Huang Renxun's Talent Strategy: Recruiting Talents with Technology and Retaining Them with Equity.
On the evening of November 23, Jensen Huang, the founder of NVIDIA who had just been awarded an Honorary Doctor of Engineering degree from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, delivered a speech. He stated that artificial intelligence is triggering a scientific revolution. "This new industry will be dedicated to the production and generation of artificial intelligence, just like the alternating current power plants that emerged during the last industrial revolution and the rise of the electric power industry. AI factories (AI factory), as well as the generation of digital intelligence, will emerge in the era of artificial intelligence."
Subsequently, in an in-depth conversation with the Chairman of the Board of Directors and Foreign Member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States, Harry Shum, Jensen Huang discussed the transformation and prospects of artificial intelligence and mentioned two major trends: robots and AI Agents. He particularly pointed out that in the future, three types of robots are expected to achieve large-scale production, and almost only these three. It is difficult for other types of robots that have appeared in history to achieve large-scale mass production. These three types of robots are: automobiles, unmanned aerial vehicles, and humanoid robots. Jensen Huang's these views and judgments undoubtedly provide extremely valuable thinking directions and forward-looking predictions for both the scientific and technological community and the industrial sector.
As the founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang is the core helmsman of NVIDIA's business territory. He has demonstrated an extremely forward-looking strategic vision in NVIDIA's development process, accurately grasped the industry development trends many times, and led NVIDIA to achieve transformation and breakthroughs at different stages. The Chinese and English versions of the first authorized interview book of NVIDIA's founder and CEO Jensen Huang will be globally released simultaneously on December 10.
"The NVIDIA Way: Jensen Huang and His Technological Empire", Source: Official
"The NVIDIA Way: Jensen Huang and His Technological Empire" takes Jensen Huang's decisive decision-making and strategic vision as the main line, presenting a panoramic view of NVIDIA, the world's highest-valued company, and its difficult development process over more than 30 years. For the first time, the book publicly discloses NVIDIA's business innovation model that gradually transformed from a graphics processing company into a giant in the field of artificial intelligence computing, expounds on the core product research and development process and corporate strategic layout of NVIDIA in various periods, deeply analyzes the unique corporate culture that is different from other technology companies, the wonderful stories of being on the verge of danger many times but being able to make a desperate comeback, the distinctive enterprise construction paradigm, and the innovations in the dimensions of corporate culture and talent recruitment. At the same time, Jensen Huang also personally recounts his own life experiences, his unique methods in technological innovation, market competition, and enterprise management. In addition, this book also looks forward to how NVIDIA will take advantage of the situation to continue to maintain its leading position in the environment of the explosion of artificial intelligence technology, as well as the future corporate development plan, etc.
The Strategic Operator Who Draws the Business Territory
In the chess game of technology business, Jensen Huang, with his excellent strategic wisdom and decisive decision-making ability, carefully plans NVIDIA's business territory, showing significant characteristics of diversification and forward-looking, and gradually leads this company to the industry peak.
To summarize Jensen Huang's successful business paradigm, technological innovation is undoubtedly the core key of his strategic layout, diversified business expansion is an important strategic direction, and ecosystem construction is a strategic masterstroke.
When NVIDIA was founded, Jensen Huang saw the potential of the PC graphics card market and focused on creating high-performance graphics card solutions for gamers, helping NVIDIA rise rapidly in the gaming market. With the advanced graphics processing technology, it won the favor of gamers and established a firm foothold in the graphics card market.
Chris Malachowsky and Jensen Huang, Source: NVIDIA
In 1999, Jensen Huang led NVIDIA to invent the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit), which is a landmark achievement. It significantly improves the quality and efficiency of graphics rendering, and its ability to process large amounts of data in parallel makes graphics processing far exceed traditional CPUs, providing gamers with a more realistic and smooth gaming experience, and building a technical high wall for NVIDIA.
In 2006, the CUDA computing platform was released, enabling the large-scale application of GPU general-purpose computing, laying the foundation for emerging fields such as high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, and promoting NVIDIA's business transformation to the multi-computing field, broadening the development path.
NVIDIA continues to optimize and upgrade the GPU architecture, from the basic to the advanced, to make the products meet the changing needs of the cutting-edge fields. Today's leading architecture and product series, with excellent computing and processing capabilities, support the training and reasoning of large artificial intelligence models, consolidating NVIDIA's leading position in artificial intelligence computing.
Diversified business expansion is an important strategic direction. Under the leadership of Jensen Huang, NVIDIA breaks through traditional boundaries and enters fields such as data centers, autonomous driving, and professional visualization. Through strategic investment, cooperation, and independent research and development, a collaborative business ecosystem is constructed. For example, in the field of autonomous driving, its solutions assist automobile manufacturers, from daily commuting to intelligent transportation scenarios, promoting the global application of autonomous driving technology, enhancing the enterprise's competitiveness, and reducing business reliance risks.
