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Talk by Jensen Huang - Nvidia CEO

· 3 min read

Nvidia CEO

Full video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hzVdV63scU&t=27s

Summary​

My Favorite Thoughts​

  • Do not wait to master a skill before starting, you learn on the job.
  • You have to be resilient to be great. There will always be challenges; you keep going and have a positive outlook.
  • To be a great leader, you must have deep interest, curiosity, and empathy for other people's work. Try to contribute to all meetings you go to. You can't always do that, but you have to strive for it.
  • Great athletes have the ability to forget. You let the past be past and keep moving.

Favorite Books​

How did you become a successful CEO?​

To run a company, you need to understand two things

  1. Understand the fundamentals of your industry. Have a deep understanding of your product and its fundamental value proposition and constantly strive to move the needle.
  2. Once you have built this machine, you need to figure out how to operate this machine. This operation is sometimes called culture or execution.
  • This work requires innovation. Every CEO has to invent this from scratch.

Nvidia org chart vs. others​

Nvidia org chart is horizontally spread where entry-level people are only ~4 layers away from the CEO. Its culture fosters innovation and maximizes collaboration, unlike the hierarchical charts in other companies. The hierarchical org is best suited for an army, where you need accountability for every decision. The horizontal org enables innovation and ideas to come from everywhere. And if an innovative idea demands change in the company's course, it can be done over a weekend.

Business vs. Social Impact​

You have to be a good business, which makes money, and gives you the ability to impact the world. For example, Nvidia could only support multiple social causes if this was generating enough cash.

Nvidia is a great business with great impact.

Short-term outlook of the tech industry.​

The tech industry is fantastic. You have an impact on so many other industries. Right now, the environment is challenging, but this will pass. It's a bad year, but you must be resilient.

What is next?​

Digital Biology has a huge potential. We can now represent the language of biology in computers, which means we can now engineer it.

Thoughts on Autonomous Car​

Nvidia approach is - an autonomous car is just one application of automation. We are looking to automate anything that moves. Nvidia builds and sells

  • Hardware
  • Software to run on hardware
  • Robotic Stack
  • Machine Learning Depending on your use case, you can choose which stack you want to buy and innovate on top of it.

Thoughts on ChatGBT​

It's a significant moment in the tech industry, like when Apple launched the iPhone. ChatGBT is going to be monumental. Already there are 500 startups built on top of ChatGBT. In recent times, this is the first technology that everybody is using, and everyone is delighted by it. Everybody is now a programmer. This opens up the computing industry to other industries.

Biggest mistake​

If you make a lot of mistakes, it's hard to pick one. I have made a lot of mistakes

  • Strategy mistakes
  • Execution mistakes
  • Taken businesses I shouldn't have
  • Walked away from businesses I shouldn't have.

Final thoughts​

We usually look at the cost of doing something but don't estimate the opportunity cost. Most of life is about what you could have done.