On leadership | Jensen Huang and Joel Hellermark

One thing I admire so deeply about you is how technically current you stay I think you must spend a lot of time reading or whatever, but you're always so incredibly thoughtful and well read and every single detail of what's going on in the industry, how to stay so on top of things while running one of the world's largest companies. - Wow. Let's see, what's the answer to that?

Well, first I'm surrounded by amazing people. When I went to visit you, you were surrounded by amazing people. And they're generous to teach me.

And so you have to make the effort to learn. I love teaching people who are great students. And so I dedicate myself a lot to being a good student.

And of course we are in a whole lot of domains from self-driving cars to climate research, to digital biology. And so the vastness, the breadth of impact that we can have in the world is great. But we have to learn to be able to- And so you're in a very tech driven industry solving and creating solutions for companies.

I'm in a very tech driven industry. And so for both of us, it's essential we understand the underpinnings of the technology so you have an intuition for how the industry's gonna change. You have an intuition for which one of the technologies is a little bit of a left turn, and which one is fundamental.

To realize that maybe the early works that we did with generative adversarial models to variational auto encoders, to diffusion models, but there were somewhat cousins of each other. And that realizing the impact of one could lead to breakthrough in another, which opens up the horizon for now diffusion models that are utterly incredible. And so I think having an intuition for technology allows you to better extrapolate.

And our ability to extrapolate and see down the road is really vital because, gosh, technology is changing fast. But it still takes us several years to build a great solution. And so how do you, on the one hand dedicate yourself to build something that's gonna take years to do?

Building it on top of technology that's utterly changing, by a factor of a thousand every few years. How do you do that unless you have an intuition for it? And so I think that the fact that you're so deeply gifted in technology, and so you understand and you have great interest and curiosity in technology is essential to running a technology driven company.

And so I think I love that part of my job. And I'm surrounded by people who are generous to teach me. And I've gotta just dedicate myself to be a good student.

- So one area I'm very intrigued by is as well is how you run the company. I've understood you don't have one-on-ones can you talk me through some of the sort of classic management playbook that you've challenged and evolved? - Mm-hmm, well, with respect to building a company, the first thing that you have to go as with all problems- and Joel, you do this very naturally- you start from first principles.

What is this machine that we're trying to create? What is this output? What is this input?

What is this output? What are the conditions that it's in? What is the industry like?

Is it a fast moving industry? Is it a bureaucratic industry? Is it highly regulated industry?

What kind of industry is it? And what are you trying to build? And so I think you think about it from that perspective, there's several things that I wanted to do with the company.

I wanted to create something. A company that naturally attracts amazing people. And the reason for that is because we're solving problems.

Our company's mission is to solve computing problems that are barely possible. And if a problem could be solved by normal computers, we don't do it. And so we have to go find problems that are impossible for normal computers to solve, or barely possible.

And so you wanna attract amazing people who wanna invent this new form of computing and apply it to solving some really difficult problems. And so I wanted amazing people. Second, I wanted a company that was smaller, not larger.

You want a company that's as small as possible, not as large as possible. It needs to be as large as necessary to do the job well, but to be as small as possible. And so naturally you want to empower people.

Well, if you want an organization that obeys command and control, then you make it a pyramid just like the old military. All the way back to the Roman Empire. But if you wanna empower people, then you wanna make it as flat as possible.

So that information travels quickly. And so in order to make something as flat as possible, the first layer has to be well considered. Well, the first layer happens to be the most senior people.

And you would think that they need the least amount of management. Nobody's coming to me, none of my management team is coming to me for career advice. They made it, and they're doing great.

And so I have a whole lot of people reporting to me because I don't need to do one-on-ones. I don't have to do career coaching. They're all fabulously happy and they know what they're doing.

They're experts in their field. And so those one-on-ones are really not necessary. And if there's a strategic direction, why do you tell one person?

You tell everybody. And so after we're swimming in the soup of strategizing and how to formulate the path to the future, when time comes, I send it out to everybody at the same time, or I'll tell everybody at the same time and people will gimme feedback and we'll refine it. And because the company is so flat and you've empowered the organization so much with knowledge of the company and their access to information, the company is also agile.

