How to shape Nvidia: CEO, crisis, and talent

Text: Guide Dong

Who is the CEO who cleans the most toilets in the world?

Who is one of the longest-serving CEOs?

Why can GPU replace CPU and become the protagonist?

Nvidia has experienced several crises, why can it turn danger into safety?

How did Nvidia compete with Intel and take down Mellanox?

Is Nvidia the cause of artificial intelligence or the result of artificial intelligence?

Is there a No. 2 position in Nvidia? How can Huang Renxun manage 60people?

What is Nvidia's real advantage? Faced with the efforts of many giants, can it succeed?

All the above questions point to the hottest topics at the moment: Huang Renxun, NVIDIA, GPU, and artificial intelligence. Seeking answers to these questions and more relevant information can not only obtain and present the growth story of an entrepreneur, the development history of a world giant, the evolution of a technology, but also the trajectory of an era.

01 Huang Renxun's Growth

As the saying goes, you can tell a person's future from the age of three. This statement makes sense, but it overlooks that a person's character is determined by nature, but it is often influenced more by various experiences.

The elementary school Huang Renxun attended was a school in Kentucky, USA, which specializes in reforming troubled youth. He did not have any problems, but his parents mistakenly thought it was a preparatory school. A misunderstanding that was neither big nor small shaped Huang Renxun's character.

Most of Huang Renxun's classmates were troubled teenagers, and he was young and Chinese, so he inevitably became the target of bullying. Fortunately, Huang Renxun established a good friendship with a roommate who was covered with tattoos and scars. He taught his roommate to read, and his roommate took him to practice weightlifting.

This friendship not only helped Huang Renxun overcome his fear, but also added strength. More importantly, it gave him confidence - the ability and willingness to fight for himself.

In this school, all students have to do physical labor. Huang Renxun was assigned to clean the toilets. He recalled this experience as "the scene will never be forgotten." And this was not the only experience that he had with toilets. During the summer vacation of high school, he worked at Denny's restaurant, and his first job was also cleaning toilets.

Whether in school or in the restaurant, Huang Renxun conscientiously completed the work of cleaning toilets day after day. Then he was recognized by the restaurant owner and later took a high-paying internship as a waiter. Cleaning toilets trained Huang Renxun's resilience and made his extremely serious and high-standard character begin to show its edge.

While working as a waiter, Huang Renxun always tried his best to do his best, and even kept thinking about how to serve more cups of coffee at a time. When ordering food for customers, he would try to avoid customers ordering milkshakes, because it takes too much time to make and clean up milkshakes. At this time, he would often urge customers to order Coke.

These experiences influenced Huang Renxun's personality, and these personality traits were crucial in Huang Renxun's future experience of starting a business and managing NVIDIA.

Huang Renxun did not have the ambition to start a business at the beginning. After many discussions and deductions with the other two co-founders, he believed that the direction of entrepreneurship was feasible. So, although he was also an engineer, Huang Renxun still started his entrepreneurial journey as CEO.

However, like most entrepreneurs, first-time entrepreneurs often have more ideals than reality and more ideas than business. It was not until the company's two major products failed in succession and the company was almost bankrupt that Huang Renxun realized that innovation is important, but commercial feasibility is more important; it is important to have a variety of product functions, but focus is more important.

So, a focused and extremely serious CEO who pursues efficiency and high standards gradually matured and instilled his own personality into NVIDIA.

02 NVIDIA's Crisis

NVIDIA encountered a crisis just after its start.

NVIDIA's first chip

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The company's second chip, NV2, was a custom chip that had not yet been developed and the customer did not plan to use it on a large scale. When Nvidia began to develop its third chip, NV3, the company had to lay off employees to reduce costs, and the book funds at this time were only enough to maintain 9months.

And the reason why Nvidia survived this crisis was: competitors' waiting and successful product development. Nvidia's rival 3dfx could have directly acquired Nvidia, but they thought Nvidia would inevitably go bankrupt and that the acquisition price would be lower if they waited. As a result, Nvidia successfully developed its third chip and became popular in the market. Another major crisis occurred in 1998. Nvidia planned to IPO, but the company's product sales were limited by chip production capacity and its expenses were not delayed, resulting in a decline in revenue and increased losses. At the same time, the financial crisis broke out in East Asia and Southeast Asia, and investors' enthusiasm for IPOs waned. Therefore, Nvidia's IPO was also suspended.

As a result, Nvidia's book funds were in urgent need again and could only last for a few weeks. In the end, Huang Renxun persuaded his customers and offered generous conditions to obtain transitional financing from them.

