Transcription
So the thing is, when you want to build something great, it's not easy to do. And when you're doing something that's not easy to do, you're not always enjoying it. I don't love every day of my job. I don't think every day brings me joy, nor does joy have to be the definition of a good day. And every day I'm not happy. Every year I'm not happy about the company, but I love the company every single second. And so I think that what people misunderstand is somehow the best jobs are the one that brings you happiness all the time. I don't think that that's right. You have to suffer. You have to struggle. You have to endeavor. You have to do those hard things and work through it in order to really appreciate what you've done. And there are no such thing that are great that was easy to do. And so by definition, I would say therefore I wish upon you greatness, which by my way of saying it, I wish upon you plenty of pain, suffering.
Need motivation? Watch the top 10 with Believe Nation. Hey, it's Evan Carmichael and I watch these [music] videos every day because I need them for motivation. Being around successful entrepreneurs every morning helps me believe that I can do great things, too. It's like your morning coffee, but for your goals, kickstarting your day with a blast [music] of positivity. So, here is a challenge for you. Try watching one video every morning for the next 30 days. And let's find out together if they help you do great things, too. If you're in, leave a hashtag believe in the comments below [music] so I can celebrate with you.
So, today, let's learn from one of the best, Jensen Huang, and our take on this top 10 rules of success. [music] Belief. [clears throat] Rule number two is love the process. When you're building a company and building a product, skill matters, intellect matters, training matters, but it's not enough. The part of it that that um that is important to to realize about building companies is that it's a challenging and painful and uh often times um extraordinarily scary thing to do. And so unless you have passion, unless you really love the process of building the company and what you're trying to do, uh it's going to be incredibly incredibly challenging. And so what I would I would um I would I would [clears throat] leave you with is um when you're building a company, if you decide to build a company, you have to ask yourself what is the purpose that you're building the company for? Is it that you would like to build a company so that you can sell it, make a fortune? Uh is it that you would like to build a company so you can take it public? Um you're just a serial entrepreneur. You want to build something, let somebody else run it, build something, sell it. Um, whatever your reason is, be honest to yourself. It turns out that um, in my case, I just love the process of building things. And I love being part of something, you know, being part of Nvidia and being part of a um, a people and being part of a cause that is um, uh, that's inspiring to me uh, keeps me vibrant and and it's something that I'm willing to do for a very long period of time.
Rule number three is prioritize your time. What is something that you believe today that 40-year-old Jensen would have pushed back on and said, "No, I disagree." Um, there's plenty of time. Yeah, there's plenty of time. If you prioritize yourself uh properly and and you make sure that you you uh you don't let Outlook be the controller of your time, there's plenty of time. Plenty of time in the day, plenty of time to achieve thing like just don't do everything. Prioritize your life. Make sacrifices. Don't let Outlook control what you do every day. Notice I was late to our meeting. And the reason for that by the time I looked up, I Oh my gosh. You know, Ben and Dave are waiting. You know, it's already We have time. Yeah. Exactly. And so, didn't stop this from being a great job. No, but you have to prioritize your time really carefully and don't let Outlook determine that.
Rule number four is take action. Strategy is not words. Strategy is action. Yeah. And so if the company has a set of strategies um but the people's actions, their top five things are not that then they're obviously not executing the strategy. And so the strategies turns out isn't what I say, it's what they do.
Number five is empower others. I believe that your contribution to uh to the work should not be based on the privileged access to information. I don't do one-on-ones and I don't my my uh staff is quite large and almost everything that I say I say to everybody all at the same time and the reason for that is because I don't really believe there's any information that I operate on that uh somehow only one or two people should hear about and this is this is these are the challenges of the company or this is the problem I'm trying to solve or this is the direction we're trying to go into um these are the new endeavors this isn't working that's working well I you know And so all of this type of information everybody should be able to hear. Uh I love that everybody's working off of the same song sheet. I love that that there's no privileged access to information. I love that we're able to all contribute to solving a problem. And when when you have 60 people in a room and often times well my staff my staff meetings are once every other week. Um uh it's it's all based on issues. Whatever issues we have uh everybody's there working on it at the same time. Uh everybody under Everybody heard the reasoning of the problem. Everybody heard the reasoning of the solution. Everybody heard everything. And so so that empowers people. I believe that when you give everybody equal access to information, it empowers people. And so that's number one, empowering. Number two, uh uh the if the if the CEO's direct staff is 60 people, the number of layers you've removed in a company is probably something like seven, you know, depending on how it is. 60 at every layer or only 60 as in like if I'm a direct if I'm one of the fortunate 60 um do I also have 60 direct reports or okay so I also don't think I don't think that that's scalable downward and the reason for that is because you need you need more and more supervision uh depending on depending on c certain levels and at at the staff level at the staff level if you're so unfortunate to be serving on Nvidia's EA uh it's very unlikely you need a lot of managerial, you know, and so I rarely find myself having to um, you know, stand up for conventional wisdom. Um, but, uh, if I was to kind of steal man the other side, I'd say, well, one-on-ones are where you provide coaching, where you maybe talk through goals together, personal goals, career advancement, you know, what have you. Um, where maybe you give feedback on something that you see somebody systematically not doing so well and so forth. So, there's all these things that kind of one is again conventionally supposed to uh do in the one-on-one. Do you not do those things or do you do them in a different way? Really good question. I do it right there. I give you feedback right there in front of everybody. And in fact, in fact, this is really a big deal. First of all, feedback is learning. Feedback is learning. For what reason are you the only person who should learn this? Now you created the conditions because of some mistake that you made or silliness that you you brought upon yourself. Um [clears throat] we should all learn from that opportunity. So you created the conditions but we should all learn from it. Does it make sense? And so, so for me to explain to you um why that doesn't make sense or how I differ from it, not as half the time I'm not right, but but for me to reason through it in front of everybody helps everybody learn how to reason through it. And so the issue the the problem I have with one-on-ones and taking feedback aside is you deprive a whole bunch of people that same learning. Learning from mistakes, other people's mistakes is the best way to learn. Why learn from your own mistakes? You know, why learn from your own embarrassment? You got to learn from other people's embarrassment. That's why we that's why we have case studies. And isn't that right? We're trying to read from other people's disasters, other people's tragedies. Nothing makes us happier than that.
