When you’re running a the most valuable company in the world, you’re busy meeting stakeholders, giving presentations, and handling the media, and can be forgiven for not being up to speed on the technical details of your products. But it turns out that NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang can wear many hats.
NVIDIA CEO often knows obscure technical specifications of products better than his own employees, the author of the book “The NVIDIA Way” has revealed. “He just has a technical competence that most CEOs don’t have,” Tae Kim said on a podcast. “He’s actually trading AI papers, the latest academic AI papers, with his engineers. He’s on these discussion boards. NVIDIA has all these email discussion boards, you know, for AI or autonomous driving where engineers trade the latest articles and research and he’s inside these discussion boards and sending the latest AI paper papers to his engineers,” he added.
“He’s passionate about this technical specifications and all the latest technology,” Kim went on. “He’s in the weeds on this stuff. One manager told me he was preparing and met Jensen to talk about wireless specifications for this unimportant product. And (Jensen) knew more about what’s happening in the wireless specs than he did. (These wireless specifications) aren’t that important. The CEO of Nvidia should not be looking at, you know, 802.11b versus 802.11n versus 802.11.g. But he loves the stuff so much that he knew more about what was happening in the wireless standards than the product manager did,” he added.
“That’s a special, unique CEO that has that business genius and that technical acumen. That combination and just that passion to work 24X7 on all this stuff, that that’s what makes NVIDIA so special and different,” he explained.
It perhaps helps that Jensen Huang has a technical background. He has a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and worked at AMD and LSI in technical roles before founding NVIDIA. But in spite of being a CEO for more than three decades, he still seems to know the ins and outs of the technical specifications in his field, and is still reading AI research papers. And his ability to be hands on with the technical stuff seems to have helped — NVIDIA is currently the most valuable company in the world, and is spearheading the AI revolution with its GPUs.