The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant

During his speech, Jensen suggested to the students that their graduation from Caltech would mark one of the peaks of their lives. He mentioned that he knew something about peaks, too. “We are both at the peaks of our career,” he said. “For all of you who have been paying attention to Nvidia and myself, you know what I mean. It’s just that in your case, you’ll have many, many more peaks to go. I just hope that today is not my peak. Not the peak.” He vowed to work as hard as ever to ensure that there would be even more peaks ahead for Nvidia, implying that the new graduates should follow his example.

After Jensen concluded, I was whisked over to the Keck Center for Space Studies and led into a wood-paneled conference room with black-and-white photos of pilots, astronauts, and presidents on the walls, where he was waiting for me. We chatted a bit before I got to my prepared questions. I explained that I was a PC gaming nerd who had been building my own computers since the 1990s. I first encountered Nvidia while researching graphics cards and invariably chose their products. And I mentioned that earlier in my career, at a Wall Street fund, an investment in Nvidia became my first big winner.

“Good for you,” Jensen deadpanned. “Nvidia is my first big winner too.”

We launched into a wide-ranging discussion of the company’s history. Jensen knows that many of his former employees look back on Nvidia’s beginnings with nostalgia. But he resists overly positive accounts of Nvidia’s start-up period—and his own missteps.

“When we were younger, Tae, we sucked at a lot of things. Nvidia wasn’t a great company on day one. We made it great over thirty-one years. It didn’t come out great,” he said. “You didn’t build NV1 because you were great. You didn’t build NV2 because you were great,” he said, referring to the company’s first two chip designs, both of which were flops that nearly killed Nvidia. “We survived ourselves. We were our own worst enemy.”

There were several more near-death experiences. But each time, amid the stress and the pressure, the company learned from its mistakes. It retained a core of die-hard employees, many of whom remain in the fold to this day. Of course, there were also people who didn’t stay, requiring the company to integrate new hires. “Every single time, somebody left, and every single time we picked ourselves up. We healed the company into existence,” he said.

He slipped into the third person. “If Jensen wasn’t even involved in the first fifteen years of our company, I would really like that,” he laughed, meaning he wasn’t proud of how the company was managed then or of his own naïveté and lack of strategic thinking.

I was put in the unusual position of defending Nvidia’s past to its founder. I pointed out that the early decisions—about which I had learned a great deal by this point in my research process—weren’t all bad ones. While mistakes were made, some of the misfires were tied to factors that were unpredictable or out of his or the company’s control. With hindsight, many of them appeared to have been unavoidable.

“Yeah, that’s fine,” said Jensen. “I don’t love talking about our past.”

I FOUND THIS TO BE A pervasive attitude within Nvidia: that the culture of the place discourages looking back, whether at errors or successes, in favor of focusing on the future—the blank whiteboard of opportunity. But you cannot understand what Nvidia is today without understanding how it got to this point. This book is the first to tell the story of Nvidia—the full story, not just Jensen Huang’s, although he is at the center of everything. It explores the founding of Nvidia by Jensen, Curtis Priem, and Chris Malachowsky, in a back booth at a Denny’s all the way back in 1993—many lifetimes ago, to anyone working in technology. Nvidia would never have come into existence without the contributions of all three men. Jensen’s business acumen and hard-driving management style were critical to Nvidia’s early success, but Priem’s chip architecture prowess and Malachowsky’s manufacturing expertise were essential, too.

It is a thirty-year story, so far, and to tell it I interviewed more than one hundred people. Many of them are current or former Nvidia employees and know the company’s inner workings intimately—this group includes Jensen, his two cofounders, and most of the early and current senior management team. Others include the two original venture capitalists who invested in Nvidia; technology industry CEOs; the partners who have helped Nvidia manufacture and sell its chips; and those at other semiconductor companies who competed with, and almost invariably lost to, Nvidia.

Through these interviews, I began to understand what makes Nvidia special. Its defining characteristic is not its technological prowess, which is more a consequence than a root cause. It is not the financial resources and the new opportunities that come from a high market valuation. It is not a mystical ability to see the future. It is not luck. Rather, it is a unique organizational design and work culture that I have come to call “the Nvidia Way.” This culture combines unusual independence for each employee with the highest possible standards; it encourages maximum speed while demanding maximum quality; it allows Jensen to act as strategist and enforcer with a direct line of sight to everyone and everything at the company. Above all, it demands an almost superhuman level of effort and mental resilience from everyone. It’s not just that working at Nvidia is intense, though it certainly is; it’s that Jensen’s management style is unlike anything else in corporate America.

