Of course, Huang would work hard anyway. It is in his nature. If there is a theme to his life, it is amplification; he has executed on the same simple precepts of diligence, courage, and mastery of fundamentals again and again and again, to greater and greater effect. I was surprised to learn how much of the man he later became was present in the immigrant child arriving unaccompanied by his parents in the United States in 1973 to an environment so unconducive to flourishing that it seems a miracle he survived it. To understand Huang fully, we begin not at Dennyâs restaurant, nor in the giant cathedrals of technology he later commissioned, but at this tiny rural school.
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The Thinking Machine - Stephen Witt
Introduction:
âThis is the story of how a niche vendor of video game hardware became the most valuable company in the world. It is the story of a stubborn entrepreneur who pushed his radical vision for computing for thirty years, in the process becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is the story of a revolution in silicon and the small group of renegade engineers who defied Wall Street to make it happen. And it is the story of the birth of an awesome and terrifying new category of artificial intelligence, whose long-term implications for the human species cannot be known. At the center of this story is a propulsive, mercurial, brilliant, and extraordinarily dedicated man. His name is Jensen Huang, and his thirty-two-year tenure is the longest of any technology CEO in the S&P 500.
Huang is a visionary inventor whose familiarity with the inner workings of electronic circuitry approaches a kind of intimacy. He reasons from first principles about what microchips can do today, then gambles with great conviction on what they will do tomorrow.
Huang doesnât think like a businessman. He thinks like an engineer, breaking down difficult concepts into simple principles, then leveraging those principles to great effect. âI do everything I can not to go out of business,â he said at breakfast. âI do everything I can not to fail.
I found Huang to be an elusive subject, in some ways the most difficult Iâve ever reported on. He hates talking about himself and once responded to one of my questions by physically running away. Before this book was commissioned, I had written a magazine profile of Huang for The New Yorker. Huang told me he hadnât read it, and had no intention of ever doing so. Informed that I was writing a biography of him, he responded, âI hope I die before it comes out.â
Still, Huang offered me access to a great number of people to report this book. I spoke with almost two hundred people, including his employees, his cofounders, his rivals, and several of his oldest friends. The beloved and even somewhat goofy family man who emerged from these interviews bore little resemblance to the unapologetically carnivorous executive who made Nvidia succeed, but it is these same attachments that spur Huangâs ambition: he spoke frankly with me of his insecurities, his fear of letting his employees down, his fear of bringing shame to the family name. Some executives speak of profit as âkeeping score,â but not Huang; for him, the money is only temporary insurance against some future calamity. There was something a little touching about hearing a man worth a hundred billion dollars talk in this way.
Huang eschewed drama and led by example, driving himself hard, refraining from gossip, and carefully apportioning credit for good work. If a product was going to be late or if LSI couldnât deliver on some promised function, Huang would immediately provide a detailed description of what had gone wrong, who was responsible, and what he was doing to fix it.
âWhen he said he was going to do something, there was a reasonable likelihood that he would actually do it, yâknow?â Malachowsky said. Malachowsky struggled to think of other Silicon Valley product managers who fit that description.
If Huang had a flaw, it was that he embraced candor in the extreme, sometimes crossing into the territory of insult. The bluntness was part of his charm, of course, but it could leave peopleâs feelings hurt. He didnât have much patience for people who disagreed with him, and he also seemed genuinely surprised that there were people working in his industry who didnât want to spend fourteen hours a day fiddling with the circuit simulator. Of course, for quarrelsome workaholics like Priem and Malachowsky, these traits were only further evidence of Jensenâs managerial fitness.
Huang did not have a concrete vision of what the future of technology would look like. Some technologists did; for example, Elon Musk began with a vision of himself standing on the surface of Mars, then worked backward to build the technology he would need to get himself there. Huang went in the opposite direction; he started with the capabilities of the circuits sitting in front of him, then projected forward as far as logic would allow. Only there, at the frontier of reason, would he allow himself to take a single step forward into the nebulous realm of vibes.