NVIDIA is currently the most valuable company in the world, and its CEO Jensen Huang is well-known for his intensity and putting in long hours at work. And Huang seems to want to squeeze out every last bit of productivity when he’s in office.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has been known to take updates from employees even when he runs into them in the company’s washrooms, a new book has revealed. Titled The NVIDIA way, the book by Tae Kim delves into the early history of NVIDIA and CEO Jensen Huang’s management style. And it features an interesting anecdote about Huang’s time in the NVIDIA loos.
“No place in Nvidia headquarters is safe from a drive-by grilling from Jensen Huang,” the book says. The book recounts the experience of Kenneth Hurley, a technical marketing engineer, who was at a urinal when Jensen walked up to the one next to him. “I’m not the kind of guy who likes to talk in the bathroom,” Hurley says. But his boss had other ideas. “Hey, what’s up?” Jensen Huang asked him. Hurley thought it was just small-talk, and replied with a noncomittal “not much.” But this earned him a sidelong glance from the CEO.
The glance seemed to be enough to send Hurley into a panic, and he realized that Jensen Huang really wanted updates, even though they were in the bathroom. “I’m going to get fired because he thinks I’m not doing anything. He’s probably wondering what I’m doing at Nvidia,” Hurley said. To save face, he proceeded to list twenty things he was working on, from convincing developers to buy Nvidia’s latest graphics card to teaching those developers how to program new features on them.
This seems to be par for the course for Huang, who says that he works from 5 am to 9 pm, even on weekends and holidays. He says that he’s so involved with NVIDIA that he can’t remember movie plots while watching films because he’s thinking about the company. “I relax all the time, because I love what I do. And I think if you really love what you do, it’s not going to feel like work,” Huang had previously said. And while this work ethic has made NVIDIA the most valuable company the world, and given Huang a net worth of $120 billion, and also seems to have required some extraordinary commitment of the company’s employees — even in the office washrooms.