Jensen runs the company in the way he does because he believes that Nvidia’s worst enemy is not the competition, but itself—more specifically, the complacency that grips any successful company, particularly one with a long and impressive track record such as Nvidia. In my work as a journalist, I have seen that companies tend to become dysfunctional as they succeed and grow, largely because of internal politics, with employees focused not on driving innovation or serving customers but on advancing their bosses’ careers. This jockeying distracts them from doing their best work and leaves them constantly looking over their shoulder for the threat from the next office over. It is something that Jensen has structured Nvidia to eliminate.

“Over the years, I realized what was happening, how people protect their turf and they protect their ideas. I created a much flatter organization,” Jensen said. His antidote to the backstabbing, to the gaming of metrics, and to political infighting is public accountability and, if needed, public embarrassment. “If we have leaders who are not fighting for other people to be successful and [who are] depriving opportunities to others, I’ll just say it out loud,” he said. “I’ve got no trouble calling people out. You do that once or twice, nobody’s going to go near that again.”

Nvidia’s unique culture might sound strange or unusually grueling, even for the tech industry. But among all the former Nvidia employees I talked to, it was hard to find a dissenter. They all reported that the company was largely free from the internal politics and indecisiveness typical in large organizations. They mentioned how difficult it was to adjust to working at other companies where direct, blunt communication is rare and there’s far less urgency to get things done. And they described how Nvidia not only empowered them, but also required them to fulfill their professional calling, as a necessary condition of employment.

In a sense, that is the Nvidia Way in its purest form. It is the unwavering belief that there is tremendous reward in doing your job the best you can. It is the drive to persevere amid adversity. Or, as Jensen put it when looking directly into my eyes: the secret to his company’s success is nothing more than “sheer will.”

MORE PRECISELY, IT IS JENSEN’S personal will that has shaped Nvidia. He has personally made the most consequential decisions in its history. His ability to place the right major bets on emerging technologies stems from his deep technical knowledge—a founder with an engineering background. I have tried in this book to distill the Nvidia Way down to a set of principles that anyone can learn from, if not use. But behind them all lurks a question: Can you really separate Nvidia from its CEO?

As of this writing, Jensen is sixty-one years old. He has run the company for thirty-one years—more than half his life. Nvidia is bigger, more profitable, and more crucial to the global economy than ever before. Yet it still relies on Jensen, as a business leader and a tone setter. Apple survived the ouster of Steve Jobs in 1985 and his death in 2011; Amazon, Microsoft, and Google all did well after Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to move on. Someday, Nvidia will have to face a similar transition. It is not quite clear what the company might look like post-Jensen—whether its culture will survive, whether it will maintain its momentum.

After all, a whiteboard is only as useful as the person who holds the marker. It can reflect genius, but it cannot create it.

PART I

THE EARLY YEARS

(PRE-1993)

CHAPTER 1

Pain and Suffering

WHEN JENSEN HUANG WAS FOUR years old, his father visited New York City and fell in love with America. From that point on, his parents had one goal: to find a way to raise him and his older brother in the land of opportunity.

It would not be an easy task. Jensen was born in Taiwan on February 17, 1963, to Taiwanese parents. They were not wealthy and moved around based on the needs of his father’s work. They ended up in Thailand for an extended period. Jensen’s mother taught her two boys English, each day selecting ten words at random in the dictionary and asking them to spell the words and memorize their definitions.1

After a wave of political unrest hit Thailand, Jensen’s parents decided to send him and his brother to Tacoma, Washington, to live with their aunt and uncle. Tacoma was once called the “City of Destiny,” because it sat at the end of the Northern Pacific Railroad, but by the 1970s it was about as far from the dynamism of New York City as it was possible to get: damp, dreary, and smelling of sulfur thanks to the paper pulping and processing plants that lay on the outskirts of town. Jensen’s aunt and uncle were recent immigrants to the United States themselves and did the best they could to help their nephews adjust to their new country while they waited for Jensen’s parents to follow them across the Pacific.

The two boys were difficult to handle. “We could never sit still,” Jensen said. “We were eating all the candy in the cupboard, jumping off the roof, climbing out the windows, tracking mud into the house, forgetting to close the shower curtain, and flooding the bathroom floor.”2

Even though they had not yet made the move to the United States themselves, his parents wanted to send their children to an American boarding school so they could get a good education. They found one called Oneida Baptist Institute, which was located in eastern Kentucky and accepted international students. They could afford the tuition only by selling nearly all of their possessions.

Jensen remembers the initial drive through the mountains of Kentucky, past the single building that was the town of Oneida’s only gas station, grocery store, and post office all at once. The boarding school had around three hundred students, evenly split between boys and girls. But it was not a prep school as Jensen’s family originally thought. Oneida Baptist Institute was, instead, a reform school for troubled young people. It had been founded in the 1890s to remove children from feuding families in the state and thus keep them from killing each other.

