Name: On leadership | Jensen Huang and Joel Hellermark
Uploaded: 2024-10-13T10:03:33.000Z
Duration: 19 min 42 s
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One thing I admire so deeply about you is how technically current you stay.

Adverbs of frequency

I think you must spend a lot of time reading or whatever, but you're always so incredibly thoughtful and well-read in every single detail of what's going on in the industry.

The superlative

How to stay so on top of things while running one of the world's largest companies.

Well, first, I'm surrounded by amazing people.

When I went to visit you, you were surrounded by amazing people.

And so you have to make the effort to learn.

People love teaching people who are great students.

And so I dedicate myself a lot to being a good student.

And of course, we're in a whole lot of domains from self-driving cars to climate research to digital biology.

And so the vastness, the breadth of impact that we can have in the world is great.

And so you're in a very tech-driven industry, solving and creating solutions for companies.

And so for both of us, it's essential we understand the underpinnings of the technology.

So you have an intuition for how the industry is going to change.

You have an intuition for which one of the technologies is a little bit of a left turn and which one is fundamental.

To realize that maybe the early works that we did with generative adversarial models to variational autoencoders to diffusion models, that they were somewhat cousins of each other.

And that realizing the impact of one could lead to a breakthrough in another which opens up the horizon for now diffusion models that are utterly incredible.

And so I think having an intuition for technology allows you to better extrapolate.

And our ability to extrapolate and see down the road is really vital because, gosh, technology is changing fast, but it still takes us several years to build a great solution.

And so how do you, on the one hand, dedicate yourself to build something that's going to take years to do, building it on top of technology that's utterly changing by a factor of a thousand every few years.

How do you do that unless you have an intuition for it?

And so I think that the fact that you're so deeply gifted in technology and so you understand it and you have great interest and curiosity in technology is essential to running a technology driven company.

So I think it's, I love that part of my job and I'm surrounded by people who are generous to teach me and I've got to just dedicate myself to be a good student.

So one area I'm very intrigued by as well is how you run the company.

I've understood you don't have one-on-ones, you know, can you talk me through some of the sort of classic management playbook that you've challenged and evolved?

Well, first, with respect to building a company, the first thing that you have to go, as with all problems, and Joe, you do this very naturally, you start from first principles.

What is this machine that we're trying to create?

And so I think you think about it from that perspective.

There are several things that I wanted to do with the company.

I wanted to create something, a company that naturally attracts amazing people.

And the reason for that is because we're solving problems.

Our company's mission is to solve computing problems that are barely possible.

And if a problem could be solved by normal computers, we don't do it.

And so we have to go find problems that are impossible for normal computers to solve or barely possible.

And so you want to attract amazing people who want to invent this new form of computing and apply it to solving some really difficult problems.

Second, I wanted a company that was smaller, not larger.

You want a company that's as small as possible, not as large as possible.

You know, it needs to be as large as necessary to do the job well, but to be as small as possible.

And so naturally, you want to empower people.

Well, if you want an organization that obeys command and control, then you make it a pyramid, just like the old military, all the way back to the Roman Empire.

But if you want to empower people, then you want to make it as flat as possible so that information travels quickly.

And so in order to make something as flat as possible, the first layer has to be well-considered.

Well, the first layer happens to be the most senior people, and you would think that they need the least amount of management.

Nobody's coming to me, none of my management team is coming to me for career advice.

And so I have a whole lot of people reporting to me because I don't need to do one-on-ones.

They're all fabulously happy and they know what they're doing.

And so those one-on-ones are really not necessary.

And if there's a strategic direction, why do you tell one person?

And so after we're swimming in the soup of strategizing and how to formulate the path to the future, when the time comes, I just send it out to everybody at the same time or I'll tell everybody at the same time.

And people will give me feedback and we'll refine it.

And because the company is so flat and you've empowered the organization so much with knowledge of the company and their access to information, the company is also agile.

And so it turns out that by having a lot of direct reports, not having one-on-ones made the company flat, information travels quickly, employees empowered, which made it possible for me not to do one-on-ones.

That algorithm was well-conceived and the architecture is well-implemented.

Everybody works as one and the company is shaped in a way that allows us to build accelerated computing best.

If you asked me to go do fried chicken, we'd have a hard time doing fried chicken.

I think you have 40 direct reports, right?

The challenge is getting everybody together.

When I want to get everybody together, but either somebody's out or somebody's on vacation or somebody's doing something.

The odds of everybody sitting at the office is approximately 0%.

How did your leadership style change over time?

There are a lot of things that I want to do better.

If something's happening at work and I don't like its direction, I'll just say it.

I don't take anybody aside, do one-on-one coaching.

If something's not right, I'll just say it.

If I have a different opinion, I'll just say it.

It could be a little too direct, but if people just realize that I'm not trying to do anything except be direct, then I spend a lot of time reasoning through my decisions, which empowers employees because they learn how leaders think through problems.

Just by every meeting I'm in, I'm explaining how do I think through this?

How do we compare and contrast these ideas?

That process of management, I think, is really empowering.

We also don't do just vice president meetings or just director and board meetings.

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On leadership | Jensen Huang and Joel Hellermark

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