Rule number six is understand work essence. I always believed that uh you need to understand the reason why your business work. What is the essence of your business? what makes it work. Now, the foundation of my business uh at its core is semiconductor technology. Here in Silicon Valley, we we usually like to refer to semiconductor technology as Mo's law. Moors law is not so much a physical law as it's a law of competition. It is a law of um challenging engineers. Um it's a law almost of setting pace. And Moore's law approximately gives you twice the performance every year or two. And so understanding that the fundamental ingredient of our of our business improves by a factor of two every year and simultaneously reduces in cost by a factor of two every year.
Rule number seven is think outside the box. I heard from someone that there were pro that you could there was never a problem you couldn't fix. Um do you think that's true or was there a problem that you couldn't fix? Uh there are some problems you can't fix. I don't recall one. Uh and the reason for that is because because um either you find a solution for it or you change the problem so that you can find a solution for it. And and I think um uh in a lot of ways some people call that thinking out of the box. Um if you can't if you can't solve something uh you know it either either sometimes is not meant to be solved um uh or you can change the problem you know in a way that that is solvable. Now there are some problems that if you try to solve it in the most literal sense it would take a long time to solve. It might take a lot of money to solve. uh it might take an enormous amount of cost you know in time or resource or whatever it is or materials. Um but if you change the problem and you you truly understand what is it what is the person really trying to ask you know what is what is at the core of that problem may you maybe you can express that problem in a slightly different way and as a result it becomes solvable and a solution can be found. Maybe you can simplify the problem. Maybe you can break maybe you can break the problem down into 10 pieces and that you would solve it over time and um uh there's a lot of different ways to look at the problem and and smart thinking about a problem is really at the beginning of engineering. It's asking asking the question what is this problem really about? You know what is this problem really about? And often times um by asking that question what is this problem really about? You know what is what are they really asking? what are we really looking for? Um how can I express this problem in different ways? Uh you know if you when you think about it that way all of a sudden uh the number of solutions really really expand.
Rule number eight is be a visionary. What would be your advice to companies that you know have product market fit that are starting to grow. They're in interesting growing markets. Um where should they look for competition and how should they handle it? While there are all kinds of ways to think about competition, we prefer to position ourselves in a way that serves a need that usually hasn't emerged. I've heard uh you or others in Nvidia, I think, you use the phrase 0 billion market. That's exactly right. Yeah. It's our way of saying there's no market yet, but we believe there will be one. And and usually when you're positioned there, everybody everybody's trying to figure out why are you here, right? Because when we first got into automotive, because we believe that in the future the car is going to be largely software and if it's going to be largely software, um a really incredible computer is necessary. And so, so when we positioned ourselves there, most people I I still remember one one of the one of the CTO's told me, you know what, cars cannot tolerate the blue screen of death. as I don't think anybody can tolerate that but [laughter] that doesn't change the fact that someday every car will be a software defined car and I I think you know uh 15 years later we're we're largely right and so often times there's non-conumption and we like to navigate our company there and by doing that um by the time that you uh that the market emerges it's very it's very likely there aren't that many competitors shaped that way and So we were early in PC gaming and today uh Infidia is very large in PC gaming. Uh we uh reimagined what a what a uh design workstation would be like and today just about every workstation on the planet uses Nvidia's technology. U we re reimagined um how supercomputing ought to be done and who should who should benefit from supercomputing that we would democratize it. And look today Nvidia is in in accelerated computing is is um quite large and we reimagine how software would be done and today it's called machine learning and how computing would be done we call it AI and so we reimagined these kind of things uh try to try to do that about a decade in advance and so we spent about a decade in zero billion dollar markets and today I spent a lot of time on Omniverse and Omniverse is a you know classic example of a 0 billion business.
