Text: Director Dong

Who is the CEO who cleans the most toilets in the world?

Who is one of the longest-serving CEOs?

Why can GPU replace CPU and become the protagonist?

Nvidia has experienced several crises, why can it turn the corner?

How did Nvidia compete with Intel and win Mellanx?

Is Nvidia the cause of artificial intelligence or the result of artificial intelligence?

Is there a No. 2 position within NVIDIA? How can Jen-Hsun Huang manage 60 people?

What is NVIDIA’s real advantage? Can it work in the face of the efforts of many giants?

All the above questions point to the hottest topics at the moment: Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia, GPU, and artificial intelligence. By seeking answers to these questions and more relevant information, what can be obtained and presented is not only the growth story of an entrepreneur, the development history of a world giant, the evolution of a technology, but also the progress of an era. trajectory.

01 Huang Renxun’s Growth

As the saying goes, you look older at the age of three. This sentence has a certain truth, but it ignores that a person's character has its own nature, but what affects it more is often various experiences.

The elementary school Huang Renxun attended is a school located in Kentucky, USA, that specializes in reforming troubled youth. There was nothing wrong with him, but his parents mistakenly thought it was a prep school. A small misunderstanding, but it shaped Huang Renxun's character.

Most of Huang's classmates are troubled teenagers, and since he is young and of Chinese descent, he will inevitably become the target of bullying. Fortunately, Jen-Hsun Huang established a good friendship with a roommate who was covered in tattoos and whose scars were visible. He taught his roommates to read, and they took him to weightlifting exercises.

This friendship not only allowed Huang Renxun to overcome his fear, but also gained strength. More importantly, it gave him self-confidence - the ability and willingness to fight for himself.

In this school, all students have to do manual labor. Huang Jenxun was assigned to clean the toilet. His memory of this experience is "that kind of scene will never be forgotten." And this is not him and the toilet." The only experience of "bonding". During the summer of high school, he worked at Denny's restaurant, and his first job was cleaning toilets.

Whether in school or in a restaurant, Huang Renxun diligently completed the job of cleaning toilets day after day. Then he was recognized by the restaurant owner, and later started a high-paying internship as a waiter. Cleaning toilets, exercising Huang Renxun's resilience also allowed his extremely serious and high-standard character to begin to shine.

While working as a waiter, Huang Renxun always tried his best to do his best, and even kept thinking about how to serve more cups of coffee at a time. When ordering food for customers, he would try to avoid customers ordering milkshakes, because milkshakes In the past, it took too much time to make and clean up. At this time, he would often urge customers to order Coke.

These experiences have affected Huang Renxun’s character, and these character traits will be crucial in Huang Renxun’s future experience in starting a business and managing Nvidia.

Huang Renxun had no ambition to start a business at the beginning. After many discussions and deductions with the other two co-founders, he believed that the direction of starting a business was feasible. Therefore, although Huang Renxun was also an engineer, he still served as CEO. Started the journey of entrepreneurship

However, like most entrepreneurs, those who start a business for the first time often have more ideals than reality and more ideas than business until the company fails two major products in a row and the company almost fails. When he went bankrupt, Huang Renxun understood that innovation is important, but commercial viability is more important; product features are important, but focus is more important.

As a result, a focused and extremely serious CEO who pursued efficiency and high standards gradually matured and instilled his character into the company NVIDIA.

02 NVIDIA’s crisis

NVIDIA encountered a crisis when it just started.

NVIDIA The first core developedThe tablet NV1 uses a new texture rendering method that can reduce memory requirements; it also integrates audio functions. However, because these functions were not compatible with the mainstream market at the time, in the end, these two selling points that Nvidia thought were great were just for self-interest, and customers were not willing to pay for these innovative and redundant functions.

The company's second chip, NV2, is a customized chip. It has not been developed yet and customers do not plan to use it on a large scale. When Nvidia began developing its third chip, NV3, the company had to lay off employees to reduce costs. At this time, it only had funds on its books for nine months.

The reason why Nvidia survived this crisis is: the waiting of competitors and the success of product development. At that time, Nvidia's rival 3dfx could have purchased Nvidia directly, but they felt that Nvidia would inevitably go bankrupt and the acquisition price would be lower if they waited. As a result, Nvidia's third chip was successfully developed and became popular in the market.

Another major crisis occurred in 1998. NVIDIA plans to IPO, but the company's product sales are limited by chip production capacity and expenses have not been delayed, resulting in declining revenue and increasing losses. It also coincided with the financial crisis that also broke out in East Asia and Southeast Asia, and investors' enthusiasm for IPOs weakened. Therefore, Nvidia's IPO was also suspended.