The root cause of this crisis lies in production capacity. This also urged Huang Renxun to think about product releases and production capacity arrangements. In the end, he reorganized the engineering department, shortened the chip development cycle, and gave birth to the "three teams, two seasons (sales seasons)" model. Ensure that the company's products can be produced and promoted to the market, and that the technology is six months ahead of market competitors. This model has significantly improved the company's sales.

Fund crisis, product crisis, business crisis, etc., NVIDIA's development path will encounter difficulties from time to time. This is a situation that every company will encounter. The uniqueness of NVIDIA is that it does not waste every crisis, and every crisis promotes the iteration of the company. The reason why the iteration is successful is that NVIDIA has a wealth of talents who can fight and win.

03 Culture to attract talents

NVIDIA's "overtime culture" is also very strong, and people often work more than ten hours a day and work overtime on weekends. Huang Renxun is even more of a workaholic. Even when he is on vacation, he is still replying to emails, so that people in the team have to remind him to relax on vacation.

Some employees in NVIDIA have complained about long working hours, but overall, there is no negative news about NVIDIA's "involution". This is related to NVIDIA's unique management style: always eliminating bureaucratic culture and fully satisfying incentive needs.

There are two ways to eliminate bureaucratic culture.

The first way is "whiteboard". NVIDIA's internal reports are not made with cool PPT, but with the old-fashioned "whiteboard+marker". Using a whiteboard to write can, on the one hand, fully demonstrate the speaker's thinking process, forcing the speaker to think and improve the feasibility of discussion and communication. On the other hand, this also eliminates the situation of "being robbed of work".

In some companies with a strong bureaucratic culture, the credit of employees who really do things is often monopolized by leaders who hold PPT and give passionate speeches. However, if you use a whiteboard to report, it will be more difficult. There is no content to read, which means that it is almost impossible to use a whiteboard to explain without actual participation and true understanding. Therefore, real credit is not easy to be claimed. Excellent employees are more likely to be seen.

The second trick is the "Five Major Events" email. The internal hierarchy of NVIDIA is relatively flat, and basic employees also have the opportunity to communicate with Huang Renxun. In addition, Huang Renxun also requires that all employees must send an email with the subject "Five Major Events" to their superiors, talking about the important things they are doing and the major opportunities they see. Huang Renxun can see all these emails, and they have become an important feedback channel for the company.

The "Five Major Issues" emails are not only conducive to eliminating some information asymmetry, but also help the company find new opportunities. For example, Nvidia's investment in machine learning comes from employees' email discussions.

When every employee's ideas, creativity, ability, and achievements can be seen by the company and even become the company's strategy, even if the work is harder, it may be worth it. The formation of this sense of accomplishment is also due to Nvidia's full satisfaction of incentive needs.

On the one hand, when employees' ideas become products used globally, it will bring a sense of accomplishment. This is what every company should consider when choosing a product direction. Just like many of Nvidia's early employees, they jumped from competitors. Because they saw that Nvidia's products represent the future better than their old company's products. They also hope to participate in the creation of more meaningful and future-oriented products.

On the other hand, NVIDIA is not stingy in terms of salary and benefits. They hope to recruit excellent talents, but they hope to retain talents even more. There is a little story that an employee played an important role in a transaction, and Huang Renxun doubled his stock grant. The employee thanked Huang Renxun, but said, "You should not just double what you grant me." So Huang Renxun accepted the advice and increased the number of stock grants for the employee.

There are many more ways for NVIDIA to actively manage. These methods are just the surface, and the core is to allow excellent talents to give full play to their abilities. This sentence may be the slogan of every company, but perhaps only a few companies are really practicing it.

04 Conclusion

As the saying goes, happy families are always alike. This sentence seems to be true when applied to companies. After all, great companies are the superposition of historical processes and personal struggles. However, each company has its own public and private characteristics.

NVIDIA, as the world's leading company in market value and the most watched company in the wave of artificial intelligence, has little information known to the public.

If you use one sentence to describe NVIDIA, it is a company that "combines the East and the West". It has both the extreme management culture of the East, which advocates hard work, and the straightforward culture of the West, which eliminates bureaucracy and encourages innovation.

This is a combination that is difficult to replicate and highly dependent on the characteristics of the founder. This is true even for Nvidia. After all, within Nvidia, it seems that it is still unclear who will become the next Huang Renxun. Similarly, for Nvidia, what if Huang Renxun is gone?