#376 Jensen Huang: Founder of Nvidia | Founders

There's an idea in this book where it says Jensen prioritized technical skill and maximum effort above all.

And as I was reading, I noticed a lot of similarities between the way Jensen thought and ran his company with the way that Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos thought and ran their companies as well.

In fact, from day one in Jeff Bezos' very first shareholder letter, Jeff wrote about the importance and emphasized the importance of having the very best team.

He wrote, setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been and will continue to be the single most important element of Amazon's success.

Jeff's focus on talent is very similar to this quote that I found from Steve Jobs in an interview that Steve gave that very same year in 1997.

And this is what Steve Jobs said.

He said that I think I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with.

You must find extraordinary people.

The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is, at most, two to one.

But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to one, given that you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream.

He said you want to build a team that pursues the A plus players.

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That is ramp .com. So the book that I want to talk to you about today is the Navidia Way, Jensen Wong and the Making of a Tech Giant, and it was written by Tae Kim.

The book is a company history of Navidia.

But that is not what I want to talk to you about.

I want to talk to you about how the founder Jensen has learned to run his company after decades of experience and learning and practice and failure and pain.

And so there is 19 different ideas that popped out to me and there's like reoccurring themes and I think they to steal an idea from from Charlie Munger.

Charlie Munger has this idea that he talks about over and over again.

He talked about over and over again for decades.

He talked about the Lollapalooza effect and how there's these economic and social implications of these different ideas inside of a company that interplay with one another and the combination of them actually make the the traits more powerful.

And in typical Charlie Munger fashion, he said the person, the man who doesn't understand this is a damn fool.

And so I organized my notes into this list of 19 ideas that I learned from Jensen, specifically how he runs his company from reading the book.

Before I get there, though, I got to take another idea from Munger where he talks about the importance of why he read so many biographies.

And he says that when you're trying to teach the great concepts that work, I think it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who develop them.

So before I get to my list of 19 ideas, I want to give you this brief overview of Jensen Wong's early life and then the prehistory of Navidia.

And I think doing so add context because Jensen runs Navidia in a very unique way.

He has built, which I think all of he has in common with a lot of his case entrepreneurs.

He built a company building philosophy that is natural and authentic to him.

He's been running the video for over three decades and I think it's impossible to do something for such a long period of time unless it is natural and authentic to you.

So the one of the most important things that happened in Jensen's life happened when he was four years old.

He was born in Taiwan.

His father visits America.

He goes to New York City and he realizes, oh, this is the land of opportunity.

I want if I want the best opportunity for my two sons, I need to get them to America.

And doing so had to feel like a daunting task to his father.

Jensen's family did not have money.

In fact, they didn't even have a lot of stability.

They had to move around Taiwan depending on where his father could find work.

They did not. The two brothers, Jensen and his brother, did not speak English.

In fact, I thought it was very fascinating how Jensen's mother decided, hey, the kids need to go to America and if they're going to America, they needed to learn English.

And so she would select 10 random words from the dictionary every day.

She'd make her sons memorize the definition and learn how to spell the words.

So 10 English words every single day.

And so in addition to reading this book, I watched a bunch of interviews with Jensen and he talks about the fact that he has he feels a great debt.

The fact the sacrifices that his parents made to give him access to essentially unlimited opportunity.

One of the great things about reading, you know, this is not technically a biography of Jensen, but it can function as one.

And one of the reasons I become an evangelist for reading biographies, I try to get people to read as many as possible because you're not really yes, we're studying and we're learning about the lives of other people, but it is natural.

It's human nature to put yourself in their shoes and think about how their story or their ideas relate to your own.

And this was, you know, actually surprisingly hit me like an emotional point because I was just thinking about the fact that, you know, this is outside of Jensen's control.

He's four years old when this is happening.

And yet the decisions that were made before Jensen even had a memory affected the entire trajectory of his life.

And I thought about the fact that my paternal grandfather was born in Cuba.

He died before I have no memory of him.

He died when I was really young.

I think I was actually four, as a matter of fact, maybe even younger.

And yet I owe the, like the entire trajectory of my life was changed by a decision of an uneducated, relatively poor man who was living in Cuba.

He was 38 years old.

He was working any kind of job.

He worked as a butcher and in a factory that made shoes.

You know, he was not a prosperous man.

He was not an educated man.

He was married. He had a baby, okay?

A two year old. That was my dad and he cast her ticks over and he decides somehow he knew he's like, this is really bad.

I have to get out of here.

He winds up, imagine living your entire life in a country.

You're 30 years old.

You have a life and a kid.

You don't have any money.

You don't speak the language and you just, and you take that risk and you come to America and that decision based on somebody I don't have any memory of changed the entire trajectory of my, of my life.

It was just the luckiest, the kindest thing that ever anybody's ever done for me, the luckiest break ever had in my life.

And I think there's a lot of similarities between the, what his parents are willing to do, what Jensen's parents are willing to do.

The fact that they send their, their sons, imagine sending your kids.

They send Jensen and his brother to Washington, to Tacoma, Washington, to live with their aunt and uncle before they can get over to America themselves.

And then what happens?

They decide, okay, my, my, our boys are here.

We know they need to get a good education.

We're going to send them to an American boarding school.

Okay. So they think what they find this place called Anita Baptist Institute, which is located in Kentucky to pay the tuition.

Jensen's parents sell off all their possessions.

Now here's the problem.

It's not a prep school.

It's not a boarding school.

I mean, it's technically a boarding school, but they thought the family was done as a prep school.

It is a school, a reform school for troubled young people.

So really the reason I want to add this like extra context for Jensen's early life for you is because I think this entire section and all the notes and stuff that I want to talk to you about before the founding of NVIDIA and really the first like 10 years of NVIDIA 2, you could really summarize it by one

of my favorite maximums in the history of entrepreneurship.

And that is excellence is the capacity to take pain.

Jensen has unfathomable levels.

I can't, I have not discovered the end of his capacity to take pain.

He talks about this a lot.

So there's two things actually happening at the reform school.

I think are really important.

One, the school holds the students to a very strict routine and you have to work every single day, which Jensen does and loves to do now.

The other thing that was beneficial to him that probably didn't feel the same way for me in a few months, Jensen was smaller than, smaller and younger than, than all of his classmates and they beat the crap out of him.

His roommate at the boarding school was eight years older than Jensen and they said there's a great description of in the book that he's covered in in tattoos and in scars from stab wounds.

And so after getting his ass kicked a bunch, they wind up like finding his footing, gaining respect.

He's obviously somebody that's, that's not going to back down from a fight.

life is talking about this formative experience going to the school and he says as a result of this experience, I don't get scared often.

I don't worry about going places I haven't gone before.

I can tolerate a lot of discomfort.

So then the other the next thing I want to talk to you about is I want to fast forward and at this point we find Jensen is already graduated college.

He is working for a microchip company.

It's AMD advanced micro devices and this is just his capacity to take pain.

He's got large I would say he's got a lot of endurance and you know he's got a phenomenal work ethic and so by day he's designing microchips at AMD and at night and on weekends he's married and has two kids by the way.

So he's got a young family he's got a full -time job and he decides he wants to go to Stanford he wants to get a master's degree.

It's gonna take him eight years to finish his master's degree because he can only go on nights and weekends and and spare time while he's working and then raising his very young family.

But again he took away a very valuable lesson.

He says I have a very long -term horizon.

I can be impatient about certain things but infinitely patient about others.

I plug away and so here's another example that excellence is a capacity to take pain.

Everywhere that Jensen works and everywhere he goes people realize he's really smart and then he winds up getting promoted rapidly almost everywhere he's at and he there's this line in the book that's fantastic it talks about like why does he think that he was able to be propelled from scrubbing toilets to

managing entire divisions of microchip of a microchip company and he believes it's his willingness and ability to put in more effort and tolerate more suffering than anyone else and again this is something he repeats in a bunch of the interviews I watched with him as well he says people with very high

expectations have very low resilience.

Resilience matters in success Jensen said greatness is not intelligence greatness comes from character and in character in Jensen's view it can only be gained and actually earned as a result of overcoming problems setbacks adversities and refusing to quit.

