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

by Tae Kim

Through these interviews, I began to understand what makes Nvidia special. Its defining characteristic is not its technological prowess, which is more a consequence than a root cause. It is not the financial resources and the new opportunities that come from a high market valuation. It is not a mystical ability to see the future. It is not luck. Rather, it is a unique organizational design and work culture that I have come to call “the Nvidia Way.” This culture combines unusual independence for each employee with the highest possible standards; it encourages maximum speed while demanding maximum quality; it allows Jensen to act as strategist and enforcer with a direct line of sight to everyone and everything at the company. Above all, it demands an almost superhuman level of effort and mental resilience from everyone. It’s not just that working at Nvidia is intense, though it certainly is; it’s that Jensen’s management style is unlike anything else in corporate America.

Jensen runs the company in the way he does because he believes that Nvidia’s worst enemy is not the competition, but itself—more specifically, the complacency that grips any successful company, particularly one with a long and impressive track record such as Nvidia. In my work as a journalist, I have seen that companies tend to become dysfunctional as they succeed and grow, largely because of internal politics, with employees focused not on driving innovation or serving customers but on advancing their bosses’ careers.

“Over the years, I realized what was happening, how people protect their turf and they protect their ideas. I created a much flatter organization,” Jensen said. His antidote to the backstabbing, to the gaming of metrics, and to political infighting is public accountability and, if needed, public embarrassment. “If we have leaders who are not fighting for other people to be successful and [who are] depriving opportunities to others, I’ll just say it out loud,” he said. “I’ve got no trouble calling people out. You do that once or twice, nobody’s going to go near that again.”

In a sense, that is the Nvidia Way in its purest form. It is the unwavering belief that there is tremendous reward in doing your job the best you can. 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.”

Luck had clearly played a part in bringing Jensen to this new opportunity. So had his own talent and skills. But as he saw it, the biggest single factor that propelled him from scrubbing toilets to managing entire divisions of a microchip company was his willingness, and ability, to put in more effort, and tolerate more suffering, than anyone else. “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.”

“Wilf says to give you money. Against my better judgment, based on what you just told me, I’m going to give you money. But if you lose my money, I will kill you,” Valentine told the Nvidia team.

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.” Jensen was sending a message: long hours were a necessary prerequisite for excellence. To this day, he has not deviated from that view or altered Nvidia’s expectation that employees adopt extreme work habits.

Jensen insisted that new hires should know exactly what they were getting into the moment they walked in the door.2 He tasked Michael Hara, Nvidia’s director of marketing, with giving a frank talk at every orientation session. As Hara recalls, his speech was intended to encourage new arrivals to not be afraid of speaking up and to offer fresh perspectives and new ideas at every opportunity. “We’re ultra-aggressive,” he told the new employees. “We don’t waste time finding excuses for why things don’t work. We move on. If you came here thinking you can just hide in the back, collect your paycheck, and go home at five, you’re mistaken. If that’s what you think, you should resign today.”

“We don’t do things like anybody else. If you come here and say, ‘This is how we did it before,’ we don’t care. We’re about doing things differently and better. When we were just twenty-five people, Jensen taught us to come here, take risks, do things outside the box, and make mistakes. I encourage you to do all three. But don’t make the same mistake twice, because we will fire you in a heartbeat.” Hara meant it, too. John McSorley, Nvidia’s former head of human resources, said that the company had a policy of hiring quickly—but also of firing fast if a new employee wasn’t working out. Jensen’s primary guidance to all of his hiring managers was simple: “Hire someone smarter than yourself.”

SINCE NVIDIA’S FOUNDING, JENSEN HAS insisted that all Nvidia employees work at the “Speed of Light.”3 He wants their work to be constrained only by the laws of physics—not by internal politics or financial concerns. Each project must be broken down into its component tasks, and each task must have a target time-to-completion that assumes no delays, queues, or downtime. This sets the theoretical maximum: the “Speed of Light” that it is physically impossible to exceed. “Speed of Light gets you into the market faster and makes it really, really hard, if not impossible, for your competitors to do better,” a former Nvidia executive said. “How fast can you do it, and why aren’t you doing it that fast?”

It was not just a rhetorical question—Jensen used this measure to gauge the performance of his employees. 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. “The theoretical limit of what you could do—that’s what Speed of Light is. That’s the only thing we were allowed to measure against,” remembered former executive Robert Csongor.