And so it turns out that by having a lot of direct reports, not having one-on-ones, making the company flat, information travels quickly, employees empowered, which made it possible for me not to do one-on-ones. That algorithm was well conceived. And the architecture is well implemented.

We also don't have business units. We don't have divisions. Everybody works as one.

And the company is shaped in a way that allows us to build accelerated computing fast. If you ask me to go do fried chicken, we'd have a hard time doing fried chicken, Swedish meatballs, no chance, but accelerated computing very well. - I think you have 40 direct reports, right?

- Yeah, something like that. Yeah, the challenge is getting everybody together. When I wanna get everybody together, but either somebody's out or somebody's on vacation or somebody's doing something.

Yeah, the odds of everybody sitting at the office is approximately 0%. - How did your leadership style change over time? You've been going on for decades now.

How did that evolve as you learned? - Well, I don't really have a style. It's just me.

There are a lot of things that I wanna do better. And if something's happening at work and I don't like it's direction I'll just say it because I don't take anybody aside, I don't do one-on-one coaching. If something's not right, I'll just say it.

If I have a different opinion, I just say it. And so it could be a little too direct, but if people just realize that I'm not trying to do anything except be direct. And then I spent a lot of time reasoning through my decisions, which empowers employees because they learn how leaders think through problems.

And just by every meeting I'm in, I'm explaining how do I think through this. Let me reason through this. Let me explain why did that.

And how do we compare and contrast these ideas? That process of management, I think is really empowering. And we also don't do just vice president meetings or just director and board meeting.

The meetings I have, there's new college grads in there. They're people from every different organization- - That is just so interesting. - Yeah, we're just all sitting in there.

They're kind of like your office. Everybody's just kind of sitting in there. - Exactly, like that's actually one thing that I found very intriguing because that's one of the playbooks, right?

You have like a very clear leadership team and you have leadership team in the things and so on. And that's something I've always struggled with because you'll have a lot of the like, best Individual Contributors. And of course, like, they should be in that meeting.

You shouldn't be just like vice precedence not knowing the craft. So it's fascinating that you can- - That's exactly, you got it. You want the person who is most informed or best skilled or just had the most experience.

They actually made the mess. Or they actually confronted the situation. You want ground truth.

You want ground truth and experts the best you can. - And you have some model for folks to communicate their top priorities? - Hmm.

- I've heard something about sending an email. What's that all about? - We don't do status reports.

And so I don't read any status reports. And the reason why I don't is because status reports they're meta information by the time you get it. And so they're barely informative.

And so I distilled and refined and bias has been inserted and perspective has already been added, and you're not looking at ground truth anymore. And so I tend to appreciate information that anybody presents. And so you're allowed, if you send out email and it's called "Top Five Things", and just whatever happens to be your top five things, whatever you observed or whatever you did or whatever you learned or things, there's just things.

- [Joel] Oh, really? - Yeah, top five things whatever it is. You just went to a great restaurant.

Who doesn't wanna hear that? (Joel laughs) That's important information. And so just had a baby, that's important information.

So whatever these things are top five things, if you send it out, I'll read it. And so I read every single morning probably a hundred or so, and I do it every day. - And it's one giant thread that everyone in the company sends to, right?

- No, just everybody has their own version of top five things and they just send it out, yeah. If you send it, I'll read it. - What's your top five things?

- Top five things are not meant to be from the center out. They're meant to be from- - Oh, okay. - There you go.

- That makes sense. - That's right. Yeah, I think of it as IOT.

If I take my top five things and I sent it out then I've contaminated the system, in fact. That's the reason why I don't do it. But I have my own top five things that I keep to myself.

- And how do you balance that with planning? So sort of bottoms up ideas, having the best engineers when your team decide what to work on, combined with sometimes you also have to execute on a plan. How do you balance those two things?

