I spent the last few days reading The Nvidia Way by Tae Kim. It is a great read on one of the largest corporations in the world, one of the most important players in the AI race and its CEO, Jensen Huang. Here are a few things I learned:

Luck matters, but only if there is hard work

Jensen, like everyone else, had a lot of luck. He was born in Taiwan and lived for a while in Thailand before moving to the US with his brother. In the US, his uncle sent both brothers to a religious school in Kentucky. The experience there played a key role in shaping the young Jensen. Who knows if he hadn’t gone there, whether he would have had the grit and appreciation for hard work that brought him unbelievable success later?

Lady Luck continued to bless Jensen when he made a fateful decision to leave AMD for LSI. While working there, he had a chance to meet with who would eventually be his Nvidia cofounders. The three of them utilized their network and reputation at previous employers to raise funds for the startup. One of the cofounder was allowed to resign and leave with a powerful computer which would be of great help later on. As Nvidia grew, it had a couple of near-death experiences. Each time, there was always luck involved, be it that Jensen managed to find a piece of equipment that sped up the crucial testing phase or a competitor didn’t put their foot down to kill Nvidia.

But all that luck would be meaningless without Jensen’s maniacal work ethic. The man worked while on holiday with his family and called it “relaxing”. He is the one that instilled the crazy work ethic at Nvidia. His philosophy is to outwork and outcompete everyone else, stay on guard at all times and prioritize customers. He would joyfully and seriously wish an ample dose of suffering on someone that wishes to be successful. Frankly, I felt inspired by his work ethic and ashamed that I am nowhere close to that.

Unconventional, yet sensible management and leadership views

To Jensen, your ability to reason through and solve problems matters much more than what information you have. In meetings, he doesn’t care about your title or where you are on the organizational chart. Everyone should have the same information and listen to how a decision is made at the same time. He gave an example of how his executive staff, college grads and junior employees could be in the same room when they discussed a problem.

Furthermore, unlike other CEOs, Jensen has 60 direct reports. He reasons that these people should be the top of their game and require minimal supervision from him. Hence, why not making the CEO one with the most direct reports? If the CEO has many direct reports, the company will have fewer layers between the CEO and the most junior level and information can flow more freely and quickly.

Jensen believes that everyone can learn from other mistakes and feedback. He does not do 1-on-1s. When he gives feedback, he does it in front of everyone so that everyone can learn. It is good, but has its downsides. People will have to suffer public embarrassment and not everyone is up for it.

I love these ideas. They are not common nor conventional, but they make a lot of sense. However, it’s not for everyone. It’d not work if the cultural change didn’t come from the very top. You can’t just impose this in your department alone. The same goes for working at Nvidia. That place is not for everyone. People are expected to work 60-80 hours a week. If you are not willing to sacrifice other aspects of your life, Nvidia doesn’t seem to be for you.

What’s next for Nvidia?

Reading the book, you’ll get the sense that Nvidia is Jensen and Jensen is Nvidia. However, he is 61 years old and at some point, he will have to step back and hand over the reins to someone else. Will the company find a CEO with the technical expertise and incredible business acumen like him? Will his successor manage to keep the culture at Nvidia which is a competitive advantage? Look no further than Intel for an example of how a former giant technology company could fall from grace and become pretty much obsolete. No-one can rule out the possibility that Nvidia could suffer the same fate. Not when Jensen is in charge. But after he no longer is.

“Jensen’s decision to ease his way out of LSI Logic turned out to pay immediate dividends during Nvidia’s fund-raising process. When he submitted his resignation, his manager had immediately taken him to LSI’s CEO, Wilfred Corrigan, a British engineer who pioneered several semiconductor manufacturing processes and design principles that are still in use today. Jensen’s manager wanted “Wilf,” as he was known throughout the company, to talk the young engineer out of leaving LSI altogether. But when Corrigan heard about Jensen’s vision for a new generation of graphics chips, he asked him a question: “Can I invest?”

“There may be people smarter than me,” Jensen once told his executive staff, “but no one is ever going to work harder than me.” He was often in the office from 9:00 a.m. to near midnight, and his engineers usually felt obligated to keep similar hours.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you may not have the brainpower or the wherewithal to detect something I think is pretty significant.”

“The large number of executives in e-staff meetings has fostered a culture of transparency and knowledge sharing. Because there aren’t many levels between the e-staff and the most junior person at the company, everyone in the organization can provide assistance on problems and prepare in advance for potential issues.”

“Jensen’s preference for whiteboarding runs counter to the way that the rest of corporate America talks to itself—through PowerPoint presentations where a speaker goes through a series of slides presenting information that is usually accepted by the audience at face value. He has always hated how static such meetings are, with little opportunity to work together or discuss topics in depth.”

“Whiteboarding forces people to be both rigorous and transparent. It requires them to start from scratch every time they step up to the board, and therefore to lay out their thinking as thoroughly and clearly as possible. It becomes immediately apparent when someone hasn’t thought something through or bases their logic on faulty assumptions, unlike with a slide deck, where you can hide incomplete thoughts in pretty formatting and misleading text. At the whiteboard, there is no place to hide. And when you finish, no matter how brilliant your thoughts are, you must always wipe them away and start anew.”

“Jensen had come up with DLSS on the spot. He had seen the promise inherent in one technology and transformed that promise into a new feature with a better business case. Now, if DLSS worked, the company’s entire product lineup, from the low end to the high end, would become more proficient, and thus valuable, allowing Nvidia to charge higher prices. “The researchers had invented this amazing thing, but Jensen saw what it was good for. It wasn’t what they had thought,” Luebke said. “It shows what a leader Jensen is and how technical and smart he is.”