WHEN GEOFF RIBAR WAS HIRED away in December of 1997 from Advanced Micro Devices to serve as Nvidia’s CFO, he found that his new boss had two impressive traits: Jensen was extremely persuasive and extremely hardworking.6 “There may be people smarter than me,” Jensen once told his executive staff, “but no one is ever going to work harder than me.”7 He was often in the office from 9:00 a.m. to near midnight, and his engineers usually felt obligated to keep similar hours. “I used to tell people at AMD, Intel, or anywhere else that if they wanted to see how Nvidia was doing, they should visit the company’s parking lot on weekends. It was always busy,” said Ribar. 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?”8

FEAR AND ANXIETY BECAME JENSEN’S favorite motivational tools. At each monthly company meeting, he would say, “We’re thirty days from going out of business.” It was hyperbole, on one level. The tense, high-stakes RIVA 128 process was not a complete outlier—as we’ll see—but it certainly wasn’t a regular occurrence. Yet Jensen didn’t want to allow any complacency to creep in, even in successful periods. And he wanted to confront new hires with the kind of pressure they would face going forward. If they didn’t have what it took, they needed to self-select out sooner rather than later.

Still, as Dwight Diercks said, “It always felt like we were at zero. And the reason is that no matter how much money we had in the bank, Jensen could explain why we were going to be at zero with three things happening. He would say, ‘Let me tell you how. This could happen, this could happen, this could happen, and all that money goes to zero.’ ” Jeff Fisher pointed out that fear can be clarifying. Even today, although Nvidia is no longer thirty days away from going out of business, the company could easily be thirty days from starting down a path that will lead to its destruction. “You’re always trying to look around corners and see what we’re missing,” Fisher said.

“Make no mistake. Intel is out to get us and put us out of business,” Jensen declared at an all-company meeting. “They have told their employees, and they have internalized this. They are going to put us out of business. Our job is to go kill them before they put us out of business. We need to go kill Intel.”10

And it had a corporate mantra—”We’re thirty days from going out of business”—that served as a warning about complacency and conveyed the expectation that everyone, from the CEO on down, had to work as hard as they possibly could, even if it meant sacrificing their lives outside of Nvidia.

“We tried to resolve the dispute. I forgot the details,” Tsai said. “But it really hit me. Jensen taught me his philosophy of doing business called ‘rough justice.’ ” Jensen explained that “rough” meant the relationship was not flat but rather had ups and downs. Justice was the important part. “After a certain period of time, let’s say a few years, it would net out to roughly equal.” To Tsai, this was a way of describing a win-win partnership, though one that acknowledged there wouldn’t be a win-win every single time. Sometimes one side would get the better of a specific deal or incident, and the next time it would be the other side. As long as it was roughly 50-50 after a few years—not 60-40 or 40-60—it was a positive relationship. He remembers thinking Jensen’s approach made a great deal of sense.

Vivoli had another idea for the GPU’s launch: to actively intimidate rivals. An Nvidia marketer unfurled a banner advertising the GeForce 256 on a highway overpass that led straight to the headquarters of 3dfx (this was before its eventual bankruptcy). The banner announced that the new Nvidia GPU would change the world and crush the competition. The state police quickly removed the banner, which was being displayed illegally, and Nvidia received a formal reprimand. Still, it had served its purpose. “It was Art of War. We wanted to demoralize them,” Vivoli said. Nvidia was learning how to bend the world to its will.

He soon learned why. While still working at ATI, he once drove past Nvidia headquarters around 7:00 p.m. and saw that the office was almost entirely full. His manager, who was riding with him, remarked, “Oh, they must be having an evening meeting.” Now that he was on the inside, he realized that “evening meetings” were the norm rather than the exception. He started to regularly work on weekends, something he never did at ATI. He recalls being forced to take part in a conference call on Christmas Eve to discuss a sales shortfall and what the company could do to recover the business. No personal time or day was truly his own. Still, he saw that the commitment expected of him was expected of everyone else, too, all the way up to Jensen, which made the sacrifice easier. “There was a sense of dedication and hard work that resonated through the organization,” he said. “The work ethic was contagious.”

