To understand Nvidia, take a look at its CEO and culture
To understand Nvidia, take a look at its CEO and culture
When Nvidia became the world’s most valuable company (again) earlier this month, it did so because of its crucial role in the growing artificial intelligence industry. Nvidia designs the chips that are used in the hardware powering AI, a market that the company dominates. And while there are quite a few factors behind Nvidia’s success, one reason is its company culture.
In his book “The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant,” out Dec.10, Barron’s senior writer Tae Kim looks closer at both the business and the people behind Nvidia, particularly CEO Jensen Huang.
“I found the defining characteristic wasn’t the technology or innovation,” said Kim in an interview with “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal. “It was this unique work culture that Jensen Huang and his co-founders built up.”
The following is an excerpt from the book, focusing on the company’s early years and the formation of its workplace culture.
When Geoff Ribar was hired away in December of 1997 from Advanced Micro Devices to serve as Nvidia’s CFO, he found that his new boss had two impressive traits: Jensen was extremely persuasive and extremely hardworking.
“There may be people smarter than me,” Jensen once told his executive staff, “but no one is ever going to work harder than me.”
He was often in the office from 9:00 a.m. to near midnight, and his engineers usually felt obligated to keep similar hours.
“I used to tell people at AMD, Intel, or anywhere else that if they wanted to see how Nvidia was doing, they should visit the company’s parking lot on weekends. It was always busy,” said Ribar.
Even for the marketing department, working sixty to eighty hours a week, including every Saturday, was the norm. Andrew Logan, Nvidia’s director of corporate marketing, remembers leaving the office to take his wife to a 9:30 p.m. showing of the movie Titanic. On his way out, his coworker shouted, “Oh, half day, Andy?”
Tester Henry Levin recalls that whenever he found himself working late, he was never the only one there. Even when he stayed to 10:00 p.m. or later, Nvidia’s graphics architects would still be at the whiteboard, passionately discussing chip optimization and rendering techniques. His contemporary, Director of Materials Ian Siu, has imprinted on his memory the image of colleagues spending the night at the office, even over the weekends, after bringing sleeping bags to work. Employees would also bring their kids to the office so that they could spend time with their families without leaving their workplace.
“We worked our asses off all the time,” Siu said. He had fond memories of the camaraderie in the office and of close relationships with his coworkers.
Ribar rarely worked until midnight, but he would often arrive early in the morning. He quickly learned that one big disadvantage to sitting near the CEO at the office was that he was often the first person Jensen saw in the morning. And Jensen was known to unload on the first person he encountered, whoever it was.
“Jensen would often stew with his thoughts on something overnight about products or marketing,” Ribar said. “It was almost never a finance issue but it didn’t matter. If I saw him first, I would get the first blast from him.”
As the day went on, no place in Nvidia headquarters was safe from a drive-by grilling from Jensen. Kenneth Hurley, a technical marketing engineer, was at a urinal when Jensen walked up to the one next to him.
“I’m not the kind of guy who likes to talk in the bathroom,” Hurley said.
Jensen had other ideas. “Hey, what’s up?” he asked.
Hurley replied with a noncommittal “not much,” which earned him a sidelong glance from the CEO. Hurley panicked, thinking, “I’m going to get fired because he thinks I’m not doing anything. He’s probably wondering what I’m doing at Nvidia.”
To save face, Hurley proceeded to list twenty things he was working on, from convincing developers to buy Nvidia’s latest graphics card to teaching those developers how to program new features on them.
“Okay,” Jensen replied, apparently satisfied with the engineer’s answer.
Fear and anxiety became Jensen’s favorite motivational tools. At each monthly company meeting, he would say, “We’re thirty days from going out of business.”
It was hyperbole, on one level. The tense, high-stakes RIVA 128 process was not a complete outlier—as we’ll see—but it certainly wasn’t a regular occurrence. Yet Jensen didn’t want to allow any complacency to creep in, even in successful periods. And he wanted to confront new hires with the kind of pressure they would face going forward. If they didn’t have what it took, they needed to self-select out sooner rather than later.
But on another level, the line “We’re thirty days from going out of business” was true. In the technology industry, a single bad decision or product launch could be fatal. Nvidia had gotten lucky twice before, barely surviving the disasters of the NV1 and the NV2 before succeeding—with only months to spare—with the RIVA 128. That luck would not hold forever. But a good corporate culture would fortify the company against the dire consequences of most mistakes. And a mistake or downturn in the market was inevitable.
Still, as Dwight Diercks said, “It always felt like we were at zero. And the reason is that no matter how much money we had in the bank, Jensen could explain why we were going to be at zero with three things happening. He would say, ‘Let me tell you how. This could happen, this could happen, this could happen, and all that money goes to zero.’ ”
Jeff Fisher pointed out that fear can be clarifying. Even today, although Nvidia is no longer thirty days away from going out of business, the company could easily be thirty days from starting down a path that will lead to its destruction. “You’re always trying to look around corners and see what we’re missing,” Fisher said.
That paranoia came to a head in late 1997. Intel had always been both an important partner for Nvidia and a potential competitive threat. Nvidia’s graphics chips all had to be compatible with Intel’s processors, because Intel was the primary CPU maker for the PC market. But that fall, Intel started telling industry partners it had its own graphics chip coming, which threatened to take business away from Nvidia and other companies in the space.
Just months after the RIVA 128 launched to great fanfare, Intel announced its own chip, the i740. It was a direct challenge to Nvidia—its new chip and its very existence. Unlike the RIVA 128, which had a four-megabyte frame buffer, Intel’s i740 had an eight-megabyte buffer—twice the size of the one on Nvidia’s chip—that the company was trying to set as the new standard in the industry. Intel had the ear of every PC maker in the world, as it supplied the vast majority of their CPUs. After Intel’s i740 announcement, “our sales pipeline started to dry up,” one Nvidia executive said. If Intel could force adoption of the eight-megabyte buffer, the RIVA 128 would quickly be rendered obsolete.
“Make no mistake. Intel is out to get us and put us out of business,” Jensen declared at an all-company meeting. “They have told their employees, and they have internalized this. They are going to put us out of business. Our job is to go kill them before they put us out of business. We need to go kill Intel.”10
Caroline Landry and the rest of the Nvidia team worked even harder to fight off the new competitor, a company that at the time was about 860 times Nvidia’s size in terms of revenue. She often worked past midnight, staggering home and falling asleep for a few hours before waking back up to do it again.
“I’m super tired. I need to get up. It’s hard,” she told herself. “But we need to kill Intel. Must kill Intel.”
Excerpted from “The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant” by Tae Kim. Copyright (c) 2025 by Tae Kim. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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