Sunday should be a day of rest for even the most hard-charging boss. Not for Jensen Huang. As the weekend draws to a close, the man who built microchip designer Nvidia into one the world’s most valuable companies likes nothing better than to pour himself a glass of Highland Park – the Scotch whisky favoured by Sir Winston Churchill – and start catching up on hundreds of emails.
Remarkably, Huang will reply to every one of them. That’s because these aren’t just any old emails. Sent from employees at every level of the company, each contains just five bullet points – called Top 5 Things, or T5Ts. They explain what staff are working on, thinking about or have noticed about the business.
Topics can range from the latest machine-learning trends in artificial intelligence – Nvidia dominates the market for advanced chips that drive the AI revolution – to competitor insights or customer pinch points.
The pithy emails – and his equally concise replies – are a vital way for Huang to keep tabs on what is going on inside Nvidia. They also ensure he’s getting key information from the coalface that might otherwise evade him.
It’s a unique management style that sets Huang apart from his peers. His unconventional approach is ‘the exact opposite’ of what is considered best practice in most of the rest of corporate America, says Tae Kim, author of a new book, The Nvidia Way.
As companies get bigger, they tend to adopt ever-steeper hierarchies. Managers are detached from staff and increasingly rely on formal status updates from underlings to take the pulse of a company.
Workaholic: Nvidia boss Jensen Huang
But these reports are often filtered of anything controversial, including current problems, potential roadblocks and personnel issues. The danger is that they become sanitised to the point of being almost useless by the time they reach the key decision-makers.
Huang’s ‘flat’ communication approach scraps all that.
The T5Ts mean Huang can combat ‘inertia and groupthink’, says Kim.
Another of his secrets is his preference for whiteboards to present ideas rather than PowerPoint presentations.
The idea is that with a whiteboard, you simply write your thoughts for colleagues to see with just a blank board and a marker, which means your thinking must be rigorous and transparent.
With a PowerPoint slide presentation, it is easier to hide a dearth of thought behind slick graphics and impressively formatted slides, so audiences often accept them uncritically.
‘These operational principles have allowed Nvidia to move quickly to take advantage of new opportunities,’ Kim says, adding that they give staff ‘powerful weapons in the constant struggle for accuracy and rigour’.
Founded in a Silicon Valley diner three decades ago, Nvidia is the stock market success story of this century. Since floating in the US on the eve of the millennium, it has come from nowhere to become one of the world’s most valuable companies.
It joined iPhone maker Apple and software giant Microsoft this year as one of only three companies in the world worth more than $3 trillion (£2.4 trillion).
Huge demand for its high-end chips has fuelled the company’s astonishing rise.
Nvidia’s shares are the best-performing on the S&P index of leading US companies over the past decade and Huang himself is now worth more than $100 billion.
Experts say Nvidia’s stunning success could not have been achieved without Huang at the wheel.
‘I have never met anyone quite like Jensen,’ says Kim, a writer at US business magazine Barron’s. ‘In the field of graphics he is a pioneer. In the harsh technology market, he is a survivor.’
Only three other chief executives in the S&P 500 – including legendary investor Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway – have been at the helm of their companies longer than Huang, he notes.
Huang, 61, has also lasted longer at his company than Bill Gates did at Microsoft or Jeff Bezos at Amazon.
Chips with everything: Nvidia shares are up 175 per cent this year
‘He challenges the division of the executive world between those CEO-founders who are technically oriented but naive in the world of business and those who are business-minded operators but who have no technical acumen,’ Kim notes.
‘You would go to a meeting and he would know more about the product than you,’ Ali Simnad, a former employee, told Kim. ‘In every meeting we attended he was probably the most prepared person,’ he added.
His workaholic ethos is rooted in his engineering background. It gives him what Kim calls a ‘seemingly limitless capacity’ for toil.
For Huang, a strong work ethic trumps intelligence. ‘It doesn’t matter how smart you are because there is always someone smarter than you,’ Huang once said. ‘Your competition doesn’t go to sleep.’
One executive told Kim that Nvidia isn’t a 24/7 company but a 25/8 one. ‘I’m not kidding,’ she said. ‘I wake up at 4.30am and I’m on the phone until 10pm,’ she added. ‘It’s my choice. It’s not for everybody.’
Staff hate it when Huang goes on a rare holiday because he tends to sit in a hotel and write more emails. When he goes to the cinema he never remembers the film because he spends the entire time thinking about work.
‘There’s not a day goes by I don’t work. If I’m not working I’m thinking about working. Working is relaxing for me,’ he told an investment bank podcast in 2023.
When US TV show Sixty Minutes asked him about employees who said working for him was demanding, and that he was a perfectionist and not easy to work for, he simply agreed.
On sale: The Nvidia Way is written by Tae Kim
‘One thing I learned pretty quickly is if you got an email from him, you acted on it,’ says former executive Michael Douglas.
‘Nothing stays. Nothing festers. You answer and move on it,’ added former human resources head John McSorley.
Huang often responds to emails within minutes of receiving them, and employees have learned to time their T5Ts strategically. Don’t send it late on a Friday evening, a former employee told Kim. ‘It would wreck your weekend.’
Most employees send their T5T emails late on Sunday night – just as Huang settles down with his single-malt Scotch. It means they can act on his feedback at the start of the working week.
Not surprisingly, a fan club bordering on a personality cult has built up around Huang, whose trademark leather jacket sets him apart from the buttoned-down boardroom elite.
‘In many ways, he is Nvidia and the company is Jensen,’ Kim adds. Of course, that raises the risk of what would happen to Nvidia if he and the company parted ways – for whatever reason.
Investors will be relieved that he shows no sign of slowing down on the emails.
- The Nvidia Way is written by Tae Kim and published by WW Norton & Co. Its hardcover edition is available priced at £25.
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