Perseverance is one of I think Jensen's most valued traits and it is also advice that he doles out so if you were to ask Jensen what is your advice on how to achieve success his answers relatively consistent over the years he says I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering so I want to get into

a very important part of like the prehistory of Nvidia and Jensen is working at this company called LSI logic and there's a few actually there's three important things that jumped out at me that I think were important for the time that Jensen's that Jensen spent at LSI logic one he's gonna pick up this maxim

that he'll repeat throughout as he's building Nvidia it's called honing the sword and it's the idea that again this is something that Jensen has in common with Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs and a bunch of other people but I want to give you two examples there that you should seek conflict if you're working

on something you care about don't avoid confrontation you actually seek conflict and Jeff Bezos said the greatest example of this he says if I have to choose between agreement and conflict I'll take conflict every time why because it always yields a better result so they're having these explosive fights

and arguments inside of like what what to build what direction how to run the company and he realizes that out like it might be temporarily uncomfortable to go through that experience when it's happening but on the other side of that is a better idea a more refined idea so the reading reasons obviously

called honing sword honing sword how do you sharpen a sword you you hit it against a wet stone a wet zone and doing it over and over and over again creates a sharper and a better sword this one's that becoming one of his main philosophies and one of the 19 things I want to talk to you about when we

get there but again every time I read anything it could be a book an article a tweet I always think about like how does what I'm reading now relate to all the other you know 375 other books that you and I have studied on this podcast together and so honing the sword actually reminded me of Steve Jobs

rock tumbler story so there's just a great interview I think it's called Steve Jobs a lost interview I think it occurred right before he went back to Apple sister's right right around 1997 so he tells a great metaphor Steve you know master storyteller has a great metaphor for teams working on a product

that they are passionate about and this is what Steve said there was an 80 year old man that lived on my street one day he showed me a dusty old rock tumbler we took regular old ugly rocks and some liquid and powder and put them in the tumbler and he said to me come back tomorrow the next day we opened

the can we took out these amazingly beautiful polished rocks the same common stones that had gone in they're rubbing up against each other creating a little friction creating a little noise had come out these beautiful polished rocks it is through a group of incredibly talented people bumping up against

each other working together they polish each other they polish their idea so the first thing that happened when he's working outside logic he grabs this one philosophy he's gonna use you know for multiple decades into the future the second thing which is arguably the most important thing is this is where he's

going to meet his future co -founders and there's another maximum I want to put into your brain and that reappears over and over again in the books all time opportunity handled well leads to more opportunity so Jensen is working at LSI right and he's assigned the Sun microsystems account he is going

to meet there's two gifted programmers and engineers Jensen said this you know this is one of the luckiest things ever happened in the fact that he met Chris Malachowski and Curtis Preen these are going to be his co -founders so he is their liaison between Sun Microsystems where they work and LSI where Jensen

works and so Chris and Curtis actually get upset at Sun Microsystems they decide to leave and they have this idea that they want to be consultants and advisors they want to tell they want to essentially pitch Samsung on taking one of their ideas and they're like hey we'll just you know design it we'll

be consultants from them and they're like wait a minute we're like really good technologists we might have a lot of technical brilliance but we don't know anything about contracts or business really we need to get somebody to help us and they're like who's the best person that can help us and they loved

working with Jensen so much and they thought he was so brilliant they're like oh we immediately reach out to Jensen so originally Curtis and Chris are like hey can you help us like write this contract for this idea that we want to pitch Samsung we want to make sure we don't get screwed over they start

meeting and eventually Jensen's just like well why are we doing this for them why don't we start our own company and that's what I think it's so important to repeat over and over again that opportunity handled well leads to more unexpected opportunity you can never possibly predict the fact that you

know every single job that Jensen does he does the best possible job you can and that now as the time passes as you want as you read the book as you go as his life unfolds that the fact that he handled the opportunity the best he did the best possible job he did unlocks all these other opportunities

I remember there's actually a great way to think about this and one way I think about this all the time and like if you hear my own inner monologue there's this basketball player he's a young basketball player named Anthony Edwards and he plays for the Timberwolves and they were like really outperforming

what people thought they were gonna do in the playoffs and I heard one of his I saw a clip of one of his postgame interviews and I thought what he said was fantastic and he had a very Anthony ended where it's had a very simple like opera like modus operandi or way to approach thing he's like hey I'm

just trying to kill everything in front of me I'm just trying to kill everything in front of me is another way of saying that whatever opportunities in front of me I'm gonna do the best damn job possible and if I do that every day that opportunity had a well is going to lead to more unexpected opportunity

now that's also combined with another maximum you and I talked about their relationships around the world so Jensen's working for LSI okay he goes to the CEO Wilfred Corrigan and he's like hey I'm gonna leave I'm gonna do this this business with Curtis and Chris and what is LSI co the first thing he

says can I invest because he's like you're you're brilliant you're one of the smartest people at this company and this this is the third reason that I wanted to talk about Jensen's time at LSI logic and how it was so important to the free history of novidia because what is Corrigan do Corrigan actually

introduces Jensen to Don Valentine the founder of Sequoia and Sequoia and Valentine had invested in LSI now here's the reason I say opportunity handle well leads to more opportunity and relationships on the world when Wilfred Corrigan calls Valentine he's not saying hey you should these guys want to

make graphics cards or they want to do he didn't even pitch them the startup idea he pitched Jensen he's like hey this guy wants to start his own company he's really smart he is really good you guys should go talk to him now this is the fascinating thing because not only did like Jensen gets this gets

this introduction they suffers reputation Jensen talks about this and something you and I will talk about later too and I think again another trait I hate to repeat myself but I have to because I think it's a repetition is persuasive it's really important Jensen has so many traits he fits right in with all

the people that you and I study and one of them is this fierce habit of self -criticism of never thinking anything is good enough and so Jen there's tons of highlights our quotes of the book where Jensen's just like I suck I cannot believe I did that and he talks about the fact that when he goes and pitches

what's gonna be novidia to Don Valentine he's like my pitch was horrendous I couldn't explain what I was building I couldn't say who I was building it for I couldn't even tell him why I was gonna be successful and yet the end of the meeting Sequoia decides to invest and there's a great quote on Don Valentine

in this he goes a beds against my better judgment based on what you just told me I see a sick crappy bitch I'm gonna give you my money but if you lose my money I will kill you Valentine told him and so Jensen's like listen the important takeaway here again he goes to school and everybody so your reputation reputation will precede

you like they succeeded on the strength of your reputation not their business plan not their pitch and this is a very important point because I always think of what there's a line where like but if you go and read Buffett shareholder letters and you go and watch his head the way he answers questions

at the AGM and you can go see these YouTube videos where he actually testifies in front of Congress you'll see the Buffett for probably for over four decades talks about the fact that you're you have to be very and you should be making all your decisions that protect your long -term reputation in mind

in fact when Buffett is testifying in front of Congress when that he was going to the Salomon Brothers scandal he talks about the fact that he told he's telling the congressman that he told everybody inside the the organization that if you lose you can lose money for the firm I won't be understanding

you lose a single shred of reputation and I will be ruthless he put that into the congressional record and again I think he talks about the fact that you know the reason is is because if you're making decisions with the importance of your long -term reputation in mind that's gonna pay dividends and it

can also destroy and and abort operate future opportunities if you have a bad reputation Jensen says the same thing it's like it is a lesson that Jensen would never forget your reputation will precede you obviously it pays dividends in business I was thinking about this with Brad Jacobs I became friends

of Brad Jacobs as a result of this podcast Brad is on his I've lost count eight nine I think he's on his ninth separate billion dollar company and when I'm reading this part when I got to this part about about Jensen I was like you know what Brad Jacobs could do a horrible job with a pitch to yet because of his track

record because of his reputation the fact that his great reputation precedes him if he's starting a new project or he wants to raise money for his new company he's gonna have a line out the door around the block and down the street waiting for people to invest in him and his next idea because of that track

record because of that reputation so there's just a few more things before we get to this list of 19 ideas that I want to spend the whole the bulk of the conversation you and I are gonna have today but I do have to get to the beginning of Nvidia because it's funny he describes this because I went back

and actually looked at like the financial performance of Nvidia and the market cap is almost like there's this harshness that that that Jensen applies to himself which I think is a good idea if you're listening to this you probably do this I definitely do this to myself but he kind of described her

first fit five to fifteen years of the company is like just a series of fuck -ups and I just want to get to this idea of well I'll just give you some background their first product right is a flop and it's called the NV1 and so Jensen is actually doing like this post -mortem and he realized they they

made several critical mistakes with the NV1 and so I'm gonna read a section from the book to you so some of these critical mistakes from the NV1 starts from positioning to product strategy says they had over designed the card stuffing it with features no one cared about the market simply wanted the fastest

fastest graphics performance for the best games at a decent price and nothing else the NV1 could simply could simply not stack up against other cards that were more narrowly designed this is what Jensen said we learned it was better to do fewer things well than to do too many things nobody goes to the store

to buy a swish army knife it is something that you get for Christmas so that's an idea that James Dyson realize so my number one recommendation for about every single book that I read is still James Dyson's first autobiography it's called against the odds because the entire book is just 14 years of struggle

it's James making every single mistake possible that a young entrepreneur can make it's him persevering and enduring through 5127 failed prototypes but James realized the same thing when he started building products he's a great line in that book that describes what Jensen's teaching us at this point

in Nvidia's history and he says people this would Dyson said people do not want all purpose they want high -tech specificity another lesson Jensen learned from this he was embarrassed the fact of how little he did not know again he is ruthless like the self -criticism he's really ruthless himself but I

think there's a there's a benefit because it's forcing himself to learn and this is something he's gonna apply this public criticism that he's known for in building the video so he was talking about the fact that one of the first board meetings you know this NV1 almost killed the company and yet at the board

one of the board members was asking he's like well how are you gonna position this and this is what Jensen said he goes he asked me a simple question and I had no idea how simple it was and it was impossible for me to answer because I didn't understand it the answer is supremely deep you'll spend your

whole career answering that question and again the issue was that Nvidia's message with the NV1 was far too complicated he didn't put enough thought into how you position it what's very weird about product positioning is everybody comes up with their own definition of it I think David Olgovey's definition that he

wrote in like 1965 has not been approved on improved on I still think it's the best simple way simple way to think about how to position your product and so David Olgovey's definition of product positioning simple it's what the product does and who is it for there's a great line that the author Tay

