NVIDIA Won’t Be the Same Without Jensen Huang — Tae Kim

Jordi Hays (0:00)

If you're sick of our coverage of the NVIDIA story, you're gonna hate this show.

John Coogan (0:04)

You're gonna get sicker. Get ready to puke, because we got the NVIDIA expert himself. Take him in the TBPN Ultradome. We're bringing him in.

Welcome to the show, Tae.

Tae Kim (0:14)

How you doing?

John Coogan (0:17)

Thank you so much for joining the show.

Tae Kim (0:18)

Oh, slow news week this week.

John Coogan (0:20)

Slow news week indeed. I'm exhausted. How are you doing?

Tae Kim (0:25)

It's been rough. It's been rough. It's been a really good week.

Yeah. That night when the board was meeting, I had to figure out, do I get any sleep or should I stay up all night? Only all nighter. A decision was going to happen.

Jordi Hays (0:40)

Yeah. Sometimes when you have a week of an insane news cycle, it's been a different experience just because you can't look away, but it's also incredibly tragic for the technology industry, for NVIDIA, for Jensen, and I think people are actually seeming to do a good job of holding two things, which is people can be flawed and make mistakes and simultaneously be one of one and incredible in other domains. Despite all the chaos of like, over on Instagram is like crazier. I'm seeing posts with like half a million likes that are just like, I'm like, the story is not niche at all.

Tae Kim (1:28)

No, not at all.

Jordi Hays (1:28)

It's like everyone knows Jensen and all the, they can recognize all the other people involved, but overall, I think people have generally been pretty balanced about it, which I guess is a silver lining.

John Coogan (1:44)

Yeah.

Tae Kim (1:45)

I've been talking to people on NVIDIA and it's complete shock. Yeah. Disappointment, they're angry. So many of the causes that Jensen was a proponent of, now those things are in big trouble. Stranded. Yeah.

The China Hawk stuff, the open source movement. But all of these things that are legitimate positive forces, that's all at risk now.

I just want to say this is just such a sad ending for probably one of the greatest CEOs of American history. To have this 10-year end like this, all the stuff that he contributed to society, the technology industry and pushing AI forward, it's really disappointing and sad.

John Coogan (2:31)

Yeah. I have a hedge fund manager friend who's one of his big overarching thesis is that we are coming to the end of the boomer bubble. This obviously relates to the handover of generational wealth from the boomers and boomer politicians going, we've had boomer politicians for something like 40 years or something like that.

He was calling out that Jensen was the final boomer CEO to go and now we're firmly in the Gen X millennial territory across all the big tech companies essentially. It's a very remarkable time. As you think back on-

Jordi Hays (3:12)

Which is crazy because Jensen at no point in time, have I mentally thought in my head, okay, boomer.

Tae Kim (3:20)

Yeah, no, no, no.

Jordi Hays (3:22)

So much vitality, so much energy.

I guess, what are you- I would say by Tuesday, I couldn't imagine Jensen staying, despite that just with everything piling on, despite that NVIDIA would never be the same and there was going to be a bunch of bad downstream implications, it just felt like just too much in some sense. Now it's like, I still think you have to believe there's a chance he comes back, but there's a lot of investigations.

Tae Kim (3:58)

I think it's over. It's like, I tweeted it out as soon as the second affair report came out with five sources. I knew then it was completely over because-

It's a direct report.

John Coogan (4:11)

Direct report and a direct report is in the NVIDIA terms and conditions, basically their employee handbook.

Tae Kim (4:17)

It's a code of conduct. Code of conduct. Yeah.

John Coogan (4:20)

It's much more cut and dry, which is weird to say because we're talking about allegations of spying with a geopolitical rival like the most controversial thing, but that investigation has not concluded. This one is cut and dry and so the second one was truly the end.

Tae Kim (4:36)

And the board must have known that if there's two ants in the kitchen, as people say, there's probably more. Then Reuters came out with a third one.

John Coogan (4:45)

Third, yeah.

Tae Kim (4:46)

Yeah, I mean, it was just game over because the code of conduct says conflict of interest and the ethics decision tests, like if this was in social media or on top of the New York Times, we should want to do this. Obviously, it did not meet those tests.