NVIDIA
Jen-Hsun Huang co-founded NVIDIA Corporation in April 1993 and has served as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board of Directors since its inception. Under his leadership, NVIDIA has become one of the largest fabless semiconductor companies in the world. NVIDIA has received numerous business and technology awards during Mr. Huang's tenure, including Fortune's Fastest Growing Companies, Wired Magazine's Top 40, and Stanford Business School's Entrepreneurial Company of the Year. Mr. Huang has served as on the Board of Trustees of the RAND Corporation since 1999 and is often invited to speak on technology and business trends at industry events. Prior to founding NVIDIA, Mr. Huang was Director of Coreware at LSI Logic and a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices. Mr. Huang holds a B.S.E.E. degree from Oregon State University and an M.S.E.E. degree from Stanford University.
Related Links: www.nvidia.com
Last Updated: Wed, Apr 19, 2006
With every product development, NVIDIA asks What is the purpose of this product and the soul of its existence? NVIDIA has been very successful developing distinctive brand names for their products that describe the soul of the product. These names have become widely recognized and have given the product a personality.
If you have a great idea, many other people probably have that idea too. When you start a company, you must assume that similar companies will form to compete with you. Be prepared to fend them off.
Every company looks for a fundamental advantage, but in reality there are none. Most large markets are designed to foster competition. The question that must be addressed is not how to create one single fundamental advantage for the company but rather ongoing advantages.
Corporate culture is the single most important thing for a CEO or entrepreneur to focus on in a company today. The culture at NVIDIA is about innovation and intellectual honesty, and the ability to be self-critical and recognize mistakes. Recognizing the power of this culture is very important for a leader.
NVIDIA's goal is to light up every pixel in the world. LCD technology has make displays more prevalent. NVIDIA hopes to take advantage of this trend, and future trends, in display technology to drive as many pixels as they can.
Jensen describes 3D technology that he expects will become popular in the near future: lightweight displays that can be worn as goggles allow the user to be immersed in a 3D environment just by looking around.
The CEO's main talent is to see around the corners and fuzzy edges, says NVIDIA's Co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang. An effective company leader needn't necessarily be outgoing, but they must be exceedingly comfortable with ambiguity - taking risks and not always plotting the exact outcome. If this is your comfort zone, says Huang, then enterprise leadership is the right path to pursue.
It is important to foster a culture that embraces mistakes and an environment where anyone can have a great idea. The majority of great ideas come out of mistakes and adversity. Adversity should be seen as an opportunity rather than a life-threatening event.
Every successful thing about a technology company has to eventually be torn down and rebuilt, says Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, and this is one of the most gut-wrenching challenges behind effective leadership. This task is both gratifying and destructive, but an axiomatic demand of the marketplace in this sector.
"When you're in the technology industry,... if you're not reinventing yourself, you're just slowly dying," says NVIDIA Co-Founder Jensen Huang. In this clip, Huang talks about market leaders' need to constantly cannibalize their own products, and how new ideas will force companies to abandon their own technology and processes on the path of progress. If you don't do it for yourself, Huang says, your competitors will surely do it for you.
There road is long between the foundation of a company and the IPO. If the IPO is the founder's purpose for starting a company, there is a great probability that the founder will be disappointed. Contrarily, NVIDIA's purpose has been and is to build a sustainable company that can make a difference in the world.
NVIDIA Co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang reports that most of his time on the job is spent brainstorming with managers and leaders and helping them brainstorm through tasks and opportunities. He believes it is essential to train talent to effectively control a different product line, a new geography, or even to take his place. Succession planning of a closed set of hand-picked individuals is a toxic process, says Huang. It's best to treat all employees as a next generation of leaders to build a better environment and long term stability. 
Pioneering a company is more than just building products. It's also about establishing a company culture, says NVIDIA Co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang. How do you organize hierarchies and structures? There's lots of trial and error, but it's also an organic process. Huang asks students of entrepreneurship to realize that skills, intellect, and training all matter for successful evolution - but they're not enough. Builders need passion and purpose above all.
The market doesn't set the price, says Jensen Huang, Co-founder of NVIDIA. The competition does. And the function of an effective manager is to decide how to allocate resources for the best return, and if its pursuit is worthwhile for the enterprise. Be mindful of your best resources - engineering talent, the limited hours in a day - and evaluate accordingly.
There is no such thing as a sustainable great idea. Ideas have to be continuously reinvented. Jensen likes to tease that his company is always thirty days away from going out of business. The world is changing so rapidly that techniques and strategies will be obsolete thirty days from now, and therefore must be continuously changed.
Will NVIDIA have to re-position itself with the slowing of the PC industry? Though NVIDIA is traditionally a PC-based company, in reality the PC-market share is only 40%. However, it is still seen as a PC company and it is important not to re-position the company so drastically that this market will be lost.
Execution is critically important; it is better to have a simple idea that can be easily implemented rather than a complicated idea that has implementation challenges. Drastic changes do not have to be made overnight; it is a long road to success and each change need only take the company to the next step.
The company vision is conveyed through telling a story. Even though Jensen doesn't enjoy public speaking or think of himself as an orator, he understands the importance of speaking to his employees. He emphasizes the importance of forcing yourself to communicate despite not liking it or not being good at it.
The company must have a vision and make product choices based on that vision. Once you commit yourself to a product, do not be easily deterred from this decision. Though the product will undergo feature adjustments, the vision should always remains constant.
Business at NVIDIA is going well -- they are selling new products and entering new markets. Though Chinese and Indian companies are threatening their American counterparts, Jensen is enthusiastic about NVIDIA's long-term viability. He does not believe that the industry is particularly scalable; having a thousand engineers is not as important as having the right engineers, and there is an advantage to being in the Silicon Valley where there is a spirit of innovation.