Kim wrote in this section that I think is beautiful it says seduction requires a simple message the the marketing and the positioning of the NV1 was far too complicated and also Tay I gotta thank Tay as well he's he sent me a bunch of supplemental material to help me make this podcast and Tay wrote

an absolutely fantastic book because it gives you this insight into the unique mind of Jensen Jensen does not shy away from how bad he was during this this period he talks about this here's another quote from the book on the early days in the video we were just bad at our jobs the first five years of our

company we had really talented people working super super hard but building a company is a new skill and that is why you know the value the main value I got in the book he say we were able to benefit in the fact that Jensen learns he's going to adjust you'll see in the future is maniacal working habits

he picks up all these ideas about the dangers of complacency the importance of having a flat fast organization he's got a lot of new ideas on how to run Nvidia and he wouldn't have had them had he not gone through the painful and tumultuous time in the company's early history so their first two products

fail they got mass layoffs they're in a cash crunch he goes back to again do you want to be great well then I wish you pain and suffering he's speaking he's giving advice that had benefited him and again I think all this this these failures that happen is like you see him developing his endurance you

see him develop developing his pain tolerance because it's impossible to run a company for 30 years and not confront endure and overcome at that adversity and discomfort it's just not gonna happen so at this point in the company history Jensen has to lay off he has to do mass layoffs he goes down from over

a hundred employees to down to 40 and Jensen also realizes that Nvidia is not gonna be able to raise more money so in the words of Jeff Bezos what it has to do they have to invent their way out they need to create a great product and sell it the third product they're making is called Reva 128 and since

he's running out of money he realized hey we have to shorten the amount of time it usually takes us to build a new product one way to do that is to actually shorten the testing cycle so let me read this from the book Jensen heard about a company I think it's called Ecos the main machine that enabled

engineers to run tests on digital chip prototypes bypassing the need to make an actual chip for testing and thus saving time but an Ecos machine cost a million dollars and would cut Nvidia's runway from nine months down to six months but Jensen realized it would speed up the testing process by significantly

more time that saved time actually saved the company because this third product was a success and then you see that Jensen's has he's a very good salesperson he's very charismatic he's got a showmanship to him and so let me give an example once they they they build a Reva 128 he gathers all of the entire

company which not many people left in the company cafeteria he pulls out a piece of paper from his pocket and he reads off a dollar amount it is a small dollar amount and then he folds the paper back puts in his pocket say hey that's how much money we have in the bank that's not good the room was like

oh shit we're in big big trouble and then he pulls out another piece of paper from his pocket he opens it up and he goes one purchase order from STB systems for 30 ,000 units of Reva 128 and the entire company erupted in cheers okay so I say all that really to save this this is now this list of 19 reoccurring

ideas that I think connected interplay with each other and it's really like again how Jensen what is Jensen learned on how to run a company and how to build a company after decades and decades of experience and learning and practice and failure and pain and the very idea number one of the 19 is Jensen

as a teacher so therefore I want to start here because the very first sentence in the book is in another life Jensen might have been a teacher that of course is gonna mean a lot to you and I because a commentary of history of founders is the fact that they spend a lot of their time teaching their organization so I

actually went and talked with sage about this or prompted sage about this and there's a great a lot of great examples so many of the great founders saw themselves primarily as teachers yeah people like Sol Price Henry Singleton Warren Buffett Bill Walsh Steve Jobs in fact Jim Sinigal the founder of Costco

who was a mentee of Sol Price has the best quote on this he says if you're not as a leader of the company if you're not spending 90 % of your time teaching you're not doing your job and so one of the ideas that sage reminded me of that I forgot is that there cynical learn that from Sol Price Sol Price

had this idea of what like why are you teaching what are you actually doing and he says you actually the best leaders create alter egos through teaching the end result of the leader teaching all their employees to become alter egos now you have somebody that can understand and perform their jobs as

well as well as are better than the owner or the leader of the company would this is why I think distilling things down to a list of principles or a handful of maxims is so common and so important because essentially what the leader of the company is doing what Jensen's doing is you're continuously

teaching and reinforcing your company philosophy and the values over time by repeating the principles and the maxims the great founders essentially become evangelists who relentlessly teach about the company's mission and the values and in fact the people that work with Jensen they call him professor professor Jensen

and they talk about the fact that he has a very he's a he's really good at explaining complicated concepts in a way that almost anybody can understand and the way he does this he has a tool for this actually he likes to use his preferred medium for teaching is the whiteboard and so in the book it says

at many of the meetings that he attends in the video he will leap up with marker in hand and diagram a problem or sketch an idea even if someone else is speaking or whiteboarding themselves at the same time okay so idea number two Nvidia is Jensen with twenty nine thousand lives right now Nvidia has twenty

nine thousand employees so one of the first sentences are the first sentence in the book is that in another life Jensen might have been a teacher one of the last sentences in the book is the most succinct definition of the Nvidia way is that it's Jensen's way or that it is simply Jensen himself there's

a lot of similarities between Steve Jobs and Jensen and one of the ten or fifteen books I've read about Steve Jobs and Apple there's a line that's stuck in my brain that I never forgot and it's talking about how he built Apple he said he's made and remade Apple in his own image Apple is Steve Jobs with ten

thousand lives what Jensen and Steve Jobs both learned the importance of managing learning how to manage your company as an extension of yourself says everyone at the company shared Jensen singular focus on the mission everyone shared his work ethic everyone worked as fast as humanly possible in order

to keep the video one step ahead of the competition he is Nvidia and the company is Jensen the way I think about this there's another night left myself you could say you know Jen's Nvidia's Jensen with 29 ,000 lives or you can say you need to build an F one organization because he has a great line about this he

says ultimately my e staff which is his direct reports which we'll talk about later is something that I have to know how to work with the company's organization is like a race car it has to be a machine that the CEO knows how to drive Michael Moritz wrote this book called The Little Kingdom and it is about the first

few years of the history of Apple he updated the book in I think 2009 -2010 that that book is called The Return to the Little Kingdom and he wrote a forward and there's a line in that book where he's describing in the introduction or in the forward he's describing Steve Jobs I think is very appropriate

here he said founders at least the very best of them are unstoppable irrepressible forces of nature that is certainly true for Jobs that is certainly true for Jensen I think what he said there is very smart the company's organization is like a race car it has to be machine that the CEO knows how to

drive and that's why he has built a company in his image he has made and remade Nvidia in his image so let's go to the third idea the whiteboard I already gave you a hint at Nvidia the whiteboard is a primary form of communication and meetings is very fascinating how you know again there's no right

one right way to do it it should be right for you you know some people like Bezos wants a six -page you know memo Jobs wants a demo Jensen wants the whiteboard so the whiteboard represents both possibility and an f for morality I can't pronounce that word I'm sorry the belief that a successful idea no matter

how brilliant must eventually be erased and a new one must take its place one of the reasons Jensen likes to use the whiteboard as the primary form of communication and meetings says everybody must demonstrate their thought process in real time in front of an audience with the whiteboard there is no hiding

I lost count how many times in the book they're talking about how central like how important whiteboarding is to running Nvidia and actually one of the things that take him was gracious to send me he sent me this this Wall Street Journal like write up a review of the book written by this guy named Ben

Cohen Ben has some great writing here in terms of like what he learned from reading the book and the importance of the whiteboard it says instead of cloistering himself in a private office Jensen prefers to work from conference rooms he does his best thinking at the whiteboard which he uses so frequently

that he has a favorite brand of marker that is only sold in Taiwan and so even when he's traveling they have to travel with this this specific brand of marker and they have to travel of whiteboards he's going to use this everywhere else this again I think explains why this is so important to Jen to

Jensen 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 lay out their thinking as thoroughly and clearly as possible it becomes immediately apparent when someone hasn't thought something through

at the whiteboard there is no place to hide idea number four flat organizational structure so Jensen's famous or infamous the fact that he has 60 direct reports and he refuses to do one -on -one so Jensen I think the one of the main reasons he designed a flat organization is a flat structure fights against

the danger of slow decision -making Jeff Bezos has this great thinking about how dangerous making decisions slowly inside an organization could be this is what Jeff said about this you can drive great people away by making the speed of decision -making really slow why would great people say in an organization where they

can't get things done they look around after a while and they say hey look I love the mission but I can't get my job done because our speed of decision -making is too slow this is something that Jensen learned in through you know to trial and error through failure he says when we were a small company

we were really bureaucratic and really political and so as a result of that Jensen thought about how he'd create this ideal organization from scratch and he realized he would choose a much flatter structure so that employees could act with more independence he also saw that a flat structure would weed

out lower performers who are unaccustomed to thinking for themselves and acting without being told what to do and he just said flat out I want to create a company that naturally attracts amazing people and so Jensen describes this flat organizational structure the first layer is the senior people this is his e