Jensen referred to his sellers as Nvidia’s Green Berets. He needed them to be self-sufficient and aggressive. Moore had failed to match Jensen’s expectation for the role—that each seller become the “CEO of your accounts.” When they met with their customers, they needed to know more about those customers’ businesses than the customers themselves do. They had to anticipate how much customers were willing to pay for Nvidia’s superior products. Jensen, for his part, would provide them with whatever resources were necessary: the “reinforcements” behind the elite vanguard.

Jensen decided to offer Nvidia employees more direct criticism in larger meetings, so that more people could learn from a single mistake. “I do it right there. I give you feedback in front of everybody,” he said. “Feedback is learning. For what reason are you the only person who should learn this? You created the conditions because of some mistake you made or silliness that you brought upon yourself. We should all learn from that opportunity.” 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.”

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. Jensen’s time, and the time of his employees, is best spent trying to solve the next problem. Praise is a distraction. And the deadliest sin of all is looking back at your past accomplishments as if they will protect you from future threats.

“How’d the launch go?” Jensen said. Vivoli went on for five minutes about every part of the event he believed was a success. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” Jensen said. Vivoli stopped talking and Jensen asked, “What could you have done better?” “That’s all he said. There was no ‘attaboy.’ There was no ‘great job.’ There was none of that. It doesn’t matter how well you think you did,” Vivoli said. “It’s okay to be proud, but the most important thing is trying to improve.”2 Jensen does not appear to be any less reproachful toward himself. A sales executive named Anthony Medeiros recalled one meeting where Jensen revealed a habit, if not an active practice, of self-criticism. “I’ll never forget this. We had done fantastic. We just blew the doors off the quarter. Then, during our quarterly review meeting, Jensen stood up in front of us.”3 The first words out of Jensen’s mouth were, “I look in the mirror every morning and say, ‘you suck.’ ” Medeiros was struck by how someone so manifestly successful could still think in such terms. But 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.

Over time, Jensen thought about how he would create an ideal organization from scratch. He realized he would choose a much flatter structure, so that employees could act with more independence. He also saw that a flat structure would weed out lower performers who were unaccustomed to thinking for themselves and to acting without being told what to do. “I wanted to create a company that naturally attracts amazing people,” he said.5 Jensen believed that the traditional corporate pyramid, with an executive suite at the top, multiple layers of middle management in the middle, and a foundation of line workers at the bottom, was antithetical to fostering excellence. Instead of a pyramid, he would remake Nvidia into something that looked more like a computer stack, or a short cylinder. “The first layer is the senior people. You would think that they need the least amount of management,” Jensen said. “They know what they’re doing. They’re experts in their field.” He did not want to spend time on career coaching—because the majority of them had already reached the pinnacle of their careers. As a result, he rarely held one-on-one meetings with his direct reports, at least when it came to such open-ended topics. Instead, he focused on providing them collectively with information from across the organization, as well as with his own strategic guidance. This would ensure that every part of the business was aligned and allow Jensen to manage more executives in a manner that actually add...

Andy Keane, a former general manager of Nvidia’s data-center business, remembered Jensen explaining the traditional structure of the company’s main competitors on a whiteboard, a structure he dubbed “the upside-down V’s.” This was how most companies were built. “You become a manager and you build your upside-down V. You defend it. Then you become a vice president and you get more upside-down V’s of people under you,” Jensen said. Keane said that at other companies, talking to executives one or two levels above your direct manager was frowned upon. “Nobody likes it. It’s just insane, right?” he said. “Nvidia was never like that.” Keane himself talked to his direct manager once or twice a month but talked with Jensen two to three times a week. “Jensen created a company that he could manage directly,” he said. “There is a vast culture difference between Nvidia and other companies.”9 Keane was also surprised by the sheer openness he found at Nvidia. He joined at the general-manager level and was allowed to attend every board meeting and off-site board event. When a typical CEO would have eight or nine people in a room for big executive meetings, Jensen would have a packed house. “Everyone could hear what he was telling the executive staff,” Keane said. “It kept everybody in sync.” When there is important information to share or an impending change in the direction of the business, Jensen says he tells everybody at Nvidia at the same time and asks for feedback. “It turns out th...