- First of all, strategy is not words, strategy is action. And so if the company has a set of strategies, but the people's actions, their top five things are not that, then they're obviously not executing the strategy. And so the strategy turns out isn't what I say is what they do.

And so it's really important that I understand what everybody's doing. And you do that by just getting a feel for everybody's top five things. And you don't have to read all of them, you don't have to read them all every week.

You just kind of it's sporadic and stochastically sampling the system. And you'll have a feeling for whether the company is going in the direction that you want it to go, that we all agree we'd go. And so that's one.

Second, planning. We don't do a periodic planning system. And the reason for that is because the world is a living, breathing thing.

And so we just plan continuously. Yeah, there's no five year plan, there's no one year plan, there's no plan. There's just what we're doing.

- That's really exciting to hear. I think one thing as you're executing on first principles, and you come to some ideas, it can also be hard to trust your intuition if you're doing something that's contrarian to what the playbook is. What do you think made you trust your intuition on some of these things?

- Most everything that you dedicate the company to go after should be reasoned through first principles. - Yeah. - There's a foundation of what are the assumptions, the important assumptions that led to you believing that the computer has to change or the chip architecture has to change or the way that software is developed or how a data center has transformed.

A data center used to be a place where we store all of our files and we would go retrieve it. But every company in the future will have more data centers, but one of the data centers will not be a center for data. But it's a factory.

It's a factory for producing intelligence. And data comes in. It's refined through the computer.

And what comes out is this invisible thing, which is the most valuable thing in the world called "intelligence". And this building is going to be driving this thing continuously, right? And so you and I we're all gonna have factories and how would you reason through that?

And you kind of back your way out? And before you know it, you formulate a view of the world based on first principle thinking. And then the next part is you go after it with enough dedication, with a conviction so that you could realize it - oftentimes it's really hard- but if you're wrong, you change your mind.

And that's the thing that's really great about modern leadership. If I'm wrong about something, I just say so, that was wrong. That was goofy.

And then you say, hey, I changed my mind. And because you're adapting and literally replanning constantly it's interesting that over time people might not even notice that you've adapted 17 times in the last year. You've changed your mind maybe 35 times.

And so if you don't do these giant five year plans which I think five year plans are just horrible for technology first of all. It's just ridiculous. And these continuous planning systems could maybe just lead to easier leadership.

- One thing we were as obsessed about as the product we would build was the company we would build. And I think there's very few companies that are truly focused on empowering folks to do their life's work. And that has also been a key passion of yours.

And how do you enable that? What are some things that you put into place to empower folks to do their life's work at NVIDIA? - That is the mission of leaders to create the environment for others, right?

To empower others to do their lives work. There's a couple ways you do that. The most important way of realizing that mission is to not cause people to have to do commodity work.

So, for example, we never talk about market share in our company. And the reason for that is because why are you talking about I have 23% market share and they have 27% market share. Why are you fighting people for market share?

Because the whole concept of market share says that there are a whole bunch of other people who are doing the same thing. And if they're doing the same thing, why are we doing it? Why am I squandering the lives of these incredibly talented people to go do something that's already been done?

And so unless we just enjoy the competition, which I tend not to, so we tend not to go fight people for market share, fight people for markets that are already commoditized. And so that's one way of thinking to go do something that's never been done before. The other way to demonstrate that, is to walk away from businesses that has been commoditized.

And either through our own initiative or otherwise, we've walked away from many businesses in the past. And so that demonstrates very clearly to your employees that we're not gonna go do commodity work. And so the combination of choosing the right work and walking away from the wrong work, that is the best way to create the conditions.

And the rest of it is what you and I were already talking about, which is empowering people with information. Whereas some companies are very siloed and information doesn't travel outside of organizations. I encourage our company to be rather transparent.

And if you ask me a question about our company's secret, there wouldn't be that many secrets. And so that empowers people. And then the rest of it is how you conduct yourself during work.

If there's a sense of hierarchy in the company then obviously that's not very empowering, but if anybody can come into a meeting and contribute including a new college grad, that's very empowering. And so I think empowerment is a big deal.