Jensen Huang has been obsessive in creating Nvidia

Sunday should be a day of rest for even the most demanding boss. Not for Jensen Huang. As the weekend draws to a close, the man who built microchip designer Nvidia into one of the most valuable companies in the world loves nothing more than pouring himself a glass of Highland Park – Sir Winston Churchill’s preferred Scotch whiskey – and hundreds to collect dollars. of emails.

Remarkably, Huang will respond to each of them. That’s because these aren’t just any old emails. Sent by employees at every level of the company, each message contains just five bullet points, called the Top 5 Things or T5Ts. They explain what employees are working on, thinking about or what they have noticed about the company.

Topics can range from the latest machine learning trends in artificial intelligence – Nvidia dominates the market for advanced chips powering the AI ​​revolution – to insights into competitors or customer pain points.

The pithy emails – and his equally succinct responses – are an essential way for Huang to stay abreast of what’s happening within Nvidia. They also ensure that he gets important information from the coal mine that might otherwise escape him.

It is a unique management style that sets Huang apart from his peers. His unconventional approach is “the exact opposite” of what is considered best practice in most of the rest of corporate America, says Tae Kim, author of a new book, The Nvidia Way.

As companies grow larger, they tend to adopt steeper and steeper hierarchies. Managers are disconnected from the workforce and increasingly rely on formal status updates from subordinates to gauge the pulse of a company.

But these reports are often filtered of anything controversial, including current issues, potential roadblocks, and staffing issues. The danger is that they are purged to the point of being almost useless by the time they reach key decision makers.

Huang’s ‘flat’ communication approach cuts all that out.

The T5Ts allow Huang to combat “inertia and groupthink,” Kim says.

Another secret of his is his preference for whiteboards to present ideas instead of PowerPoint presentations.

The idea is that with a whiteboard you simply write down your thoughts for colleagues to see, using just a blank board and a marker, which means your thinking should be rigorous and transparent.

With a PowerPoint slide presentation, it’s easier to hide a lack of thought behind sleek graphics and impressively formatted slides, so the audience often accepts them uncritically.

“These operating principles have enabled Nvidia to act quickly and take advantage of new opportunities,” Kim said, adding that they give staff “powerful weapons in the ongoing battle for precision and accuracy.”

Founded thirty years ago in a Silicon Valley restaurant, Nvidia is the stock market success story of this century. Since floating around the US on the eve of the millennium, it has risen from nothing to become one of the most valuable companies in the world.

It joined iPhone maker Apple and software giant Microsoft this year as one of only three companies in the world worth more than $3 trillion (£2.4 trillion).

Huge demand for high-quality chips has fueled the company’s astonishing rise.

Nvidia’s shares have been the best performers in the S&P index of leading US companies over the past decade, and Huang himself is now worth more than $100 billion.

Experts say Nvidia’s stunning success could not have been achieved without Huang at the wheel.

“I’ve never met anyone like Jensen,” says Kim, a writer at the American business magazine Barron’s. ‘He is a pioneer in the field of graphics. In the tough technology market he is a survivor.’

Only three other CEOs in the S&P 500 – including legendary investor Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway – have been at the helm of their companies longer than Huang, he notes.

Huang, 61, has also worked at his company longer than Bill Gates at Microsoft or Jeff Bezos at Amazon.

“He challenges the division of the executive world between CEO founders who are technically oriented but naive to the business world, and those who are business-minded but lack technical acumen,” Kim notes.

“You would go into a meeting and he would know more about the product than you do,” Ali Simnad, a former employee, told Kim. “At every meeting we attended, he was probably the best prepared person,” he added.

His workaholic ethos is rooted in his engineering background. It gives him what Kim calls a “seemingly limitless capacity” to toil.

For Huang, a strong work ethic trumps intelligence. “It doesn’t matter how smart you are, because there is always someone smarter than you,” Huang once said. ‘Your competition isn’t going to sleep.’

One executive told Kim that Nvidia is not a 24/7 company, but a 25/8 company. “I’m not kidding,” she said. “I wake up at 4:30 a.m. and am on the phone until 10 p.m.,” she added. ‘It’s my choice. It’s not for everyone.’

The staff hates it when Huang goes on a rare vacation because he tends to sit in a hotel and write more emails. When he goes to the cinema, he never remembers the movie because he thinks about work all the time.

‘Not a day goes by that I don’t work. When I’m not working, I think about going to work. For me, working is relaxing,” he said in an investment banking podcast in 2023.

When the American TV program Sixty Minutes asked him about employees who said that working for him was demanding, and that he was a perfectionist and not easy to work for, he simply agreed.

“One thing I learned pretty quickly is that if you got an email from him, you acted on it,” says former director Michael Douglas.

‘Nothing remains. Nothing festers. You answer and move on,” former human resources chief John McSorley added.

Huang often responds to emails within minutes of receiving them, and employees have learned to strategically time their T5Ts. Don’t send it too late on a Friday night, a former employee told Kim. “It would ruin your weekend.”

Most employees send their T5T emails late on Sunday evening – just as Huang sits down to dinner with his single-malt Scotch. It means they can take action on his feedback at the start of the work week.

Not surprisingly, a fan club bordering on a cult of personality has formed around Huang, whose trademark leather jacket sets him apart from the buttoned-up elite in the boardroom.

“In many ways he is Nvidia and the Jensen company,” Kim adds. That, of course, carries the risk of what would happen to Nvidia if he and the company parted ways – for whatever reason.

Investors will be relieved that he shows no signs of slowing down with the emails.

• The Nvidia Way was written by Tae Kim and published by WW Norton & Co. The hardcover edition is available for £25.