Jensen Huang is well aware of the importance of ecosystem construction for the long-term development of the enterprise, and promotes NVIDIA to build an open, collaborative, and win-win artificial intelligence ecosystem. Through the technology platform and tool suite, resources are provided for developers and partners to accelerate the innovative application of artificial intelligence. NVIDIA cooperates deeply with the academic community, scientific research institutions, and industry-leading enterprises to jointly promote the frontier research and industrialization of artificial intelligence, expand its global influence, and lead the industry trend.
Currently, NVIDIA has become a global technology leader and plays a crucial role in many key fields. Jensen Huang's strategic layout does not stop, and he is leading NVIDIA towards a broader future. Exploring the frontier of quantum computing and laying out in the emerging field of the metaverse fully demonstrate his ambition to pursue the cutting-edge of technology.
The Creator of NVIDIA's Enterprise Vitality and Efficiency
In the internal management field of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang also shows extraordinary wisdom and unique charm. He shapes an efficient, innovative, and vibrant enterprise environment with unique concepts and methods.
The unique enterprise architecture is the cornerstone of his management wisdom . Jensen Huang boldly abandons the traditional pyramid structure and builds a flat organization. He directly manages more than 60 executives, so the information transmission is more rapid, and decisions can be quickly issued and implemented, effectively avoiding the drawbacks of multi-level management. At the same time, this architecture strongly promotes the formation of a transparent and knowledge-sharing culture. Many executives can fully communicate with each other, and grassroots employees can also deeply participate in decision-making. Jensen Huang's frequent communication with employees also enables all employees to have a unified goal and coordinated actions.
Innovative management methods inject strong power into the enterprise. In order to timely grasp the internal situation of the company, Jensen Huang requires employees at all levels to send "Five Major Issues" emails to their immediate superiors and executives, detailing information such as work progress and market observations. These emails are marked by topic for easy screening. This method not only allows Jensen Huang to detect market changes and new opportunities in advance but also becomes an efficient feedback channel between employees and management, promoting the timely resolution of problems and ensuring the smooth progress of various tasks.
The whiteboard is an important tool for Jensen Huang to show his thinking process and solve problems. The whiteboard meeting focuses on solving practical problems and requires participants to explain their ideas rigorously and transparently. In the whiteboard meeting method, whether it is an executive or a grassroots employee, they need to stand in front of the whiteboard to explain the business situation in detail and accept the challenges and questions of others. This approach helps to refine the essence of things, stimulate new ideas, and avoid the possible misleading of PPT presentations, ensuring the scientificity and accuracy of decisions.
In addition, at the beginning of a new project, Jensen Huang usually adopts the "Captain" management method. He appoints a "Captain" as the project leader who reports directly to him. The "Captain" is fully responsible for the project, has greater power and resource allocation rights, and also bears all the responsibilities for the success or failure of the project. This management method stimulates the sense of responsibility and work enthusiasm of employees, avoids unclear responsibilities and buck-passing phenomena, and ensures that each project can be advanced efficiently.
The excellent corporate culture is the soul that unites the enterprise. Jensen Huang emphasizes public accountability, firmly resists office politics, publicly criticizes bad behaviors, and advocates that employees focus on work with the customer's interests as the guide. NVIDIA encourages teamwork, and employees support each other to overcome difficulties. Instead of being harsh on those with poor performance, they provide help to promote the common growth of individuals and the team.
Particularly importantly, Jensen Huang insists on long-term R & D and innovation investment. Even in the early stage of entrepreneurship, he adheres to the priority of innovation. He continuously promotes the progress of graphics and artificial intelligence technology. After the company grows, he still dares to explore new fields, making NVIDIA always stand at the forefront of technology.
Through a unique architecture, innovative methods, and an excellent culture, Jensen Huang has built NVIDIA into a vibrant and efficient technology giant, laying a solid internal management foundation for it in the fierce market competition, leading NVIDIA to move forward steadily in the technological wave, and continuously writing a glorious chapter.
The Highly Attractive Recruitment Strategy
Talent, as the core driving force for enterprise development, plays an extremely critical role in NVIDIA's rise. And Jensen Huang's unique employment strategy and methods are undoubtedly the key to attracting and firmly retaining many elite talents. He is good at recruiting people with technology rather than words, retaining people with innovative equity compensation incentives , and using every method to recruit excellent talents.
Attracting talents with technology. Jensen Huang focuses on attracting potential talents with actual technology demonstrations rather than simple words. For example, when recruiting John Montrym, the chief engineer of Silicon Graphics, Jensen Huang asked the team to create an extremely impactful military-themed immersive simulation demonstration. By showing NVIDIA's strong technical strength and rapid product iteration ability, Montrym deeply realized NVIDIA's development potential and was finally persuaded to join. This way of speaking with technology enables professional talents to more intuitively feel NVIDIA's technical advantages and innovation capabilities, thereby attracting them to devote themselves to the company's development.
