When Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company (again) earlier this month, it was thanks to its key role in the growing artificial intelligence industry. Nvidia designs chips used in the hardware that powers AI, a market it dominates. There are many factors behind Nvidia’s success, one of which is its company culture.
In his book, The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant, which will be released on December 10th, Tae Kim, a senior writer at Barron magazine, explores the business and the people behind Nvidia, especially We take a closer look at both CEO Jensen Huang.
“We found that the defining characteristic was not technology or innovation,” Kim said in an interview with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal. “It was this unique work culture that Jensen Huang and his co-founders built.”
Below is an excerpt from a book that focuses on the early days of a company and the formation of its workplace culture.
When Jeff River was hired by Advanced Micro Devices as Nvidia’s CFO in December 1997, he noticed two striking traits in his new boss. That said, Jensen is very convincing and very hardworking.
“There may be people smarter than me,” Jensen once told his executive staff. “But no one will work harder than me.”
He was often in the office from 9 a.m. to nearly midnight, and his engineers usually felt obligated to keep similar hours.
“I used to tell people at AMD and Intel and other companies that if they wanted to see how Nvidia was doing, they should go to the company parking lot on the weekends. It was always busy,” Ribard said.
Even in the marketing department, it was common to work 60 to 80 hours a week, including every Saturday. Andrew Logan, Nvidia’s director of corporate marketing, remembers leaving his office to take his wife to a 9:30 p.m. screening of the movie “Titanic.” As I was leaving, a co-worker yelled, “Oh, Andy, half day?”
Tester Henry Levin recalls that whenever he found himself working late, he wasn’t the only one there. Even when he stayed past 10 p.m., Nvidia’s graphics architects were still at whiteboards, passionately discussing chip optimization and rendering techniques. Ian Siu, a contemporary materials director, remembers seeing colleagues bringing sleeping bags to work and spending the night in the office, even on weekends. Employees also brought their children to the office so they could spend time with their families without leaving work.
“We always tried our best,” Siu said. He had fond memories of office camaraderie and close relationships with colleagues.
River rarely worked until midnight, but he often arrived early in the morning. He quickly realized that one of the big drawbacks of sitting near the CEO in the office was that the CEO was often the first person Jensen met in the morning. And Jensen was known for unloading on whoever he met first.
“Jensen would often spend all night thinking about products and marketing,” River said. “There were few financial issues, but it didn’t matter. If I saw him first, I would get the first blast from him.”
As the days passed, no part of NVIDIA headquarters was safe from a drive-by grill from Jensen. Kenneth Hurley, a technical marketing engineer, was at the urinal when Jensen approached the urinal next to him.
“I’m not the type of person who likes to talk in the bathroom,” Hurley said.
Jensen had other ideas. “Hey, what are you doing?” he asked.
Mr. Hurley didn’t give a clear answer, saying “not much,” earning him a sidelong look from the CEO. Harley panicked and thought, He’s probably wondering what I’m doing at Nvidia. ”
To save face, Hurley lists 20 things he’s working on, from convincing developers to buy Nvidia’s latest graphics cards to teaching them how to program new features. I have listed it.
“Okay,” Jensen replied, apparently satisfied with the engineer’s answer.
Fear and anxiety became Jensen’s favorite motivational tools. At a monthly company meeting, he said, “I’m going out of business in 30 days.”
That was an exaggeration on some level. The tense, high-stakes RIVA 128 process wasn’t entirely an outlier, as we’ll see later, but it certainly wasn’t something that happened on a regular basis. But even during periods of success, Jensen didn’t want to allow complacency to creep in. And he wanted to face the pressures new employees would face. If you didn’t have what you needed, sooner or later you had to retreat by choice.
But on another level, the line “30 days until I’m out of business” was true. In the technology industry, one wrong decision or product launch can be fatal. Nvidia has gotten lucky twice so far, narrowly surviving the disasters of NV1 and NV2 before finding success with RIVA 128 with just a few months to spare. That luck won’t last forever. However, a good company culture will strengthen the company against the dire consequences of most mistakes. And mistakes and market downturns were inevitable.
Still, Dwight Dierks said: That’s because Jensen was able to explain why no matter how much money you have in the bank, three things happen to reduce it to zero. He said, “Let me show you how.” This could happen, this could happen, this could happen, and all that money would be zero. ”
Jeff Fisher pointed out that fear can be tangible. Even now, NVIDIA is no longer going out of business in 30 days, but it could be as many as 30 days before the company begins its path to ruin. “You’re always trying to look around the corners and see what we’re missing,” Fisher said.
The paranoia reached its peak in late 1997. Intel has always been an important partner for Nvidia, as well as a potential competitive threat. Since Intel was the leading CPU manufacturer in the PC market, all of Nvidia’s graphics chips had to be compatible with Intel’s processors. But that fall, Intel began telling industry partners that its own graphics chips were coming, which threatened to take business away from Nvidia and other companies in the space.
Just a few months after the much-hyped RIVA 128 was launched, Intel announced its own chip, the i740. This was a direct challenge to Nvidia’s new chip and its very existence. Unlike the RIVA 128, which had a 4MB frame buffer, Intel’s i740 has an 8MB buffer, which is twice the buffer on Nvidia chips, and the company is trying to make this the new standard for the industry. there was. Intel had the ear of every PC manufacturer in the world because it supplied the majority of CPUs. After Intel’s i740 announcement, “the sales pipeline started to dry up,” said one Nvidia executive. If Intel can force the adoption of 8 megabyte buffers, RIVA 128 will quickly become obsolete.
“Make no mistake about it, Intel is out to get us and put us out of business,” Jensen declared in an all-hands meeting. “They’ve told their employees this and they’ve internalized it. They’re going to put us out of business. Our job is to kill them before they put us out of business.” We need to crush Intel.”10
Caroline Landry and the rest of the Nvidia team worked even harder to take on a new competitor, which at the time was about 860 times larger than Nvidia in terms of revenue. She would often work past midnight, stagger home, sleep for a few hours, then wake up and work again.
“I’m super tired. I have to get up. It’s going to be hard,” she told herself. “But we have to crush Intel. We have to kill Intel.”
Excerpt from “The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant” by Tae Kim. Copyright (c) 2025 by Tae Kim. Used with permission of the publisher, WW Norton & Company, Inc. Unauthorized copying and reproduction prohibited.
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