Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia, has revealed the simple email trick he used to turn his software startup into one of the most valuable companies in the world.
The 61-year-old CEO of the AI chip company claims to have read every email his employees sent him for decades.
“If you send it, I will read it,” the billionaire simply said to the Wall Street Journal.
He explained that his approximately 30,000 employees submit notes using the T5T or Top-5 Things style to ensure they are aware of all the happenings at his billion-dollar company.
The management style asks the sender to detail to the receiver the things they are working on, the things they are thinking about, and the things they are noticing in their corners of the business.
Huang says he’s been using this style since before his startup revolution, and over the years, Top 5 emails have become his preferred method of organizational principle across the company.
Tae Kim, author of ‘The Nvidia Way’, attributes the native Taiwanese founder’s unique approach to the reason he has achieved success.
“Jensen’s management style is unlike any other in corporate America,” he wrote in the book.
Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia, has revealed the simple email trick he used to turn his software startup into one of the most valuable companies in the world.
According to Kim, Huang is “allergic to bureaucracy, formal strategic planning or status reports” and “needed to somehow control what was happening inside Nvidia to make sure everyone had the right priorities.”
The senior journalist revealed that staff at all levels of the company send regular T5T-style emails to their teams and executives, which Huang can access.
These emails are usually short and include only a few bullet points. Over time, they have become a “crucial feedback channel” for the CEO.
When employees send their emails, they know Huang will see them and can even respond at any time of the week.
However, to ensure employees have relaxing weekends, executives make sure not to send T5T emails on Friday nights, but rather on Sunday nights.
As a result, Huang reads them on Sunday night and responds quickly on Monday morning.
The founder also once said that a T5T email doesn’t have to be just about how the company works, but about anything Huang needs to know.
‘If you find a restaurant and they have great fried chicken. “I want to know,” he said last month, according to Diary.
He explained that his approximately 30,000 employees submit notes using the T5T or Top-5 Things style to ensure they are aware of all the happenings at his billion-dollar company.
Huang says he’s been using this style since before his startup revolution, and over the years, Top 5 emails have become his preferred method of organizational principle across the company.
The senior journalist revealed that staff at all levels of the company regularly send emails to their teams and executives in T5T style, which Huang can access.
Nvidia’s journey from an early Silicon Valley tech company to a trillion-dollar leader in the artificial intelligence revolution began at a roadside Denny’s restaurant in 1993.
Huang, who has been the company’s CEO since day one, was eating a Super Bird sandwich with mayonnaise and mustard while chatting with his two fellow co-founders about the potential of a company specializing in computer chips for graphics rendering.
Thirty years and at least one brush with bankruptcy later, Nvidia is the hottest stock on Wall Street and the self-proclaimed “world leader in artificial intelligence,” after stumbling into the booming sector almost by accident.
In that time, Huang has also transformed: from a slightly geeky and unassuming computer scientist to a tattooed, leather-jacketed CEO with ambitions to become a “robot” so he can spend decades more at the helm of the company.
The stock’s gains align closely with the explosion of interest in AI following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.
Bringing the power of generative AI to the masses, the chatbot has demonstrated the power, potential and dangers of this life-changing technology.
It has also put investors into overdrive as they look to cash in on the revolution.
Nvidia now sits firmly at the center of the AI boom.
Nvidia was conceived in a Denny’s restaurant in California by Huang and his two co-founders. The company has now become a leader in artificial intelligence technology. Pictured: Jensen Huang appears on the cover of Time magazine’s September 2021 issue of the World’s 100 Most Influential People.
After Nvidia Stock Soared $2 Trillion Last Year, he Leather-jacket-wearing rock star CEO now worth more than $102 billion thanks to vision, charisma and great ambitions.
Now he’s a Silicon Valley rock star who has earned a place alongside Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as tech leaders reshaping the world.
Huang has also adopted some of the quirks of the tech billionaire stereotype.
He has had the Nvidia logo tattooed on his left arm, and the leather jacket he wears for big announcements has been compared to Apple founder Steve Jobs’ affection for black turtleneck sweaters.
And in March of last year, Huang even talked about becoming a “robot” so he could continue running his company for years into the future.
‘In another four decades, I will be a robot. And maybe another three or four decades after that. So I hope I can enjoy this for a long time,” he said.
Part of Huang’s appeal is his humble background.
She was born Jen-Hsun Huang in Taiwan in 1963 and moved to the United States at age nine.
Huang pictured with his parents. He was born in Taiwan and moved to the United States at age 9.
Jensen with his wife Lori after graduation.
His early life in the US was marked by a series of somewhat strange events: Huang’s uncles accidentally enrolled him and his brother in a Baptist boarding school in Kentucky, under the mistaken belief that it was a preparatory school.
But Huang has praised her time there (she recently donated $2 million to build a new girls’ dormitory at the school) and credits the school for instilling her “fanatical” work ethic in her. His chores as a schoolboy included scrubbing all the bathrooms in his three-story dormitory every day.
While at school, Oneida Baptist Institute, he also displayed an almost prodigal talent for table tennis that led him to be described in a 1978 issue of Sports Illustrated as “perhaps the most promising young man to ever play table tennis in the Northwest.”
Huang also taught a struggling roommate several years his senior how to read while at Oneida.
He went on to become a straight-A student in high school and developed his passion for computer science while studying electrical engineering at Oregon State University.
Huang graduated when computers were becoming popular in 1984, the same year Apple launched its first Macintosh and the term “cyberspace” was coined. It was also in Oregon where he met his wife, Lori, and they now have two adult children together.
He earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University before taking jobs at two Silicon Valley-based semiconductor companies.
Nvidia was conceived around Thanksgiving in 1993 by Huang and co-founders Chris Malachowsky, who remains with the company, and Curtis Priem, who resigned in 2003.