As Jensen put it, “you want a company that’s as large as necessary to do the job well, but to be as small as possible,” and not bogged down by overmanagement and processes. To get there, he decided that rather than rely on a permanent class of professional managers, whose only job was to be in charge of things, he would create a far more fluid system that would orient Nvidia around its business goals. And even as he took the long view, he would get rid of the practice of long-term strategic planning, which would force the company to stick to a particular path even if there were reasons to deviate from it. “Strategy is not words. Strategy is action,” he said. “We don’t do a periodic planning system. The reason for that is because the world is a living, breathing thing. We just plan continuously. There’s no five-year plan.” He began to tell his employees that their ultimate boss was the mission itself. The idea was to make decisions for the good of the customer, not to boost the career of the executive above them. “The concept of the mission is the boss makes a lot of sense because ultimately we’re here to realize a particular mission, not in service of some organization,” Jensen said.10 “It got people thinking about the work and not the organization. The work, not the hierarchy.” Under the “mission is the boss” philosophy, Jensen would start every new project by designating a leader, or a “Pilot in Command” (PIC), who would report directly to Jensen. He found that this crea...

“We always have a PIC for every project. Whenever Jensen talks about any project or any deliverables, he always wants the name. Nobody can hide behind, ‘such and such a team is working on that,’ ” former finance executive Simona Jankowski said.11 “Everything has to have a name attached to it because you have to know who’s the PIC, who’s accountable.”

In exchange for that level of accountability, PICs were granted the weight of Jensen’s authority and received priority support throughout the organization. After Jensen organized Nvidia’s employees into groups centralized by function—sales, engineering, operations, and so on—they were treated as a general pool of talent and not divided by business units or divisions. This allowed the people with the right skills to be assigned to projects on an ad hoc basis. It also helped mitigate some of the ever-present job insecurity that plagues corporate America. “Nvidia doesn’t constantly fire people and rehire them,” said Jay Puri, head of global field operations.12 “We take people that we have and we are able to redirect them into a new mission.” Managers at Nvidia were trained n...

“Managers don’t feel like they get power by having large teams,” Puri continued. “You get power at N...

Most of all, the flat structure freed Jensen to spend his precious time explaining the reasoning behind his decisions at meetings instead of adjudicating turf wars. Not only did he see flatness as key to Nvidia’s strategic alignment, keeping everyone focused on the mission; he also saw it as an opportunity to develop his junior employees by showing them how a senior leader should think through a problem. “Let me reason through this. Let me explain why I did that,” Jensen said. “How do we compare and contrast these ideas? That process of management is really empowering.” Of course, employees’ constant exposure to Jensen and his decision-making process included his public dressings-down of executives and PICs. He justified those potentially painful moments as an efficiency gain for the company: offering private one-on-one feedback behind closed doors would slow him and the company down by requiring the scheduling of separate meetings, but it also deprived junior employees of a learning opportunity.

“I don’t take people aside,” he said. “We’re not optimizing for not embarrassing somebody. We’re optimizing for the company learning from our mistakes. If a leader can’t handle the slight embarrassment, they can come talk to me. But it’s never happened.”13

So Jensen asked employees at every level of the organization to send an e-mail to their immediate team and to executives that detailed the top five things they were working on and what they had recently observed in their markets, including customer pain points, competitor activities, technology developments, and the potential for project delays. “The ideal top five e-mail is five bullet points where the first word is an action word. It has to be something like finalize, build, or secure,” said early employee Robert Csongor.14 To make it easier for himself to filter these e-mails, Jensen had each department tag them by topic in the subject line: cloud service provider, OEM, health care, or retail. That way, if he wanted to get all of his recent e-mails on, say, hyperscaler accounts, he could easily find them through a keyword search. The “Top 5” e-mails became a crucial feedback channel for Jensen. They enabled him to get ahead of changes in the market that were obvious to junior employees but not yet to him or his e-staff. “I’m looking to detect the weak signals,” he would tell his employees when asked why he liked the Top 5 process. “It’s easy to pick up the strong signals, but I want to intercept them when they are weak.” To his e-staff, he was a little more pointed.

Every day, he would read about a hundred Top 5 e-mails to get a snapshot of what was happening within the company. On Sundays, he would dedicate an even longer session to Top 5’s, usually accompanied by a glass of his favorite single-malt Highland Park scotch whiskey. It was the thing he did for fun: “I drink a scotch, and I do e-mails.”

