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

by Tae Kim

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