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

by Tae Kim

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.