The experience rattled Berger—and made him a better employee. “The one thing with Jensen is you don’t bullshit him,” he recalled years later. “You bullshit him and your credibility is dead. The appropriate answer is, ‘I don’t know, Jensen, but I’ll find out.’ ”19

Yet as I learned soon enough, Levin was not an outlier. Activist investor Carl Icahn has a theory that much of corporate America mismanages the succession process in choosing new CEOs. He calls it anti-Darwinian—the very antithesis of the ruthless process of natural selection that allows only the best equipped of a species to survive and reproduce.1 Icahn observed that competent executives often get sidelined in favor of more likeable but less capable ones because of behavioral incentives inside companies. The personalities who ascend the corporate ranks resemble college fraternity presidents. They become friendly with the board of directors and are not threatening to the current CEO. They’re not prodigies, but they’re affable, always available for a drink when you are feeling down. As Icahn put it, these figures (they are mostly men) are “not the smartest, not the brightest, not the best, but likeable and sort of reliable.” CEOs want to survive. Naturally, then, they prefer not to oversee a direct subordinate who is brighter and could potentially replace them. They tend to opt for someone slightly less astute than they themselves are. But when the CEO eventually departs, the glad-handing executive who is now on good terms with the board of directors frequently gets elevated, perpetuating the “survival of the un-fittest” as the new CEO starts a similar cycle.

NVIDIA WAS ABLE TO AVOID similar pitfalls because it had a technical CEO in Jensen. “When you meet Jensen Huang, even with dozens of other graphics companies, you realize this is a guy you want to do business with,” said Tench Coxe, one of Nvidia’s early investors, who continues to serve on its board today. “What made him great is he is an engineer and he is a computer scientist.”4 Former product manager Ali Simnad recalled working on a Wi-Fi product that was never released, in part because of Jensen’s intense diligence. “Jensen was very scary,” he said.5 “You would go to a meeting and he would know more about the product than you do.” During the product meeting, Jensen made clear that he understood all the technical details of the various Wi-Fi standards. The product wasn’t crucial to Nvidia’s strategy, but Jensen still made the time to master the technology and specifications. “He knew everything. In every meeting we attended, he was probably the most prepared person.”

Jensen has said many times that he could not do his job effectively without in-depth familiarity with the technology itself. “It’s essential we understand the underpinnings of the technology so you have an intuition for how the industry is going to change,” he once remarked.8 “Our ability to extrapolate and see down the road is really vital because technology is changing fast, but it still takes us several years to build a great solution.” Only with domain expertise can he decide which projects to support, estimate how long they will take, and then allocate resources properly to generate the best long-term returns.9

An operations executive claimed that Nvidia isn’t a 24/7 company, but a 25/8 one. “I’m not kidding. I wake up at 4:30 a.m., and I’m on the phone until 10:00 p.m.,” she said. “It’s my choice. It’s not for everybody.” Another product manager noted that many employees don’t want to embrace the grind and end up leaving after a few years. He himself tended to arrive at the office before 9:00 a.m. and rarely left before 7:00 p.m. Once home, he had to log on from 10:00 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. every night to talk to partners in Taiwan. “On weekends, if you could not reply to an e-mail within two hours, you had to let the team know the reason why you wouldn’t be able to respond,” he said. When he reviewed his calendar, he discovered that he had been either traveling for work or at the office for almost half of his weekends over the past year. 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.”

When he goes to the movies, Jensen says he never remembers the film because he spends the entire time thinking about work. “I work every day. There’s not a day that goes by I don’t work. If I’m not working, I’m thinking about working,” Jensen said. “Working is relaxing for me.”16

He lacks sympathy for anyone who works less than he does, and he does not believe that he has missed out on anything in life by giving himself so completely to Nvidia. When 60 Minutes interviewed Jensen in 2024 and asked about employees who said working for him was demanding, that he was a perfectionist and not easy to work for, he simply agreed. “It should be like that. If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy.”

What separates Jensen from almost all of his competitors is easy to understand yet hard to implement. He challenges the division of the executive world between those CEO-founders who are technically oriented but naïve in the world of business and those who are business-minded operators but who have no technical acumen. He shows it is possible that one person can serve both roles; in fact, in the highly technical semiconductor industry, his ambidextrousness may be a key to success.