-staff you would think that they need the least amount of management he said they know what they're doing their experts in their field he did not want to spend time on career coaching because the majority of them had already reached the pinnacle of their careers he rarely held one -on -one meetings with his direct

reports instead he focused on providing them collectively with information from across the organization as well as his own strategic guidance and what I love about this is that he's adamant about running the company based on the best way to do it for him and he refuses to change his management philosophy

he is insistent on a flat structure it says he steadfastly refused to change his management philosophy even when new board members joined and recommended that he hired chief operating officer to reduce his administrative burden no thanks he replied this is a great way talking about the way he runs the company

in this flat organizational structure it's a great way to make sure everybody knows what's going on really think about what he's doing here what he's saying you create a company building philosophy that fits you it does not matter what other people are doing what is natural authentic to you and what do

you and are you going to enjoy doing that so you can do it for a long period time Jensen created a company that he could manage directly there is a vast cultural difference between Nvidia and other companies Jensen talks again about this and these these ideas are you know I organized them at all like

under topic but they're spread to hundreds of pages in the book so Jensen repeats again the benefits of keeping his company flat it turns out by having a lot of direct reports not having one -on -ones we made the company flat information travels quickly employees are empowered that algorithm was well

conceived and finally another benefit he says you want a company that's as large as necessary to do the job but as small as possible and not bogged down by over management and process number five and again this is why I think all of these really you know it doesn't really matter what order you take

them in other than I think number one probably has to be that Jensen's a teacher because he's really teaching his philosophy to the entire organization but very public criticism there's something he's known for this is probably repeated more than any other idea in the book and the reason I put this after number

four which is you know build a flat fast organization because turns out very public criticism works very well if you want a flat fast organization so Jensen does not believe you know this is maximum like praise publicly criticized privately no he does not he criticizes publicly so that the entire organization can learn

from a single person's mistake there's so many examples to book there's a lot of parallels to again Steve Jobs here I'm gonna read Jensen's words of like why he's doing this over the years I realized that what was happening how people protect their turf and how they protect their ideas so he's anti

you know he does not want bureaucracy to build up into a size company so I created a much flatter organization his anecdote to backstabbing to gaming of metrics and to political infighting is public accountability and if need be public embarrassment I just say it out loud I've got no trouble calling

people out so let me give you an example of Jensen's public criticism so that the entire company can learn from an individual stake and his constant fight against complacency which would be another idea that you and I will talk about Jensen was furious at the poor planning and execution on the chip

he called us its engineers and an all -company meeting is this the piece of shit you intended to build he shouted the architects did a shitty job putting the product together how could you not see the issue before it happened someone should have raised their hand and said we have a design issue here

this is a product they called the NV 30 and so yelling at the people or cursing at them you know some people are like I can't like can we kind of moderate our language can we be a little you know more kind or more respectful I was reading this it came from a it's not even from Johnny Ives biography

it actually comes from an interview Johnny I gave after Steve Jobs passed and he talked about one of the best criticism that he ever got from from Steve was the fact that Steve called Johnny Vane and this is what Johnny said he goes I remember asking Steve about this I could be perceived that his critique

of a piece of work was a little harsh right then that just sound like what we just the example we just went over with with Jensen seems pretty harsh it's like calling you a piece of he called you did a piece of shit I can't believe he did this he's screaming and so Johnny's recounting this conversation Steve

is like you know you were kind of harsh with your criticism we had put a lot of heart and soul into this and I asked he could we not moderate the things that we said a little and he said why and I said because I care about the team and Steve said this brutally brilliant insightful thing he said no Johnny

you're just really vain you just want people to like you I'm surprised at you I thought you held the work up as the most important not how you believe you were perceived by others and Johnny's response was I was terribly cross because I knew he was right Jensen is not doing this to intentionally hurt

people's feelings he's doing this because he puts the work up as the most important he is this great line where he says he tortures people's I guess I'm laughing he tortures people into greatness so Jensen offers Nvidia employees direct criticism in large meetings so more people can learn from a single

mistake this is what he says feedback is learning for what reason are you the only person who should learn from this we should all learn from that opportunity he says Jensen displays his trademark directness and impatience in all settings he does this all the time in small meetings to he just can't

let go he has to make it punitive a little bit again public criticism is very important to Jensen it's repeated I don't know a dozen times over and over again in fact I saw it so much I went up leaving myself the same note over and over again I go this is just like Steve Jobs telling Johnny that he's

vain that you're putting people's emotions over the work again Jensen is going to hold up the highest he's going to hold the work as the quality of the work as the most important so I don't want to seem like a like a like a crazy obsessed person even though I definitely am I play I play the the documentary

the last dance in the background while I work and the last dance is obviously about Michael Jordan and the final season with the Bulls and there's actually a that was going over the outline and reading the book while this is playing in the background and there's actually a line in the documentary where one

of Jordan's teammates is describing Jordan and because I was like eyeballs deep in the world of Jensen the past few weeks at the same time I'm rewatching the documentary I was like oh this sounds just like Jensen so this is this is Jordan's teammate describing Michael Michael wanted to be the best player

on the best team he's raising his voice he's calling guys out he's talking about how he's treating his teammates right he's raising his voice he's calling guys out so we're not playing well as a team we're lazy he's not worried about hurting your feelings if he did you could leave he would gladly tell

you you don't want to play hard fine get out and then right after this Michael is explaining this leadership style and why he played the game the way he did and I feel like there's an echo of of of Jensen Jensen is not trying to be like oh just you know just another founder he's trying to be the best

of the best to create a company that nobody else on the planet could create and he has done that and so he's talking about the fact that he's being really harsh on his teammates he's he's calling out how lazy they are and not not working hard enough not not practicing off not playing well in games and this is a time

when the second best player Scotty Pippen was out and he was really worried because they're losing games he goes every this is Michael Jordan speaking now he goes every day that Scotty wasn't playing gave someone else the confidence that they could beat us and if you're trying to maintain dominance

over people you don't want to give them a chance to gain confidence so that drove my energy let's get this thing rolling that leads into idea number six tortured into greatness this habit of self -criticism so Jensen is not just public site publicly criticizing other people he does this to himself he

has a great line about this where he talks about I want to torture people into greatness which he realizes he's tortured himself into greatness as well so I'll talk about this a little bit later on but Jensen believes that complacency kills and Jensen has this combination these traits may even seem

contradictory but I would just say that this combination of traits I'm about to describe to you is very common for a lot of history's greatest entrepreneurs and as a result of the podcast I get to meet a lot of world -class entrepreneurs today they listen to the podcast and they have these traits too

so Jensen has this combination of extreme self -confidence and charisma matched with this inner voice that says he sucks an inner voice that says nothing he ever does is good enough and that inner voice typically is impossible to satisfy so he tortures his team into greatness but he tortures himself

into greatness as well and so let me talk about this intense habit of self criticism this is much later in the videos history they just they smash this quarter the financial performance the products are great there's like we just blew the doors off this quarter we're having a meeting with Jensen I figure

is we're gonna like congratulate ourselves and he stands up in front of Jensen stands up in front of the room and he goes I wake up every morning I look at myself in the mirror and I say you suck and so the person working in a video just could not understand it's like this guy's why all counts one of the most

successful people in the world how could he still think in such terms and my answer to that by spending eight years and four months and reading 375 hours for history's greatest entrepreneurs so of course he does of course he does Jensen has a great line of the book says I don't like giving up on people

I'd rather torture them into greatness idea number seven this is very fascinating I don't think I've ever heard this idea before it's Jensen's speed of light idea so the speed of light idea is the only benchmark that we're gonna judge ourselves and how fast we move will be the absolute maximum speed

possible what the hell does that mean so he wants all of the work done in the video to be contained by only one thing and that's the law of physics so the speed of light means that you have to take every single project inside your company you break it down into its component tasks and then each task

must have a target time to completion that assumes no delays no cues or no downtime why of course you're gonna have some kind of unexpected things pop up because he wants to set the theoretical maximum which he calls the speed of light he wants to know what is the physics like the fastest this could be

done and you know it's the fastest it could be done because it's physically impossible to to exceed that time and then he says we're not gonna judge ourselves on what we used to do we're not gonna judge ourselves on what other companies do I don't give a shit what other companies are doing we are going

to judge ourselves against the speed of life so it's our speed of life speed of light says Jensen would reprimand subordinates who set goals are referred to what the company had already done before or what the competitors were doing at that moment as he saw it he needed to prevent that kind of eternal

rot that he observed at other companies so I'm gonna give you an example of Jensen speed of light idea already gave you a little hint earlier this is about the Reva 128 to save time Jensen decreed that Nvidia would have to develop their driver software for the Reva 128 before the prototype chip was completed

this was a reversal of the customary process this would say shave nearly a year off the production timeline you have to shave a year off a production time because if you remember he's running he's got nine months of cash now he just bought that machine so he's got six months of cash there is no time

so says this was shaved nearly a year off the production timeline but it required the company to find a way to bypass the step of testing the software and physical chips that's why Nvidia invested a million dollars in that icos emulate emulator even though every dollar was precious it would allow them

to approach the speed of time here's another description of the speed of time the video employees did not think did not let themselves think about what was likely to work or what they could reasonably achieve they only cared about what would be possible with the maximum amount of effort and minimum

amount of wasted time idea number eight Jensen is unapologetically extreme he's extreme in all things he works all the hours and he says no one will outwork me so these ideas I grouped all under idea number eight so you know I'm obsessed with Edwin land founder Polaroid Steve Jobs hero and there's a great line

in one of the many biographies of Edmond land I think I've done like five or six podcasts on Edmond land so if you haven't listened to them you should go on the back catalog and definitely listen to as many as possible Steve was studying Edmond land when he was 20 Steve was still studying him when he

was dying just incredible incredible person but Edmond land is you know one of one and there's a great line in one of his biographies there's somebody worked with with Edmond land he goes this man never had an ordinary action to anything Jets is the same way so there's this hilarious meme and any and any

guy knows this like you walk into a public restaurant there's our public restroom there's a series of urinals it is plight it is etiquette if there's a bunch of empty urinals do not stand next to me like give me some space and so there's this meme you always see where this guy is using urinal there's

like 50 empty urinals and then guy walks into the bathroom and uses the one right next to him Jensen literally does that he did that this guy's so relentless he will if you work for him he will grill you at the urinal I gotta read this to you no place in a video headquarters was safe from a drive -by grilling

from Jensen let me pause there actually I just thought of that this I didn't think about this are there there's a line again another perilous jobs talks about how intense his focus and like he'll stare at you and he'd like he should completely focus on you it's kind of like would scare some of the employees

at Apple and if they found him like an elevator or something they would like try to skip the elevator because you don't want his attention I think there was an example where like you get in the elevator by the time you get off you've lost your job it seems like focus on what you're doing you couldn't

explain where you're working on is very upset so there's a there's an element to that with Jensen as well so yeah Jensen is getting Kenneth Hurley's out of urinal Jensen walks up and starts using the one next to him and Hurley goes I'm not the kind of guy who likes to talk in the bathroom and Jensen

had other ideas he goes hey what's up and Hurley replied with not much which earned him a sidelong glance from Jensen Hurley panic thinking I'm gonna get fired cuz he thinks I'm not doing anything Hurley proceeded to list 20 things he was working on okay Jensen replied satisfied with the answer when I

first read that absolutely lost I started laughing go back to this idea I was like no one's gonna work me he's unapologetically shame he says there may be people smarter than me but no one is ever going to work harder than me when part of his staff mentioned to Jensen that some employees were griping

about the long work hours Jensen's response was typically direct people who trained for the Olympics grumble about training early in the morning too Jensen was sending a message long hours were a necessary prerequisite for excellence over and over again these these examples of Jensen just being completely

unapologetically extreme there's like some kind of like like a ward given by a magazine or some kind of like industry you know publication and they thought they were happy like oh look we finished second this is the early days of the video and Jensen sternly tells them second place is the first loser

