The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant

by Tae Kim

“Over the years, I realized what was happening, how people protect their turf and they protect their ideas. I created a much flatter organization,”

Big problem people protect their turf

They mentioned how difficult it was to adjust to working at other companies where direct, blunt communication is rare and there’s far less urgency to get things done.

Interesting

It is the drive to persevere amid adversity. Or, as Jensen put it when looking directly into my eyes: the secret to his company’s success is nothing more than “sheer will.”

lol

“People with very high expectations have very low resilience. Unfortunately, resilience matters in success,” he later said. “Greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character.”17 And character, in his view, can only be the result of overcoming setbacks and adversity. To Jensen, the struggle to persevere in the face of bad, and often overwhelming, odds is simply what work is. It is why, whenever someone asks him for advice on how to achieve success, his answer has been consistent over the years: “I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”

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“We were diluted across too many different areas,” Jensen recalled.8 “We learned it was better to do fewer things well than to do too many things even though it looked good on a PowerPoint slide. Nobody goes to the store to buy a Swiss Army knife. It’s something you get for Christmas.”

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Landry mentioned to Jensen that some employees were griping about the long work hours. His response was typically direct. “People who train for the Olympics grumble about training early in the morning, too.”

lol

He would reprimand subordinates who set goals that referred to what the company had already done before or what the competitors were doing in that moment. As he saw it, he needed to prevent the kind of internal rot that he observed at other companies, where employees often manipulated their projects to provide steady and sustainable growth that would advance their individual careers, when in reality they were making only incremental improvements that actually hurt the company in the long term. The “Speed of Light” notion ensured that Nvidia would never tolerate such sandbagging.

Interesting

Even for the marketing department, working sixty to eighty hours a week, including every Saturday, was the norm. Andrew Logan, Nvidia’s director of corporate marketing, remembers leaving the office to take his wife to a 9:30 p.m. showing of the movie Titanic. On his way out, his coworker shouted, “Oh, half day, Andy?”

When are they doing childcare

New graphics chips were reviewed in the press, and a common feature of reviews was the benchmarking process, wherein independent reviewers test certain metrics, such as frame rate per second, in specific, graphics-intensive games, and under different resolutions. Standard benchmarks give gamers a series of quantitative reference points so that they don’t have to rely on subjective analyses of a graphics card’s quality

Quote flash benchmarks will be key in brain preservation

Jensen displayed his trademark directness and impatience in all settings. He would often chew people out for fifteen minutes straight, regardless of the venue. “He does it all the time. It’s not even at company[-wide] meetings. It’s during smaller meetings or alignment meetings,” a former Nvidia executive said. “He can’t let it go. He just has to make it punitive a little bit.”

Interesting that he is so harsh

Jensen’s at-times harsh approach was a deliberate choice. He knew that people would inevitably fail, especially in a high-pressure industry. He wanted to offer employees more opportunities to prove themselves, believing that they, in every case, are often just one or two epiphanies away from solving their problems themselves. “I don’t like giving up on people,” he said. “I’d rather torture them into greatness.” The method is not intended as a means to show off how much smarter he is than his employees. Instead, he sees it as a guard against complacency.

Interesting

it was, for better or for worse, the same approach that Jensen wanted everyone else at Nvidia to take toward themselves and their own work. Do your job. Don’t be too proud of the past. Focus on the future.

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would often respond to e-mails within minutes of receiving them and wanted a response from an employee within twenty-four hours at most. The responses had to be thoughtful and backed by hard data. Those that fell short of his high standards would get a typically sarcastic response: “Oh, is that right?”

lol

NVIDIA WAS ABLE TO AVOID similar pitfalls because it had a technical CEO in Jensen.

Well this is an inference and it’s too confident It’s hard to say

Nvidia’s extreme work culture stems from the chief executive himself, who lives and breathes his job and looks down on anyone who isn’t as committed. “I don’t actually know anybody who is incredibly successful who just approaches business like, ‘This is just business. This is what I do from 8 to 5, and I’m going home, and at 5:01, I’m shutting it down,’ ” Jensen has said.15 “I’ve never known anybody who is incredibly successful like that. You have to allow yourself to be obsessed with your work.”

Yup