Jensen announced the change in strategic focus in a company all-hands meeting. “We need to consider this work as our highest priority,” he said.20 He explained that Nvidia had to get the right people working on AI. If they were currently assigned to something else, they would change focus and work on AI, because it was going to be more important than anything else they could possibly be doing.21

In 2006, he became the first hire at a new division called Nvidia Research. In his first weeks on the job, Luebke had lunch with Steve Molnar, a system architect at Nvidia and a long-time friend, and asked him what he thought a research group at Nvidia should do. For instance, should it be organized around pursuing patents? Molnar thought about it for a while and said, “I don’t see Nvidia as some kind of IP fortress. Our strength is just outrunning the other guy.”

Ultimately, Nvidia Research showed how Jensen’s strategic vision has changed over time. In the beginning, when the company was in survival mode, he wanted everyone to focus on concrete projects: delivering the next generation of chips at the “Speed of Light,” selling the “whole cow,” and beating competitors through sheer execution. As Nvidia got bigger, Jensen realized that survival now meant future-proofing the company in as many ways as possible. Continuous innovation would require a more flexible approach to Nvidia’s operations, even if that meant pursuing some bets that a younger Jensen might have dismissed.

One former senior industry executive argues that Nvidia sets itself apart from its rivals in its willingness to experiment and invest over long periods, successfully monetizing its more open-ended efforts. This contrasts with larger technology giants such as Google, which often spend heavily on researching new technologies but have little to show for it commercially. Notably, all eight Google scientists who authored the seminal “Attention Is All You Need” paper on the Transformer deep-learning architecture—which proved foundational for advancements in modern AI large language models (LLMs), including the launch of ChatGPT—soon after left Google to pursue AI entrepreneurship elsewhere.

“Jensen has always said that we should be doing things that other people cannot. We need to bring unique value to the marketplace, and he feels that by doing work that is cutting edge and revolutionary, it allows the company to attract good people,” Nvidia executive Jay Puri said. “We don’t have the culture of just going after market share. We would rather create the market.”8

Jensen is a technical founder and CEO, which is part of Nvidia’s advantage over some of its competitors. But to call him a mere technologist is to undersell his skill at hiring and developing people who are good fits for Nvidia’s particular culture. He gives his employees a high degree of independence over their individual projects, but only if they can keep those projects perfectly aligned with the company’s core objectives. To reduce ambiguity, Jensen spends a great deal of his time communicating with his employees and ensures that everyone at the company knows the overall strategy and vision. He offers a level of visibility most companies don’t share outside of the C-suite.

THE COMPANY’S HIRING METHODS are just one component of the Nvidia Way. Its emphasis on retention is another. Jensen rewards performance by using stock grants, which are distributed on the basis of how important an employee is considered to the company. “Jensen looks at stock like his blood,” said former head of human resources John McSorley. “He pores over the stock-allocation reports.”

To avoid the “equity cliff” (when engineers depart after their stock packages have fully vested over the industry-standard four years), Nvidia offers annual refresher grants. If an employee receives an “outperform” rating from his or her manager, that employee may be awarded an additional three hundred shares that vest over the next four years. In theory, employees can receive these refresher grants every year—more and more reasons to remain with the company. Another wrinkle is the TC, or “top contributor,” designation. Managers can refer an employee for special consideration to senior executives. Jensen will review the list of TC candidates and give out special one-off grants that also vest over a four-year period. Once such a grant is approved, the employee receives an e-mail from a senior executive, with Jensen copied. The subject line says “Special Grant,” authorizing the RSU grant “in recognition of your extraordinary contributions,” with a clear description of the rationale behind the award. Jensen can also reach down into the organization at any time and award stock directly, without waiting for an annual compensation review. This allows him to ensure that people who are doing great work feel appreciated in the moment. It is yet another sign of his interest in every aspect, and level, of the company.

“The company treats people extremely well, not only in terms of salaries and benefits but also by treating people as human beings rather than fungible engineers,” a former Nvidia employee said. “There are many opportunities for advancement.” This person mentioned Nvidia offering flexibility on remote work when a family member received a cancer diagnosis or providing ex gratia payments when an employee’s house burned down. “People tend to be loyal to a company that supports them,” he said. Another senior executive spoke about a time when his spouse had a major health event. He told Jensen he had to move across the country to be close to family. “Don’t worry about it,” Jensen said. “Go and call me when you’re ready to work again.” The employee was kept on the payroll even though he wasn’t able to work full-time.