NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Discloses The Company's "Secret Sauce", Says He Still Serves Dishes The Best

Belief, Persistence & Resilience Is What CEOs Should Target For Success, Says NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang

When we see Team Green and how it managed to rise from the very bottom of the markets, it is an iconic sight. What was the reason behind such gigantic success? Many thoughts remain, but the firm's CEO has simplified it.

In an interview with venture capitalist Navin Chaddha, Jensen says that the company comprises ordinary people with huge visions; however, that wasn't where the essence of success lies. Later on, NVIDIA's CEO said that "persistence, resilience, and belief" was the best part of the company's journey.

So we competed with like 110, 120 graphics companies over time and what made us different was perspective and some people would say that that's vision but it's simpler just to say that it's perspective. We say the world differently so let me give you an example.

Whereas people were thinking they that they were building compute graphics chips or they were building computer graphics systems or they were trying to build the world's best and you could see it that their mission statement says we're going to build the world's best 3D graphics technology, we always saw it as an application problem that the goal was to make the application richer or more or enjoyable or possible in many cases and the way we express it is accelerated computing.

The thing that I dropped over time is this word in front of it which is application accelerated computing and it's really about the application. We always realized that it wasn't about the 3D graphics chip only. The 3D graphics chip and the architecture underneath and the domain-specific that we invented, OpenGL is of course one of them, we didn't invent that but OpenGL is one of them. We invented CUDNN which is used for AI, we invented Rapids which is used QDF for data processing, we invented Q-Quantum for Quantum Simulation. There's a whole bunch of algorithms and domain-specific libraries that we created over time but that platform, that library, the chip is in service of the application.

So, we, from the beginning, instead of just having graphics chip designers, we always had people who were working with the application industry to inspire them to use the technology to work with them to refactor their applications so that they can take advantage of the technology that we invented or algorithms to make their computer graphics games better. We were always in that mix of intersection between the application and the architecture we created.

Jensen Huang - NVIDIA CEO

Now, when questioned about the one bet NVIDIA laid upon, Jensen says that their primary focus is improving the application of their technologies.

He says that while other companies were involved in a computer power race, NVIDIA focused on providing a suitable medium for their architectures to work upon, ultimately achieving cumulative success in all departments. NVIDIA's CEO claims that they see AI as a "co-design or a full stack" problem, which is evident because of how massively CUDA & other domain-specific libraries have reached the stage where they are seen as the best in the markets.

Speaking a bit about NVIDIA's humble beginnings, Jensen says that he never took his status in the company as pride and instead interacted with everyone on a personal level. Jensen's job as a waiter at Denny's made him realize that he needs to be humble, and he said at the interview that "no one serves better tables than him till now."

Hey, look, you know, core skill set, the deep mode, look, these are life skills, you know, they help bussing tables, making dinner and doing dishes. These are are really important life skills.

Jensen Huang - NVIDIA CEO

The interview was indeed a delight to watch, and it's inspiring to witness how NVIDIA managed to turn a startup of three ordinary engineers into the world's most valued computing firm. Jensen did give a brief rundown on AI dynamics as well. The future holds plenty for NVIDIA and everyone involved in this technological revolution.