what he called "a live grenade under your company's valuation."

The operational scramble now underway inside Nvidia's Santa Clara headquarters is the proof. Because Huang never groomed an operational successor or named a president, the board had no internal candidate ready to take over.

Who is running Nvidia now?

CFO Colette Kress is carrying two of the hardest jobs in corporate America simultaneously. The board tapped her as interim CEO while she keeps her day job running the company's finances.

Her first test arrives fast. Kress has five days to calm rattled Wall Street analysts before hosting Nvidia's quarterly earnings call next Tuesday, November 17.

She is not a stranger to the numbers. Kress has spent 13 years running Nvidia's finances and knows them cold, in Kumra's phrase. Even so, the arrangement asks one person to run global chip operations and close the quarterly books while a federal probe involving a key buyer hangs over the company.

What should other companies take from this?

Kumra's first lesson for growing businesses is blunt: name a real number two before you need one. Nvidia's emergency patch — doubling up its CFO — is a brutal stopgap, not a plan.

The second lesson runs against founder mythology. Never confuse being irreplaceable with doing a great job as CEO. Huang's centrality to every decision made the company faster on the way up and brittle at the moment of departure. The same structure that removed management layers also removed any buffer between one person's conduct and a trillion-dollar valuation.

The third lesson concerns governance. A board that inherits a crisis with no president, no COO and no succession pipeline has only bad options left. Nvidia's directors chose the least bad one available on a Thursday morning.

What happens next?

The immediate benchmark is November 17. How Kress performs on the earnings call, with analysts already rattled by a 10 percent premarket drop and a federal investigation in the background, will shape the market's verdict on whether Nvidia is a system or a solo act.

Huang's legacy as a builder is intact. His legacy as an organizational designer now has an asterisk.