Ceo Nvidia Quotes

Nvidia was founded in 1993 by Chris Malachowsky, Curtis Priem, and Jensen Huang, the latter of whom remains CEO today.

Under Jensen Huang, Nvidia didn't just ride the AI wave; they built the surfboard, the wave pool, and then taught everyone how to surf through strategic bets on GPUs and CUDA

Nvidia remains the only stand-alone graphics-chip firm to this day, even though hundreds of others have thrown their hats in the ring. Jensen himself is now the technology industry’s longest-serving CEO.

Keane was also surprised by the sheer openness he found at Nvidia. He joined at the general-manager level and was allowed to attend every board meeting and off-site board event. When a typical CEO would have eight or nine people in a room for big executive meetings, Jensen would have a packed house. “Everyone could hear what he was telling the executive staff,” Keane said. “It kept everybody in sync.” When there is important information to share or an impending change in the direction of the business, Jensen says he tells everybody at Nvidia at the same time and asks for feedback. “It turns out that by having a lot of direct reports, not having one-on-ones, [we] made the company flat, information travels quickly, employees are empowered,” Jensen said. “That algorithm was well conceived.

DURING ONE OF NVIDIA’S VERY FIRST board meetings, director Harvey Jones, a former CEO of a leading chip-design-software company called Synopsys, asked Jensen about the NV1: “How would you position this?” At the time, Jensen didn’t realize that Jones was not merely asking about the NV1’s feature set or product specifications. He was asking him to consider how Nvidia would sell the new chip in a highly competitive industry. He knew that products had to be presented in the clearest, most precise terms in order to stand out. “He asked me a simple question. I had no idea how simple it was. It was impossible for me to answer because I didn’t understand it,” Jensen remembered.11 “The answer is supremely deep. You’ll spend your whole career answering that question.

The average CEO will try to listen to the customer, but in computing, that’s a big mistake, because customers just don’t know what’s possible. They just don’t know what can be done!

Plenty of people worked long hours, though. Jens Horstmann attributed Huang’s success to his adaptability. “I’ve often asked myself, how is it that we started in the same cubicle, you know, with a similar IQ, both working equally hard,” Horstmann said. “How is it that this person not only built this amazing company, but also a network around him of people that—that would just die for him if needed?” Huang, Horstmann believed, had changed himself many times. He recalled Huang at LSI, pushing the simulation software to its outer limits. “Now, he’s still doing the same thing, but what he’s engineering is himself. He was not born as a great CEO; he was not destined to be one. He transformed himself into one, just by abstracting!