Jensen Huang also shows a firm and persistent attitude when recruiting important talents. When he discovers excellent talents, he will take decisive and rapid actions and use every method to recruit excellent talents. When 3Dlabs was facing closure, Intel proposed to relocate and recruit its employees, while Jensen Huang quickly dispatched executives to recruit and opened a new office locally to meet the needs of employees, successfully attracting the team to join. When evaluating potential acquisition targets in India, NVIDIA found that the target company was about to dissolve due to tax issues. NVIDIA decisively decided to directly hire its excellent employees, turning the crisis into an opportunity, enriching the company's software team, and promoting the development of new projects. In the face of the legal threat from Pellucid, he did not flinch and insisted on hiring Dix and his supervisor, showing extraordinary courage and determination. This persistent pursuit of talents makes excellent talents feel NVIDIA's attention and recognition of them, and also attracts more like-minded talents to the company.
The Second Place is the First Loser
As the core figure of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang's profound life philosophy and NVIDIA's GPU technology complement each other, jointly promoting the company's development in the modern technology field,
Jensen Huang emphasizes the power of focusing on the present. He drew inspiration from the story of an old gardener in Kyoto organizing a moss garden. He deeply understands that only by devoting himself wholeheartedly to the current work and doing the best of what is at hand can a brilliant future be forged. In NVIDIA's development process, whether it is the early study of specific technical fields or the later exploration of related architectures and the field of artificial intelligence, this kind of focus is reflected. Under his leadership, the team members are dedicated to technological breakthroughs and product optimization without distractions, promoting the company's progress step by step, and finally making NVIDIA grow from an ordinary technology company to an industry leader.
In 1999, Jensen Huang at his desk, Source: NVIDIA
Continuous learning is also an important part of Jensen Huang's life philosophy. From being a dishwasher at the bottom to becoming a technology tycoon, his life experience itself is the most powerful endorsement of the concept of lifelong learning. He actively encourages employees to continuously acquire new knowledge and master new skills to cope with the rapid changes in the technology industry. Within the company, the learning atmosphere is strong. Whether it is technical discussions or professional training, the aim is to improve the quality of employees. His own in-depth study of cutting-edge fields such as artificial intelligence sets an example for employees, inspiring them to continuously explore the unknown, enabling NVIDIA to always stay at the forefront of the technological iteration wave.
Making decisions based on first principles thinking is a major feature of Jensen Huang's leadership style and an important part of his life philosophy. In Jensen Huang's classic quotes, there is such a sentence "Strategy is what you give up". In NVIDIA's development process, when facing the determination of technology and market strategy, he breaks through the limitations of appearance and convention, and deeply and accurately explores the industry trends. When artificial intelligence emerged, based on the grasp of the fundamental computing needs, he skillfully arranged in this field, helping NVIDIA to take the lead in the field of artificial intelligence. He also uses this thinking to cultivate employees, enabling the team to directly address the key points under complex challenges and make rational and forward-looking decisions.
The courage to innovate and the fearlessness of competition are another important element in Jensen Huang's life philosophy, which injects a continuous stream of vitality into NVIDIA. He encourages employees to boldly explore new markets and create new products, and abandon excessive worry about competition. Under this concept, NVIDIA has been advancing rapidly in the journey of technological innovation. From taking the lead in GPU accelerated computing to deeply laying out the artificial intelligence ecosystem, every step shows its courage to be the first. He creates an innovative culture, tolerates failure, and stimulates the creativity of employees, making NVIDIA an innovation incubation field in the technology field, continuously breeding breakthrough results that lead industry changes.
Jensen Huang's life philosophy is also reflected in his insistence on doing difficult but correct things. The entrepreneurial road is full of thorns, but he always holds the faith and never gives up. In the face of technical bottlenecks, market competition pressure, and capital difficulties, he never says die. This tenacity infects every employee, forming a strong cohesion and centripetal force within the company. When the industry winter comes, all employees, led by him, stick to their posts, devote themselves to research and development, and overcome difficulties together to prepare for the spring, making NVIDIA move forward steadily with a firm goal even in the midst of turmoil.
According to relevant data: In China, about 90% of the enterprises born every day will disappear within 18 months. This competition is not only reflected in technological innovation, fine management, environmental protection, brand building, social responsibility, etc., but also in the rapid response and adaptability to market changes.
In today's business and technology fields, they are in an unprecedented wave of change. The technological iteration is accelerating exponentially, new technological concepts and innovative applications are emerging one after another, and the market competition is becoming more and more intense. The dynamic changes in the global economic pattern, the continuous reshaping of industry barriers, and the mutual competition among cross-field giants have brought greater impacts on the existing pattern and international order.
In such a fierce business competition environment, many enterprises are exploring the secrets of success and the path of sustainable development. And NVIDIA can build a unique business barrier and technology highland. Its development process and management wisdom may provide a reference example and a blueprint for in-depth thinking.
The book "The NVIDIA Way: Jensen Huang and His Technological Empire" details NVIDIA's development process and shows the company's practices in strategic planning, corporate culture construction, and talent management. This book not only reviews NVIDIA's development over more than 30 years but also provides valuable references for business leaders, technology industry practitioners, and readers interested in enterprise management.