#376 Jensen Huang: Founder of Nvidia

**David Senra** (0:00)
There's an idea in this book where it says, Jensen prioritized technical skill and maximum effort above all. And as I was reading, I noticed a lot of similarities between the way Jensen thought and ran his company with the way that Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos thought and ran their companies as well. In fact, from day one, in Jeff Bezos' very first shareholder letter, Jeff wrote about the importance and emphasized the importance of having the very best team. He wrote, setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been and will continue to be the single most important element of Amazon's success. Jeff's focus on talent is very similar to this quote that I found from Steve Jobs in an interview that Steve gave that very same year in 1997 And this is what Steve Jobs said. He said that, I think I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with. You must find extraordinary people. The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is at most two to one. But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to one. Given that you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream. He said you want to build a team that pursues the A plus players. And this is exactly what Ramp did. Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible. In the last 12 months, they hired only 0.23% of the people that applied. When you use Ramp, you now have top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24-7 to automate and improve all of your businesses' financial operations. And they do this all on a single platform. That means the longer that you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. This is important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, you can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. In the end of that interview that Steve Jobs gave, he added, a small team of A-plus players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. From a customer's perspective, what does it sound like when you have a small team of A-plus players? It sounds like this customer review that I read, which said that Ramp is like having a teammate who you never need to check in on because they have it handled. Ramp gives you everything you need to optimize all your financial operations on a single platform. Ramp's website is incredible. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp.com. So the book that I want to talk to you about today is The Nvidia Way Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant and it was written by Tae Kim. The book is a company history of NVIDIA, but that is not what I want to talk to you about. I want to talk to you about how the founder Jensen has learned to run his company after decades of experience and learning and practice and failure and pain. And so there is 19 different ideas that popped out to me and there's like reoccurring themes and I think they to steal an idea from from Charlie Munger. Charlie Munger has this idea that he talks about over and over again. He talked about over and over again for decades. He talked about the Lollapalooza effect and how there's these economic and social implications of these different ideas inside of a company that interplay with one another and the combination of them actually make the traits more powerful. And in typical Charlie Munger fashion, he said, the person, the man who doesn't understand this is a damn fool.
And so, I organized my notes into this list of 19 ideas that I learned from Jensen, specifically how he runs his company from reading the book. Before I get there, though, I gotta take another idea from Munger where he talks about the importance of why he read so many biographies. And he says that when you're trying to teach the great concepts that work, I think it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them. So, before I get to my list of 19 ideas, I wanna give you this brief overview of Jensen Huang's early life and then the prehistory of NVIDIA. And I think doing so will add context because Jensen runs NVIDIA in a very unique way. He has built, which I think all of, he has in common with a lot of history-based entrepreneurs, he built a company building philosophy that is natural and authentic to him. He's been running NVIDIA for over three decades and I think it's impossible to do something for such a long period of time unless it is natural and authentic to you. So, one of the most important things that happened in Jensen's life happened when he was four years old. He was born in Taiwan, his father visits America, he goes to New York City and he realizes, oh, this is the land of opportunity, I want, if I want the best opportunity for my two sons, I need to get them to America. And doing so had to feel like a daunting task to his father. Jensen's family did not have money. In fact, they didn't even have a lot of stability. They had to move around Taiwan, depending on where his father could find work. They did not, the two brothers, Jensen and his brother, did not speak English. In fact, I thought it was very fascinating how Jensen's mother decided, hey, the kids need to go to America. And if they're going to America, they needed to learn English. And so she would select 10 random words from the dictionary every day. She'd make her sons memorize the definition and learn how to spell the words. So 10 English words every single day. And so in addition to reading this book, I watched a bunch of interviews with Jensen. And he talks about the fact that he has, he feels a great debt, the fact that sacrifices that his parents made to give him access to essentially unlimited opportunity. One of the great things about reading, this is not technically a biography of Jensen, but it can function as one. And one of the reasons I've become an evangelist for reading biographies, and I try to get people to read as many as possible, is because you're not really, yes, we're studying and we're learning about the lives of other people, but it is natural, it's human nature to put yourself in their shoes and think about how their story or their ideas relate to your own. And this was, you know, actually surprisingly hit me like an emotional point because I was just thinking about the fact that, you know, this was outside of Jensen's control. He's four years old when this is happening.