As befit its original purpose, the school held its students to a strict routine. Each morning, Jensen would cross the Red Bird River on a worn-out swing bridge to attend his classes. He joined the swim team, played soccer, and discovered new foods such as Jell-O, sausage, biscuits, and gravy. He went to church twice a week and watched ABC’s Sunday Night Movie on the weekends. Some evenings, he would play chess with the school custodian. On others, he would help him fill the vending machines and get a free soda in return. The occasional trip to town gave him an opportunity to buy fudgesicles at the grocery store; otherwise, he would content himself eating apples off of the tree outside his dorm room window.

Above all, there were the chores. Every student was required to work every day. Already strong enough for extended manual labor, Jensen’s brother was assigned to work at a nearby tobacco farm. For his part, Jensen was on janitorial duty for his three-story dorm. “I had to clean the bathrooms,” he said. “You can’t unsee that kind of stuff.”3

Jensen’s relative youth, and likely his different ethnicity as well, made him a target of bullies. Even though the school was ostensibly designed to reform its pupils, in practice oversight could be lax, and Jensen was beaten up often in his first months on campus. Even his roommate was intimidating: he was eight years older than Jensen, and his whole body was covered in tattoos and scars from stab wounds. Eventually, Jensen learned to overcome his fear. He befriended his roommate and taught him how to read, and in exchange the other boy introduced Jensen to weightlifting. Jensen took to it, and it gave him not only strength but confidence—the ability and desire to stand up for himself.

Later in his life, Jensen’s executives would say he had developed his tough, street-fighter mentality during his days in Kentucky. “Maybe this is a bit of my early schooling, I will never start a fight, but I will never walk away from one. So, if someone is going to pick on me, they’d better think twice,” Jensen himself said.4

After a few years, Jensen’s parents moved from Thailand to Beaverton, Oregon, a city on the outskirts of the Portland metropolitan area. They withdrew the boys from the “boarding school” in Kentucky and enrolled them in public school. Although Jensen was happy to be back with his parents, he looked back on his time at Oneida Baptist as formative.

“I don’t get scared often. I don’t worry about going places I haven’t gone before. I can tolerate a lot of discomfort.”5

ON THE FOURTH FLOOR OF the Elks Club building in downtown Portland, inside an ornate ballroom with chandeliers and carved ceilings, a man named Lou Bochenski had started a table-tennis club called the Paddle Palace. It was open every day from 10:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. and had a thriving juniors program for young enthusiasts. After school, Jensen would often end up at the Paddle Palace, where he discovered both a talent and a passion for the sport. He would also once again find himself doing janitorial work, now to make some extra money—Bochenski paid him to scrub the Paddle Palace’s floors.

This was not just charity on Bochenski’s part. His daughter, Judy Hoarfrost, was a member of the “ping-pong diplomacy” team that visited China in 1971. In fact, Hoarfrost and her eight teammates were the first group of Americans to make a state-sponsored visit to China since the Communist Revolution in 1949. Although they lost most of their matches, their trip signaled a thawing in U.S.-Chinese relations—and helped increase the profile of table tennis in the United States. Bochenski considered it his duty to help discover promising young table-tennis players and develop them into national-level talents.

Both Hoarfrost and Bochenski were impressed by Jensen’s skills and work ethic,6 so much so that in 1978, Bochenski wrote a letter to Sports Illustrated magazine that praised Jensen as the “most promising junior” ever to emerge in the Pacific Northwest. He pointedly said that, unlike other teenagers written up in the magazine whose families spent $10,000 annually on traveling to tournaments, Jensen earned his own travel money.

“He is a straight-A student and very hungry to become a table-tennis champion. He has played only three months, but I suggest you watch out for him in another year,” Bochenski wrote.7 At the time, Jensen was only fourteen.

At one point, he went to Las Vegas for a national table-tennis tournament. But the lights and sounds of the city were too alluring for him. Instead of resting up before his matches, he stayed up all night walking up and down the Strip. He lost badly—and never forgot the sting of his own failure.

“When you’re thirteen or fourteen years old and you go to Las Vegas for the first time, it’s hard to focus on the match,” he said three decades later.8 “To this day, I regret not being more focused on the tournament.”

When he was fifteen, he entered the U.S. Open Junior Doubles tournament. This time, he knew better than to let himself get distracted and came in third place overall.

JENSEN WAS ALWAYS A GOOD student. Learning how to interact socially with other people, though, was more challenging.

“I was very introverted. I was incredibly shy,” he said. “The one experience that pulled me out of my shell was waiting tables at Denny’s.”

When Jensen was fifteen, his brother helped him get a job at a Denny’s in Portland. He would work at the twenty-four-hour diner for several summers in high school and college. Jensen started where he always had, doing the dirty work of washing dishes and cleaning bathrooms. “I did more bathrooms than any CEO in the history of CEOs,” he would recall.9 He then became a busboy and later waited tables.

