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

by Tae Kim

“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.