As a result, Nvidia's book funds were once again in crisis and could only last a few weeks. In the end, Huang Renxun persuaded his customers and provided generous conditions before obtaining transitional financing from them.

The root cause of this crisis lies in production capacity. This also prompted Huang Renxun to think about product releases and production capacity arrangements. In the end, he reorganized the engineering department, shortened the chip development cycle, and gave birth to the "three teams, two seasons (sales season)" model. Ensure that the company's products can be produced and promoted to the market, and that the technology is six months ahead of market competitors. This model has significantly improved the company's sales.

Funding crisis, product crisis, operating crisis, etc., Nvidia will encounter difficulties from time to time in its development path. This is a situation that happens to every company. The unique thing about Nvidia is that every crisis is not wasted, and every crisis promotes the company's iteration. The reason why iteration can be successful is because Nvidia has rich talents and can fight and win battles.

03 Culture to attract talents

Nvidia’s “overtime culture” is also very strong, often working more than ten hours a day and overtime on weekends. Huang Renxun is a workaholic. Even when he is on vacation, he is still answering emails, so that the team members have to remind him to relax during the vacation.

Some employees within NVIDIA have complained about long working hours, but overall, there is no negative news about NVIDIA's "involution." This is related to Nvidia's unique management style: eliminating bureaucratic culture at all times and fully meeting incentive needs.

There are two ways to eliminate bureaucratic culture.

The first step is to "whiteboard". NVIDIA's internal reporting does not use cool PPT, but the old-fashioned "whiteboard + marker". Writing on a whiteboard can fully demonstrate the speaker's thinking process, force the speaker to think, and improve the feasibility of discussion and communication. On the other hand, this also eliminates the situation of being “robbed of work”.

In some companies with a strong bureaucratic culture, the credit of employees who really do things is often taken away by leaders who use PPT to give passionate speeches. However, reporting on a whiteboard becomes more difficult. There is no content to follow, which means that without actual participation and true understanding, it is almost difficult to explain on a whiteboard. Therefore, real credit is not easily claimed. Excellent employees are more likely to be seen.

The second trick is the "Five Major Matters" email. The hierarchy within NVIDIA is relatively flat, and basic employees also have the opportunity to communicate with Huang Renxun. Moreover, Huang Renxun also requires that all employees must send an email with the subject "Five Major Matters" to their superiors to talk about the important things they are doing and the major opportunities they see. These emails can be seen by Huang Renxun and have become an important feedback channel for the company.

"Five Matters" emails are not only helpful in eliminating some information asymmetries, but also help companies find new opportunities. For example, NVIDIA's investment in machine learning comes from employee email discussions.

When every employee's thoughts, creativity, abilities, and achievements can be seen by the company and even become the company's strategy, even if the work is harder, it may be worth it. of. The formation of this sense of achievement also benefits from NVIDIA's full satisfaction of motivation needs.

On the one hand, when employees’ ideas become products used around the world, it will bring a sense of accomplishment. This is something every company should consider when choosing product direction. Just like many early employees of NVIDIA,Came here from a competitor. Because they see that NVIDIA's products represent the future more than the products of their old employer. They also hope to participate in the creation of more meaningful and future-oriented products.

On the other hand, NVIDIA is not stingy in terms of salary and benefits. They want to recruit great talent, but they also want to retain talent. There’s a little story about an employee who was instrumental in a deal that saw Jen-Hsun Huang double his stock grant. The employee thanked Jen-Hsun Huang but said, "You shouldn't just double what you gave me." Therefore, Huang Renxun followed his advice and increased the number of stock grants to the employee.

Nvidia has many active management methods. These methods are just the surface, but the core is to allow outstanding talents to give full play to their capabilities. This sentence may be the slogan of every company, but perhaps only a few companies actually practice it.

04 Conclusion

As the saying goes, happy families are always similar. This sentence seems to be true when applied to companies. After all, great companies are the superposition of historical processes and personal struggles. However, every company has its public and private characteristics.

Nvidia, as the world's leading company by market value and the company that attracts the most attention in the artificial intelligence wave, does not have much information known to the public.

If you use one sentence to describe Nvidia, it is a company that "combines east and west". It has the ultimate management culture of the East, advocating hard work, and the straightforward culture of the West, eliminating bureaucracy and encouraging innovation.

This is a combination that is difficult to replicate and highly dependent on the characteristics of the founder. This is true even for Nvidia. After all, within Nvidia, it seems that it is still unclear who will become the next Jen-Hsun Huang. Similarly, for Nvidia, what if there is no Huang Renxun?