He believed that Denny’s equipped him with a number of significant life skills, including how to navigate chaos, work under time pressure, communicate with customers, and handle mistakes (in this case, from the kitchen). It also taught him to find satisfaction in the quality of his work, no matter how minor the task, and to fulfill each according to the highest possible standards. It didn’t matter if he was cleaning the same toilet for the hundredth time or interacting with a new customer who had never been to a Denny’s before and didn’t know what to order. He recalls pushing himself to do the best he could, even if it meant chasing an absurd goal such as being able to carry more cups of coffee at a time than anyone else on staff. He learned to take pride in daily toil.

“I’m certain I was the best dishwasher, busboy, and waiter they’ve ever had,” he said.

Except when it came to one common order. “I hated shakes because I hated making them,” he said; it took a long time to prepare a single shake and an even longer time to clean up afterward. He would try to nudge customers to order Coke instead, and if they persisted, he would ask, “Are you sure?”10 Already, he was learning another fact of working life: the trade-off between having high standards and being efficient with one’s time.

JENSEN ATTENDED ALOHA HIGH SCHOOL in Beaverton, Oregon, where he made friends in the math, computer, and science clubs. He spent all his free moments programming BASIC on the Apple II and playing games on teletype terminals, which looked like electric typewriters, and which were connected to a larger mainframe computer.

He “fell in love” with video games, in particular the Star Trek mainframe game, which was based on the classic Hasbro board game Battleship.11 He also spent a good deal of time playing Atari and Konami games at the arcade, including Asteroids, Centipede, and Galaxian.12 He didn’t have a computer at home, so he had to go elsewhere to get his gaming fix. “We had no money,” he said.13

The precocious Jensen had skipped a grade at his elementary school in Thailand and again at Oneida Baptist Institute in Kentucky. He graduated from Aloha High School at the age of sixteen and decided to attend Oregon State University in Corvallis, both because of the low in-state tuition and because his best friend, Dean Verheiden, was going there too. Together, Jensen and Verheiden chose electrical engineering as their major and took many of the same classes. Hoping to gain relevant work experience, Jensen applied repeatedly for an internship at a local technology company called Techtronic Industries but was rejected every time.

During his sophomore year, Jensen met Lori Mills, one of only three girls in an electrical engineering class of two hundred fifty students. “I was the youngest kid in the class. I was tiny. I was skinny. But I had a great pickup line,” Jensen said, who by this point had grown out of his awkward phase and had sharpened his social skills. “Do you want to see my homework?”14

The line worked. He and Mills began dating, and they got married shortly after they both graduated in 1984. Jensen was invited to interview with some of the largest semiconductor and chip makers in the country. He first had his eye on Texas Instruments, whose offices spanned multiple zip codes, but his interview went poorly, and he didn’t get an offer. He next interviewed with two companies based in California. The first was Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD, a company that Jensen had idolized ever since he saw a poster of one of their microprocessors at Oregon State. The second was LSI Logic, which made customizable microchips called application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs, for technical and scientific uses.

He received offers from both companies and chose AMD, because he was more familiar with its reputation. By day, he designed microchips; at night and on the weekends, he took courses at Stanford so that he could get his master’s in electrical engineering. On top of his work and his continuing studies, he and Lori had a son, Spencer, and daughter, Madison. Because he couldn’t take many classes at once, completing the master’s degree was a long, arduous process; he finally finished after eight years. “I have a very long-term horizon,” he said. “I can be impatient about certain things, but infinitely patient about others. I plug away.”15

Between his job, his master’s, and his family, Jensen had achieved the dream of so many immigrant parents, who make huge sacrifices to move to the United States in order to give their children the chance for a better life.

“My father’s dream and my mom’s aspirations for our success are what ultimately put us here,” Jensen said nearly thirty years later, when asked to reflect on his past. “I owe them a great deal.”16

Yet Jensen’s well of ambition ran deeper still. The drive to do every job to perfection and, at the same time, as efficiently as it could possibly be done now led him to question his own work designing microprocessors. Although he was good at designing microchips for AMD, he found it tedious; at the time, it was still done manually, by hand.

One of his office mates had left for LSI and wanted Jensen to come with him to the company. And Jensen, like most people in the chip-making industry, had heard that LSI was now pioneering new software tools that promised to make the process of chip design much faster and easier. The idea intrigued him. Although he knew it would mean taking a risk, he felt a need to work at a company that, to him, seemed to have a clear grasp on the future of the chip industry. It was an early sign of his restless, forward-thinking nature, which would lead him to pursue the cutting edge even if it meant leaving safety and security behind.