Jensen Huang: belief

Transcript context

…We have some questions we want to ask you. Some are cultural about Nvidia, but others are generalizable to company-building broadly. The first one that we wanted to ask is that we’ve heard that you have 40+ direct reports, and that this org chart works a lot differently than a traditional company org chart. Do you think there’s something special about Nvidia that makes you able to have so many direct reports, not worry about coddling or focusing on career growth of your executives, and you’re like, no, you’re just here to do your fricking best work and the most important thing in the world. Now go. (a) Is that correct? and (b) is there something special about Nvidia that enables that? I don’t think it’s something special in Nvidia. I think that we had the courage to build a system like this. Nvidia’s not built like a military. It’s not built like the armed forces, where you have generals and colonels. We’re not set up like that. We’re not set up in a command and control and information distribution system from the top down. We’re really built much more like a computing stack. The lowest layer is our architecture, then there’s our chip, then there’s our software, and on top of it there are all these different modules. Each one of these layers of modules are people. The architecture of the company (to me) is a computer with a computing stack, with people managing different parts of the system. Who reports to whom, your title is not related to anywhere you are in the stack. It just happens to be who is the best at running that module on that function on that layer, is in-charge. That person is the pilot in command. That’s one characteristic. Have you always thought about the company this way, even from the earliest days?…

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