Jensen's guidance was direct just go win the idea was whoever could run faster is going to grab all the land Jensen's unapologetically extreme when he was recruiting he invites this guy that working at he's a chief engineer at Silicon Graphics he invites him to lunch he goes listen John you should really

think about coming to Nvidia because ultimately I'm going to put SGI out of business Jensen is completely relentless about work he says you have to allow yourself to be obsessed with your work I work every day there's not a day that goes by that I don't work if I'm not working I'm thinking about working

working is relaxing for me and so here's an example how I'm just being unapologetically extreme actually created a lot of value for Nvidia and some might call this story like how do you work three times as hard and three times as fast as your competitors but there's just a lot of anecdotes in the book

where there's people that used to work in a video they got used to the culture then they leave and they go work at other like tech companies like wait why is everybody like everybody else is moving like slow motion there's like way let their culture is a lot less intense so it's not just to be a unapologetically

extreme for the sake of being unapologetically extreme we're throwing a lot of a lot of like hours at something it's like doing this you have an advantage other people don't and so Jensen this is before the AI boom the video is just a PC graphics it's still just in the PC graphics industry and he's

trying to figure out he's like okay like the top of this industry there's like a lot of turnover I've gotten to the top I want to stay here how do I do that and one way he does this about being unapologetically extreme so says if you look at the PC graphic industry why is it that one company can never

hold lead for more than two years now that the video is the market leader Jensen became obsessed with this problem he realized the whole industry moved according to the rhythms of the computer manufacturers who refresh their product launches twice a year chip makers Nvidia included took 18 months to

design and launch a new chip and typically only worked on one ship at a time which means chips were functionally obsolete long before chip makers could come out with a new product Jensen and figure out figured out how to keep Nvidia ahead of its competition he said we were going to fundamentally restructure

the engineering department to line up with the refresh cycles which how do you do this the video would split the design team into three groups the first would design a new chip while the other two worked in parallel to the first to develop faster derivatives based on the new chip what is that why why

would you do that because this allows the company to release a new chip every six months the competitors are releasing a chip every 18 months and he has a line for this he says this was called three teams two seasons now the company would have three times as many chips on the market even if a competitor offered

a slightly better product PC makers would have no motivation to switch away from Nvidia knowing that a faster part would arrive within six months idea number nine this is one of my favorite ideas I've never heard this either it's Jensen's top five email idea really this is just a genius way to get unfiltered

information from the entire company so Jensen asks every employee in the video at all levels that you have to send an email and they're called like T5T so you need the top five things that you're working on or what you've recently observed in the market things like customer pain points what some competitors

doing any kind of new development in technology if there's any kind of project delays and so the ideal top five email is five bullet points where the first word is an action word and so something like finalize build or secure and to make it easier for Jensen to filter these emails he has each department

tag them by the topic in the subject line so let's say he wants to get all the recent emails on hyperscale or accounts he can just easily do a keyword search see all that and then read through all these bullet points now top five emails is a crucial they are crucial feedback channel for Jensen and he

would tell his employees why he why he the top five emails are so important he says it's easy to pick up on the strong signals but I want to intercept them when they are weak which he winds up doing which I'll tell you back in one second but again I think all these ideas are combined unapologetically

extreme top five emails so he's like you know I want to pick up on these weak these signals when they're weak and then we can develop into something that's strong but to his e -staff he said it this way don't take this the wrong way but you might not have the brainpower or the wherewithal to detect something

that I think is pretty significant so every day he reads you know over a hundred top five emails to get a snapshot at what's happening inside of the company and so I want to read from that Wall Street Journal article that was written by Ben Cohen that take him sent me his employees have been sending

notes known as T5 T's top five things that they're working on things are thinking about or things are noticing in the corners of the business and for decades Jensen has been reading them all of them if you send it Jensen says I'll read it top five thing emails have become his preferred method of flattening

hierarchy strategy isn't what I say it's what they do Jensen said that's a good line strategy isn't what I say it's what they do so it's really important that I understand what everybody is doing he does that by reading top five thing emails he doesn't want information that has already made his way

through layers of management what he wants is information from the edge that's a direct quote from Jensen he says I want information from the edge he is looking for the next zero billion dollar market a frontier that has not been explored because it barely exists but one day could be a thing one of the weak

signals that he intercepted years ago was a wonky but exciting development in machine learning that kept popping up in T5 T emails Jensen decided that Nvidia needed to invest more in tools for accelerating workloads on its GPUs this is why they're a three trillion dollar company today that decision clearly

paid off these days those GPUs are the brains of artificial intelligence and again the the hilarious part about him being unapologetically extreme he says this is what he does for fun he's like I drink a scotch and I do emails and the one one funny thing there's an anecdote in the book that's pretty

funny where people hate when Jensen goes on vacation because he emails them more it's they're like what are you supposed to be on vacation no I'm doing emails I'm like watching my kids play or whatever when they were younger they have there's a very intense email culture at they'd say the email culture

in a video is like unrelenting there's nothing he doesn't let anything stare anything fester if you get an email from him you need to act on it right away he does not want anything to fester and in fact I finished reading this book quite a while ago and I were working on outline and organizing the ideas

for way longer than I normally do because I really do think it's you know he's probably he is one of the most important founders alive right now and I think there's just a lot of good ideas that you and I can hopefully use in our work too so I've been like having non -stop conversations with a bunch

of my founder friends about this and I was actually telling a friend about this intense email culture described in the book and I didn't know that Nevada invested invested in my friend's company this company called together AI and the company's again this is just an investment from Nvidia and he's like

oh yeah like he's like that in real life like what do you mean he goes like he invested our company and we'll send emails and the response is super fast and at the same lunch when we're having lunch I met a young kid a young guy shouldn't say kid but a few years ago he was a kid he was probably like

19 at the time and he was working for like some chip company after I came over the name but he heard what we were talking about he's like oh yeah I emailed Jensen what do you mean you emailed Jensen he's like well I was an intern at the ship company and inside that company that kept talking about they're

developing like the Nvidia killer or whatever and so this intern at another chip company cold emails Jensen and within you know a few minutes Jensen writes back with like his perspective on is there like is it true what their company saying is it possible is an Nvidia killer but again he just wants

to know what's going on he wants information from the edge idea number 10 this won't come as a surprise Jensen's communication style blunt concise and direct he says over and over again he did he believes in direct truthful blunt communication we're not worried about people's feelings we're putting

the work above everything else but I just have to read one line that I absolutely loved Jensen's emails are short and sweet like a haiku this is something that even outside of work that he has in common with a lot of issues greatest leaders Napoleon was the same way let me read this this line from the biography

Napoleon that I read says long orders which require much time to prepare to read and to understand are the enemies of speed Napoleon could issue orders of a few sentences which clearly expressed his intentions and required little time to issue and to understand which a Churchill during World War two

ways fight in the Nazis he would limit the size of the memos that you could write him and he would tell his staff it is slothful not to compress your thoughts one of my favorite examples of this what did he just say Napoleon could issue an order in a few sentences which is clearly expressed his intentions

and only required little time to issue and to understand if you have not read the book creative selection highly recommend you do it's written by a programmer that would demo and work with Steve Jobs you could also listen to the episode which is episode 281 called working with Steve Jobs which is on that book

here's the line from the book it's gonna sound just like Jensen just gonna sound just like Napoleon just like Churchill Steve was always easy to understand he would either approve a demo or he'd request to see something different next time whenever Steve reviewed a demo he would often say with highly

detailed specificity what he wanted to happen next he was always trying to ensure the products were as intuitive and straightforward as possible and he's willing to invest his own time effort and influence to see that they were I chuckled to myself over how much time I've spent thinking about this iPad

demo and how much Steve taught me in one meeting where he spoke just four sentences idea number 11 Lua again all these ideas interact with each other I think they build upon one each other we just talked about them how important being direct important of doing you know having a flat organization structure

and going really fast so if you start rambling Jensen will just say Lua okay this is a maxim and a shorthand it's an acronym it means listen to the question understand the question answer the question so if he says Lua he wants you to stop and just do those three things in or listen to the question understand the question answer

