4 Leadership Skills That Helped Jensen Huang Build Nvidia Into a $2 Trillion Company

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4 Leadership Skills That Helped Jensen Huang Build Nvidia Into a $2 Trillion Company

By Jennifer Conrad | Inc Magazine | April 29, 2024

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Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of chipmaker Nvidia, presides over the third most valuable company in the world. But, as his oft-repeated origin story goes, his first job was working as a dishwasher at Denny’s when he was a teenager.

After receiving a master’s in electrical engineering at Stanford, Huang again spent a lot of time at Denny’s, sitting at a booth in a San Jose location and hashing out a plan for Nvidia with co-founders Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. Today, their Santa Clara, CA-based company creates the graphics processing units that are used by some of the most sophisticated computing systems in the world, including those used by OpenAI to train its AI models.

“I was probably Denny’s best dishwasher. I planned my work, I was organized,” he told Stanford MBA student Shantam Jain during a recent interview for the university’s View from the Top speaker series. Huang told Jain the work instilled in him a belief that “no task is beneath me,” which has served him to this day as he runs a $2 trillion tech company. Here are four leadership lessons Huang shared with the university’s budding entrepreneurs.

Set your own definition of success.  Nvidia made its name moving into fields where the market wasn’t established, according to Huang.  “We’re trying to create the market while we’re creating the technology,” Huang said.   The company relies on what it calls EIOFS: early indicators of future success, asking questions such as, “Is this worthy work to do? Does this advance a field of science somewhere that matters?” he said. “We find inspiration not from the size of a market, but from the importance of the work… Nobody has to do a business case on it. Nobody has to show me a P&L.”

It’s OK to be lazy sometimes.  Huang says it’s perfectly fine to be “lazy” about some things, particularly taking on work that any other company accomplish. That frees up resources to tackle the most challenging problems.  “If somebody else can do it, let them do it,” he said. “We should go select the things that if we didn’t do it, the world would fall apart. You have to convince yourself of that, if I don’t do this, it won’t get done.”

Stay in constant contact with employees.  Huang encourages employees to reach out to him directly for help with problems they’re working through. “I show people how to reason through things all the time — strategy things, how to forecast something, how to break a problem down,” he said.  “In the process of doing that, of course, I learned a lot from [the employee],” he added. “You gave me a seed of a lot of information. I learned a lot, and so I feel rewarded by the process.”

Reject top-down leadership.  Huang is known for his flat organization structure and for having 50 direct reports. Why so many? Huang believes those in senior positions should require the least oversight from management. He doesn’t agree with the mindset among many CEOs that “the information of a CEO is supposedly so valuable, so secretive, you can only share it with two other people or three, and their information is so invaluable, so incredibly secretive, that they can only share it with a couple more,” he said. “I don’t believe in a culture, in an environment, where the information that you possess is the reason why you have power.”  Instead, he believes management’s role should be to empower employees to do their best work. “You should create the conditions by which they can do their life’s work, which is my mission,” he said.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of chipmaker Nvidia, presides over the third most valuable company in the world. But, as his oft-repeated origin story goes, his first job was working as a dishwasher at Denny’s when he was a teenager.
2. “I was probably Denny’s best dishwasher. I planned my work, I was organized,” he told Stanford MBA students during a recent interview.  
3. Four leadership lessons Huang shared with the university’s budding entrepreneurs are:  set your own definition of success (Nvidia made its name moving into fields where the market wasn’t established), It’s OK to be lazy sometimes (about some things, particularly taking on work that any other company accomplish, “We should go select the things that if we didn’t do it, the world would fall apart.) , stay in constant contact with employees (theygave me a seed of a lot of information. I learned a lot, and so I feel rewarded by the process.), and reject top-down leadership.

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Topics:  Leadership, Decision-making, Innovation, Teams, Entrepreneurship