Rule number nine is have a perspective. 16 years ago, uh we started Nvidia and um the the uh the insight that we had um some people call it vision. Um uh vision is an awfully big word to me. Vision is an awfully big word to me because I I believe first of all vision matters. Let me tell you that vision matters and I'll help you understand that in a second. Um, but I like to use the word perspective because it makes it possible for anyone to have one. When you say vision, it feels like only a few selected visionaries of the world can have one. But everyone has a perspective. And that's in fact all vision means that you see the world uh in a way that is either uh different um or uh otherwise okay than than somebody else. uh and you see opportunities that I think are that you believe are particularly important to go in and address that you can address um in a particular way and so perspective um our perspective at the time this is 1993 um you guys won't won't remember this but the uh the PC um was Windows 3.1 um CDROM um was uh about to be introduced um there were no PCs with networks um wireless technology um the no if you said some if somebody said radio uh I think you would the word that would come to mind is FM radio um and so wireless technology didn't exist um the fastest microprocessor um in the world was a 66 MHz 46DX2 um and I don't think any of you would even use it um in your tennis shoes today Um and we would run our computers with that. Uh and uh the PC was was um becoming used um for uh desktop or for office automation. Um our perspective was that this particular uh device was going to be unique in the sense that it has the ability to run programs and what if uh we uh gave it the benefit of running 3D graphics programs so that um uh you could uh explore new worlds, play games, um you know, play games. And so uh we started a a company and and the business plan um basically read something like this. We're going to take um technology that was available only in the most expensive workstations. We're going to try to make it reinvent the technology and make it inexpensive. And um uh the killer app was video games. And so I I took this idea to San Hill Road. And um uh and they told me there was no video game market. People don't start companies to play games. And um uh my parents, my I remember calling my mom and telling her that I'm going to start this company and she says, "You know, what do you what do you guys do?" And I said, "We build these things called 3D graphics chips and and um uh people would use them to play games." And and then she she said, "Why don't you go get a job?" And so and and so um uh now of course of course games was was we believe um going to be a very large part of the marketplace. Now, we had that perspective u for very obvious reasons. We grew up in the video game generation. I was the video game generation. I was the beginning of the video game generation. And so, the the entertainment value of video games, uh, computer games was very obvious to me. And I could imagine how it could be a very large market and a very large industry. For a lot of the people that were older, that sensibility didn't exist. And so notice I just described to you a perspective about the world that we had that is apparently obviously now true because video games is the world's largest digital media industry today. Um it is apparently true and yet at the time um our common sense was unique. Nobody would have created the technology. Nobody would have created a company with the sole purpose of building technology to make video games possible. And so that was our perspective.
And number 10, the last one before a very special bonus clip is build a network. You once told me that you really didn't like firing people and very seldom did it. Can you elaborate on that? Well, I rather I rather improve you than give up than give up on you. You know, when you fire somebody, you're kind of saying you're kind of saying, well, you know, a lot of people say, "Well, it it wasn't your fault or or I made the wrong choice." Or, um, there are very few jobs. Look, I used to clean bathrooms and now I'm the CEO of a company. I I think you can learn it. I'm pretty certain you can learn this. And and there there are a lot of things in life that I believe you can learn, and you just have to be given the opportunity to learn it. I had the benefit of watching a lot of smart people do a lot of things. I'm surrounded by 60 people. They're doing smart things all the time and they, you know, they probably don't realize it, but I'm learning constantly from every single one of them. And and so I I don't like giving up on people because I think they could they could improve. And so there's a there's there's it's kind of tongue and cheek, but but people know that I rather torture them into greatness. What are some structural things that someone who's building a business can do to sort of stay ahead? and you can just keep your pedal to the metal and say we're going to outwork them and we're going to be smarter and like that works to some extent but those are tactics. What strategically can you do to sort of make sure that you can maintain that lead? Often times if you created the market, you ended up having you know what what people describe as moes because if you build your product right and it's enabled uh an entire ecosystem around you to help serve that end market, you've essentially created a platform. Sometimes it's a it's a product-based platform, sometimes it's a service-based platform, sometimes a technology-based platform. But if you were you were early there and you you you were mindful about helping the ecosystem um succeed with you, you ended up having this network of networks and all these developers and all these customers who are who are built around you. Y and that network is essentially your moat. And so, you know, I I don't love thinking about it in the context of a moat. Um and the reason for that is because you're now focused on building stuff around your castle. I tend to like thinking about things in the context of building a network and that network is about enabling other people to enjoy the success of the final market. You know that you're not the only company that enjoys it, but you're enjoying it with a whole bunch of other people.
For 10 more amazing rules from San Alman, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe and I'll see you there. Well, I'm biased because I like coding, but I think you should learn to code. I don't write code very much anymore, although I randomly did yesterday. But learning to code was great as a way to learn how to think. And I think coding will still be important in the future. It's just going to change a little.