the question number 12 this is so cool again I love there's a bunch of ideas in this book they're truly novel unique so number 12 the mission is the boss and pilot in command I think he really picked up on the fact that as you build an organization over time as it grows it starts to exist for the sake

of perpetuating itself and he's like no no we want a flat organization one like we want to just focus on the mission but as the mission changes and if you read the book and you obviously clearly like they started on the video game industry what are they doing now they're dominating the artificial intelligence

industry like that is because he had this flat fast reactive culture and organization and he can switch the mission and then take all the resources onto that new mission this is what Jensen says the concept of the mission is the boss makes a lot of sense because ultimately we're here to realize a particular

mission not in service of some organization under the mission is the boss philosophy Jensen starts every new project by designing a leader and I love what they call their leader they call the leader a pilot in command this pilot in command now is the one accountable for that that mission and is directly

reports directly to Jensen he says we have a PIC a pilot in command for every project nobody can hide behind such as such team is working that no it's a person there's a goddamn name attached to it the pilot in command is accountable Jensen organizing videos employees into groups centralized by functions

sales engineering operations and so on they're treated as a general pool of talent and not divided by business units or divisions why because when you have a new mission you take all these these functions sales you know engineering operations whatever and now you can turn them or point them at a new

mission and now they're under the direction of a pilot in command and then that pilot in command directly reports to Jensen again I think this is a really really important I dedicate an entire episode to this there's episode 360 if you haven't listened to it it's on Bob Kiernan the founder of Fast and All

he wrote a book that that book has one really one idea that you that the leader's job is to keep everyone inside of the organization working for the company's core objective that is very natural in human nature to drift and later like no no no back over here back on the company's core objective one

other section from this he gives Jensen gives his employees a high degree of independence over their individual projects but only if they can keep those projects perfectly aligned with the company's core objectives after you're done listening to this if you want I think you spent an hour really digging

into episode 360 the book is almost impossible to find I had a friend of mine actually right to the company and that's how we were able to get like 20 or 30 copies of the book I don't know if you can buy it anymore but episode 360 again you can summarize that by it's the leaders job to keep everyone

working towards the company's core objective number 13 it's one of my favorite lines in the book John Johnson Jensen says strategy is not words strategy is action strategy is not words strategies action Jensen said we don't do periodic planning the reason for that is because the world is a living breathing

thing we just plan continuously there is no five -year plan okay so again I'm gonna read that paragraph and I'm gonna filter that paragraph through every other thing that I've read for this podcast and every other thing that you and I've talked about it's that line strategy is not words strategies actions

one of my favorite lines book and immediately I think of Henry Singleton so Henry Singleton had a very distinct philosophy around planning I did a I think one or two episodes on him years ago I got to redo this see he's too important and I didn't know how to podcast back then so I gotta do another episode

on but Charlie Munger for example said Henry Singleton was the smartest person he ever met okay Buffett says that is a crime that business schools don't study Singleton I think he said you could take the top 100 business school graduates and combine their record and still wouldn't compare to Singleton's

record there's a lot of ideas because I discovered Buffett and Munger before I discovered Singleton that I thought were Buffett and Munger's and they were actually they learned from Singleton because he was building a very successful conglomerate called Teledyne so I go and I asked Sage for these ideas

like how did what did Henry Singleton say about planning and Sage did an excellent job summarizing Singleton's philosophy which to me sounds a lot like Jensen's philosophy so number one flexibility over rigid plans Singleton said I know a lot of people who have very definitive plans they follow assiduously

but we're subject to a great number of outside influences on our business and most of them can't be predicted so my plan is to say flexible sounds a lot like what Jensen just said number two daily steering steering verse long -term planning Singleton's approach was summed up in the quote where he says

my only plan is to keep coming to work every day I like to steer the boat each day rather than play plan way ahead into the future number three rather than getting caught up in detailed strategic plans Singleton focused on retaining flexibility and keeping options open he believed excessive planning

constrains freedom of action number four recognition of complexity which is exactly what Jensen said the fact that the world is a living breathing changing thing Singleton understood that businesses are subject to numerous outside influences it cannot be predicted making detailed long -term planning

potentially counterproductive and then this is I think what Jensen would agree with number five independent thinking when others are doing something Singleton was often skeptical for example late in his career when many companies are doing share repurchases Singleton said if everyone's doing them there

must be something wrong with them and so when Jensen also said hey there's another line that popped up to me he's like we don't have a five -year plan that is exactly the same kind of thinking that Michael Bloomberg used to build his company in fact in Bloomberg's autobiography this is what he wrote

I never let planning get in the way of doing don't devise a five -year plan central planning didn't work for Stalin or Mao and it won't work for an entrepreneur either okay idea number 14 choke you with gold this is a very very old idea Brad Jacobson his book how to make a few billion dollars talks about the fact

that you know between all of his companies is like a hundred forty thousand employees or something he goes listen money animates people everywhere you really should overpay for top talent because it's nearly impossible to overpay for top talent and the reason I distilled this down to the maximum choke

you with gold it's because I was reading this old book of David Olga V and David Olga V talks about this he says the Medici family persuaded this very famous sculptor in Florence to enter their service where they wrote him a letter which concluded come I will choke you with gold if you are talented

and contributing to Nvidia's mission Jensen will choke you with gold Jensen pours over the stock allocation reports managers can refer an employee for special consideration to senior executives Jensen will review this list of top contributor which they call TC list okay Jensen will review the list of top

contributor candidates and give out special one -off grants of stock that vest over a four -year period once such a grant is approved the employee receives an email from a senior executive with Jensen copied on the email the subject line will say special grant which authorizes the RSU grant in recognition of your

extraordinary contributions with a clear description of the rationale behind the award this is really important to about when you do this thing when you when you decide to grant these Jensen also reaches down into the organization anytime and awards stock directly without waiting for an annual compensation review

this allows them to ensure that people who are doing great work feel appreciated in the moment it is another sign of his interest in every single aspect and every level of his company which leads us to idea number 15 which is a quote from Walt Disney Walt Disney said if we lose the detail we lose it

all Jensen is in the details I'm sure people would accuse him of being a micromanager just like they would accuse Walt Disney being a micromanager or Steve Jobs and so on and so forth for his entire Jensen is keep in mind Jensen has run Nvidia for over three decades and the way he's done I see manages

the company directly he involves himself to reap deeply in product decisions sales negotiations investor relations and more he does not work in a private office he involves himself in everything at Nvidia and so all of these company building philosophies that he has learned implemented really allow

him to get out of the get the most out of the organization that he built and he built that organization in the bet that in the way that makes it the best for him to run member of Michael Moore it said on Steve Jobs and the great founders founders at least the very best of them are unstoppable irrepressible

forces of nature Walt Disney to fall into that category Steve Jobs a fall into that category Jensen falls in that category number 16 idea number 16 complacency kills no looking back no resting on our laurels innovation is a necessity not an option and paranoia and so there's a line in the book that says

Jensen runs the company the way he does because he believes the Nvidia's worst enemy is not the competition but itself the complacency that grips any successful company and this is he applies this to complacency that is both real and imagined remember he is a ruthlessly self -critical and blunt about his failures

and his mistakes and so you know people are looking at video now it's like one of the best companies ever created but he it's very fascinating that he doesn't like looking back and when you do look back it says he resists overly positive accounts of the video startup period and his own When we were younger

we sucked at a lot of things Nvidia wasn't a great company on day one we made it great over 31 years it did not come out great you don't build nv1 because you're great you don't build nv2 because you were great the failure of those nearly killed the company in its infancy and she has a great line about this he

says we survived ourselves we were our own worst enemy Jensen believes that for the first 15 years when he was he sucked he says this he actually says it in third person he goes if Jensen meaning himself wasn't even involved in the first 15 years of the company I would really like that he was not proud

how he managed the company and he says I don't love talking about our past but I don't want to like I think this is an important thing too it's like yeah he doesn't love talking about his past he's not just talking about his past failures he applies that even after a massive success remember that one

story when they're smashing the quarter and he tells his team they woke up that morning and wakes up most morning mornings looks at himself in the mirror and it's like you suck and I actually think there's a very productive way to do this so this idea of not looking back not resting on your laurels

again this is something he has common with Steve Jobs and he has a great way I think summarizes what Jensen's doing here not resting on his laurels not like he I think later on the book Jensen says something like you know wasting there's nothing worse than like looking back at your own accomplishments

or just not good use of your time and so what Steve says is I say he says I think if you do something it turns out pretty good then you should go do something else that's wonderful and not dwell on it for too long just figure out what's next the reason I think this is important that that it also fits

into like Steve Jobs overall philosophy if you go back and ask if Steve was asked one time like what his favorite quote is and it was actually a quote by Aristotle where it says we are what we repeatedly do excellence then is not a act but a habit and so I think Steve would tell you the key is keep

pushing forward stay hungry and continuing continue to create really wonderful things rather than then dwelling on past achievements and so thought this book is this this theme just reoccurs over again that complacency kills and went back and searched all my notes and highlights and you just see this over

and over again Andy growth he had this mantra success breeds complacency complacency breeds failure only the paranoid survive herb Keller the founder of Southwest said a company is never more vulnerable to complacency than when it's at the height of its success we must not let success and breed complacency

cockiness greediness laziness indifference preoccupation with bureaucracy hierarchy our obliviousness to threats posed by the outside world there's a great line from one of the biographies of Bernard founder of LVMH that I read he abhors complacency so much less Schwab who's one of Charlie Munger's

favorite founders he said we must constantly remind ourselves as to why we are successful and what we must do to continue to be successful because if we become complacent brother it's all over with Warren Buffett you need to fight off the ABCs of business decay arrogance bureaucracy and complacency

when these corporate cancers metastasize even the strongest of companies falter and so that combines with the fact that adnividi a innovation is a necessity it's not an option and so really you could think about this is really how you avoid the innovators dilemma so one of Jensen's favorite favorite

favorite books is the innovators dilemma one of the main takeaways he took from reading the book is that the threat is actually gonna come from the low end of the market and I actually love what he did here so number one the threat comes from low end of the market number to ship the whole cow and this is gonna be

fascinating so this is Jensen talking about how to avoid the invaders dilemma the innovation is a necessity it's not an option for them in a video he says we build Ferraris all of our chips were designed for the high end the best performance the best triangle rate the best polygons I don't want to let

someone come in and be the price leaders lock me out of the bottom and climb their way to the top see said that theme reappears throughout history obviously Clayton Christian talks a lot about that in the innovators lemmas Jensen saw the Nvidia could stop throwing away parts the failed quality tests

this is fascinating ship the whole cow is his idea here okay we're building Ferraris our chips are the best of the best the best best performance really high prices fat margins right so what if I wanted to attack myself what would I do and then I'll just go do that before somebody else does it to me

right so Jensen saw the Nvidia could stop throwing away parts the failed quality tests they failed quality test if you're building a Ferrari but not if you're building you know afford fusion right so true these parts were not suitable for the company's Ferrari grade ships but if they were otherwise

functional lower speeds Nvidia could repackage them into a less capable and therefore cheaper version of the company's mainline products this looked like a clear opportunity to make something out of nothing rejected parts were generating no revenue for Nvidia they were thrown out think about how many

different products byproducts that Rockefeller made from materials that were waste waste materials from the refining of kerosene that he went turning turning into products and these massive profitable product lines that again he was just throwing in the garbage now he's like oh we need to find uses

for our waste materials package them up as and sell our byproducts exact same thing that Jensen is doing here Nvidia could create a whole new derivative product line that could turn a profit without the expense of time and consuming process of research and development this line would serve as a defense

against competitors for whom the low -cost chip was their main product Nvidia could easily afford to price the chip down so much that a competitors would be forced to sell at a loss this strategy was dubbed ship the whole cow a reference to how butchers find ways to use almost every part of the carcass

not just the prime cuts idea number 17 Jensen goes to school and everybody already mentioned this earlier this is somebody this is this idea going to school and everybody was described and one of the biographies I've read of about a young Jeff Bezos they said he went to school on everybody obviously

before he's founded Amazon and during and after but Jensen has exact same you know tendency same idea so this is conference on neural information processing systems essentially an academic conference where all the machine learning and neuroscience experts present their latest findings okay and so there's

an actual niviti employee who's there and he runs into Jensen unexpectedly he's like well Jensen like what are you doing here you're not you're not you're not scheduled to speak to speak what are you doing with conference and Jensen told him I'm here to learn and what he noticed was that Jensen was sitting

towards the front row and it's not like he hired somebody to take notes on he's sitting there taking notes showing up himself and trying to observe absorb all the recent developments in artificial intelligence because again it goes back to Jensen wanting to be involved in every aspect of nividia he's

not trying to outsource things he's trying to be in the details Jensen also talks about the fact that you know at conferences like this he meets a lot of smart people and winds up and recruiting and they become employees and assets of nividia so this again I think is a reoccurring theme the importance

of going to school and everybody there is this guy named Mitch rails Mitch rails co -founder of this company called Dana here Mitch rails go school and everybody Dana here is like 170 billion dollar company today and a friend of mine was just at the small intimate conference with Mitch recently and he

was blown away by how focused Mitch was and the entire time Mitch was you know sitting through the front listening to speakers and he was taking pages and pages of notes and my friend had this thought where he's like I don't get this Mitch you're more successful than anybody else here why are you taking

notes and when my friend told me this story I go no wrong answer so there's a great line in Bill Walsh's book the score takes care of itself and he says champions behave like champions before they're champions I guarantee you Mitch rails did not build 170 billion dollar company and then start taking

notes he was going to school on everybody and taking notes and learning from every single experience way before he builds 170 billion dollar company way before he is quote unquote the most successful person in the room because this goes back to the max and the David always said the good ones no more

there's another example of Jensen being one of the good ones that no more Jensen shows up to this party at Nvidia it's a party for new hires introduce this guy named Peter Young Jensen already knew who he was he says you're Peter Young you've been here for a year from Sony PlayStation and then you worked

at 3d FX prior to that Jensen had similar recall of all the biographical details of the other 50 attendees of that party okay idea number 18 create markets don't do anything someone else can do don't do anything someone else can do is the motto of Edmond Land but what Jensen was setting out to do he

really believed he was building a company that was unlike any other company and he knew he didn't want to build an undifferentiated commodity product he wanted some kind of pricing power and so it says the video doesn't believe in building commodity products because commodities are subject to downward

pricing pressure as competition increases Jensen has always said that we should be doing things that other people cannot that is exactly what Edmond Land said we need to bring unique value to the marketplace and you do that by doing work that's cutting edge that's revolutionary work that no one else

can do we do not this is really the punch line we don't have a culture of going after market share we would rather create the market okay so all of these ideas leads us up to the final idea idea number 19 is swarm your greatest opportunity and the reason this one is last is because it's going to describe

the massive historical opportunity that nvidia has pursued in artificial intelligence and it's obvious when you read the book that all the things that you and i just talked about enabled and helped nvidia sees what is going to be likely the greatest one of the greatest opportunities that humanity has ever

has ever seen and a single company has been able to especially corner the market and and most of the profits so far so this is going to the wild thing here and this is going to be probably the longest section is the fact that this this played out over you know multiple decades jensen is going to recognize

the ai trend very early he's going to invest heavily you know when other people are telling him not to do this and he's gonna by doing so he's gonna maneuver his company into position to take advantage of it better than anybody else in the world so i'm gonna read a couple highlights we're just gonna go

through obviously this is what mainly the book is about but i'm gonna give you what i feel are like the the basic framework of important actions i think that that jensen did and so there's an idea that recurs throughout these these books and this idea that you have to stay in the game long enough to

get lucky so the idea that's going to turn nvidia into a multi -trinity dollar company actually came from their customers coming up with unique ways to use their product so the first reference to using nvidia gpu's for non -graphical purposes was in a 2002 research paper on using computers to simulate

the movement of clouds you could think of these like really weak signals that that that jensen was referencing earlier so it says an increasing number of computer science researchers are using GPUs for non -graphics applications researchers who ran their simulations on computers with GPUs reported significant

speed improvements over computers that relied on cpu power only these simulations required computers to learn how to reframe non -graphics computations in terms that graphical functions are in terms of graphical functions that a GPU could perform in other words the researchers had hacked nvidia's GPUs

now jensen's response here was brilliant he sees this way right this unexpected opportunity as a way to expand the market for his products and he's interested in making it easier for other people to do that so what does he do number one he hires the guy who discovered how to do this number two he picks

a mission he wants to make it easier for people like the guy who discovered this to find more non -graphical applications of GPUs why because anytime you make something easier for people to do that will expand the market and so this guy's name is harris harris is the guy that coins the phrase gp GPU

which means general purpose computing on GPUs which he's describing this phenomenon that he is witnessing now this is why jensen saying you know i want direct unfiltered information on information from the edge jensen quickly grasped that gp GPU had the potential to open up the markets for nvidia's

GPUs way beyond their existing market which was just computer graphics and so jensen's next side is well how do i make this easier the way i make this easier i want to generate more demand i need to make it easier to program these GPUs so he they create this new programming model for chips that they

call the compute unified device architecture it's called cuda cuda makes it possible and easier for scientists and engineers to leverage the gpu's computing power now keep in mind we're like a decade and a half before all this this this huge ai explosion because the reason that's important is because jensen

believed that this could expand nvidia's reach into every corner of the tech industry and this next section is why number 19 idea number 19 is swarm your greatest opportunity so this is happening in 2008 2007 2008 is where we are so the error of the gpu would create so many opportunities that jensen

saw at his mission to prepare nvidia to take advantage of it even if no one could know exactly what those opportunities would be everything else was secondary so again this is one of the most mind -blowing uh parts of the book for me because it's 2007 2008 jensen's decision to go all in on this is literally

going to create trillions of value for the company in the coming decades it's a crazy amount of foresight on his part and it's also going to require him to endure even more pain so jensen's way to do things is like i'm going to push this everywhere i want to make what i'm doing a foundational technology

and if jensen has conviction for that this is going to work he's willing to invest heavily for the long term even when other people and the market are telling him not to do that so let me just read this section those make a lot more sense jensen understood the importance of saturating the marketing

with the market with it the more people who had kuda in their hands the faster the technology would establish itself as a standard we should push this everywhere we need to make it a foundational technology jensen told the kuta team the move was extremely expensive it took four years and the company

invested so much in converting its gpu's for kuda compatibility that its gross margin fell from 45 to 35 as navidya increased spending on kuda the global financial crisis destroyed consumer demand and navidya's stock price fell by more than 80 from october 2007 to november 2008 jensen believed so strongly

in kuda's market potential that he remained committed to the course he had chosen even as his investors demanded a strategic course correction i believe in kuda jensen said we were convinced that accelerated computing would solve problems that normal computers couldn't we had to make that sacrifice

i had a deep belief in its potential and then navidya does something really smart here this is something there's been a couple examples of throughout history of the importance of doing so when you're doing something brand new you you have to make a commitment to spend a lot of time and energy and resources

into educating the market about this new invention so intel did this when they invented the microprocessor in fact they knew they were on to the biggest they they swarmed their greatest opportunity it was very confusing to the market very in some cases scary to the market so they they wind up sending

all the founders and the the the all the like the executives inside of intel including their founders spent the majority of their time educating the market and running classes in fact what navidya does here it sounds a lot like what intel did when they invented the microprocessor so developers don't

know what to do with that's fine navidya is going to teach them we are going to educate the market so navidya's chief scientist is again named david kirk begins offering and sending colleges and universities kuda capable machines if they committed to teaching a class on the subject uh david kirk wants

to visiting universities he would start educating students professors and department heads on all on all the changes on how they were teaching computer science because parallel computing was going to become far more important david kirk gave over a hundred talks over the course of a year on this he

winds up teaching a class himself at the university of illinois on the subject navidya took it upon themselves to go over and spread the religion of gpu computing before it could it really took off in fact this was a necessary step for it to take off there was no textbook on this so kirk decides to

write one there's always like this book this foundational book it's hilarious if you're trying to get a movement going i think one step is to write a book on this so kirk writes the textbook on this that that textbook sells tens of thousands of copies winds up getting translated into all these uh different

languages and it winds up being used by hundreds of schools to teach thousands maybe tens of thousands of students again the idea is like we need to educate the market in addition to doing this at universities they would host so the the business development and marketing people in navidya would host

summits they'd have like these two -day technology summits at navidya where researchers and computer sciences scientists and engineers could come and talk about like how they're using kuda and the gpu's and so dozens of researchers from life science industry chemical engineers biologists pharmacologists

software developers would would attend and then genson would show up and he would sit down and get feedback with the real world users of kuda and then use the insights that he learned from them to inform the development of the product and so again this is where now now we're in 2012 2013 and genson just

realizes oh my god this is going to want to be the biggest opportunities in history we are going to this opportunity of gpu -powered deep learning is going to be massive and we need to go all in and so let me read this part from the book for me there was considerable debate within the executive team

on this topic several genson's key lieutenants were against investing more in deep learning in the belief that it was just a passing fad but genson overruled them deep learning is going to be really big he said he said this in 2013 we are going all in on it so if you think about everything that you

and i have been talking about and highlighting and studying has led up to this genson had built a company in the image of his own focused yet far -ranging mind now he would pull every lever at his disposal at his disposal to navigate navidia to the very center of the tech industry as the company whose hardware could bring

about the ai -powered future it was definitely not a single day when the entire company changed forever it was a period of several months where genson was increasingly interested and started asking increasingly deep questions and then started encouraging the company to swarm to machine learning genson announced

a change in strategic focus in a company all hands meeting we need to consider this work as our highest priority ai was going to be more important than anything else they could possibly be doing again incredible incredible insight and foresight rather on genson's part he believed this was going to be

the cause and you know now 10 years later it's obviously true obviously accurate it was going to be the largest tam expansion within a decade genson was sure that ai would create the largest total adjustable market expansion of software and hardware that we've seen in decades and so the book does a great job

of describing how the interplay of all these ideas the decisions that genson and everybody in navidia made over the course of three decades allowed them to build this very formidable moat and i thought it was very fascinating genson actually doesn't like the term moat he prefers what he's really trying

to build and what he has built is a strong self -reinforcing network and there's a great description of the strong self -reinforcing network this moat that navidia has built since it's hard to describe navidia's action as anything other than the construction of a competitive moat navidia made a general

purpose gpu that represented the first major leap forward in computational acceleration since the invention of the cpu the gpu's programmable layer cuda was easy to use and opened up a wide range of functions across scientific technical and industrial sectors as more people learned cuda the demand for gpu's

increase genson's strategic brilliance ensured that competitors would have difficulty breaking into a market that navidia had created and i think the best way to close is a reminder that the most succinct definition of the navidia way is that it is genson's way or it is simply genson himself and that is where i'll

leave it for the full story highly highly highly recommend it's a no -brainer reading the book everyone i know that's read the book so far has loved it i know a bunch of people have bought multiple copies for their team if you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes available in your podcast

player are available at founderspodcast .com you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time that is 376 books down 1000 to go and i'll talk to you again soon okay so i have a big update for you for founders notes i am eight years into this podcast by the end of the year i will have read well over

400 biographies and autobiographies of some of history's greatest founders i'm doing this because my organizing principle my life's work is i want to organize and distill the collective knowledge of history's greatest founders and i want to do that better than anybody else on the planet it's why i work

on the podcast seven days a week so as you can imagine eight years into this 375 difference 376 different books it's impossible for me to remember and recall everything that i've read so i built a tool that allows me to recall and tap into this collective knowledge of history's greatest founders on demand anytime

i want and i use this tool every day and it's a tool that i've called founders notes you can subscribe and access the tool that i built and the one that i use this is very important what you see when you subscribe that is the same version that i use i don't have a different version it's the exact same

thing that you can use so the big update that i have for you is that i've been working with the team at readwise uh the founders of readwise and the team at readwise are the ones that have helped me actually build and design this tool so for the past few months we've been working on this major redesign

of founders notes and that redesign is done and it's available now i need to give you the prehistory just like i spent a bunch of time in this video episode this gentsen episode talking about the importance of the prehistory of what was going on before we got to the 19 uh the 19 key ideas i want to

talk about so the prehistory of this project is that for the past six years i've been using this app called readwise to store all of my notes and highlights for every book that i've read the podcast that gives me the ability to search it and pull it up anytime i wanted okay and the reason i partnered

with readwise last year was because a bunch of people listening to the podcast kept saying hey because i would talk about readwise i'd talk about the app i'd talk about how valuable was and the fact that i just like it was very helpful and useful to be able to recall and pull everything up and i didn't

do it with ever thinking i was going to build a tool around this but so many people were asking it's like hey is there a way i can actually like read all of your notes and so we built a tool called founders notes and it allows you to do that you can still do that you can still read all my notes all

my highlights and i keep adding to them every week and i will always do so but over time what i realized because i use this tool today is like the ai assistant called sage that sits inside of founders notes is actually the most valuable feature and there's a line in the book uh that i didn't talk about in the podcast

it's in the book where jensen's talking about like what we can expect in this this ai -enabled world that we all live in right now and he says you'll be able to have a virtual assistant almost like a brilliant intern with near perfect memory capable of instantly recalling any piece of knowledge stored

on computers and the internet sage is this but for the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs so how i use it is like when i ask sage a question it reads all of my notes all of my highlights all of my transcripts and then provides a concise summary and answer to the information i'm

looking for so it and the read the key here is its memory is way better than mine in fact this is why i think you should subscribe and use sage as a way to supplement the decisions that you make in your work you just heard me do this multiple times in the episode so think about when jensen was struggling

with figuring out what product positioning is you the definition that i recalled was just me asking what is product positioning summarizes the best definition gives us examples for every single thing we've talked on the podcast when we talked about how the importance of educating a market uh when you're

when you're creating a new technology or a new product like intel did what i was reading you came directly from sage when i talked about how henry singleton said what did henry singleton say about planning that five point i think it was five point bullet list that came directly from sage when he talked

about uh the importance of what's the leader's job you think of yourself as the leaders think of yourself as teachers all the examples from soul price from henry singleton from warren buffett from bill steve jobs that came from sage and so the big update is now when you log into founder's notes it looks

completely different if you have you haven't used it in a while or if you've never used it the very first thing you see is the ability to ask sage a question the other update that was really important to me was we added the ability to toggle between ai models so we built the thing on chat gpt and you

can still use that if you want but the default now is clod 3 .5 sauna because that's the one i use and it's it's spooky because when i ask sage a question it sounds like me except with a much better memory um again you can toggle between whichever one you want and you'll find the one that actually you

you feel is most helpful but that's the one i've been using another cool thing that we added as well when you log in you see all these like suggested questions okay all of the suggested questions that you see when you log in these are questions that i have asked sage and i'm continuing to add to that list

of suggested questions because as i keep searching and finding good questions and good answers i add it to the suggested prompts or the suggested questions list so even if you didn't have a question you wanted to ask it you could log in see what i've been asking it and actually read and learn from that but again i

think the main purpose is like to use it as you have any questions in your business you should be asking sage because then what happens is it's essentially like if you could prompt all of history's greatest entrepreneurs to help you solve the problem that you're dealing with inside of your business

i'm going to continue uh get it making it improving it continuing adding to it because again this is a tool for myself i literally cannot make the podcast without it i'm constantly adding to it just as a as a byproduct of a natural byproduct of the work that i do so every single book every single podcast

every single transcript every single note and just keep adding to it so if you want a way to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand and use it to supplement the decisions that you're making in your work i highly recommend you go to foundersnotes .com that is founders

with an s founders notes just with an s just like the podcast foundersnotes .com and sign up today thank you very much for the support thank you for listening and i'll talk to you again soon

[The NVIDIA Way: Jensen Huang’s Philosophy for Building a Tech Giant]-[#376 Jensen Huang: Founder of Nvidia]

📋 Summary

The NVIDIA Way: Lessons from Jensen Huang

1. Excellence as a Capacity for Pain

2. "Honing the Sword" and Public Criticism

3. The Flat Organization and the "Whiteboard" Culture

4. The "Speed of Light" and Strategic Agility

5. Information from the Edge: The T5T Emails

6. Swarming the Greatest Opportunity: The AI Pivot

7. Complacency Kills

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript