Jensen Huang has become obsessed with the creation of Nvidia

Sunday should be a day of rest for even the toughest boss. Not for Jensen Huang. As the weekend draws to a close, the man who turned microchip designer Nvidia into one of the world’s most valuable companies likes nothing more than to pour himself a glass of Highland Park (Sir Winston Churchill’s favorite Scotch whiskey). ) and start catching up on hundreds of emails.

Surprisingly, Huang will answer each of them. This is because these are not just plain old emails. Submitted by employees at all levels of the company, each contains just five bullet points, called the Top 5 Things, or T5T. They explain what staff are working on, what they think or have noticed about the business.

Topics can range from the latest machine learning trends in artificial intelligence (Nvidia dominates the market for advanced chips driving the AI ​​revolution) to competitor insights or customer pain points.

The terse emails, and his equally terse responses, are a vital way for Huang to stay up to date with what’s going on inside Nvidia. They also make sure you get key information from the coal surface that might otherwise evade you.

It’s a unique management style that sets Huang apart from his peers. Its unconventional approach is “the exact opposite” of what is considered best practice in most other American companies, says Tae Kim, author of a new book, The Nvidia Way.

As companies grow, they tend to adopt increasingly pronounced hierarchies. Managers are separated from staff and increasingly rely on formal status updates from their subordinates to take the pulse of a company.

But these reports often filter out any controversial topics, including current issues, potential roadblocks, and personnel issues. The danger is that they become sanitized to the point of being almost useless by the time they reach key decision makers.

Huang’s “flat” communication approach eliminates all that.

T5Ts mean Huang can combat “inertia and groupthink,” Kim says.

Another of his secrets is his preference for whiteboards to present ideas rather than PowerPoint presentations.

The idea is that with a whiteboard, you simply write down your thoughts for colleagues to see with just a blank whiteboard and a marker, meaning your thinking needs to be rigorous and transparent.

With a PowerPoint slideshow, it’s easier to hide a lack of thought behind slick graphics and impressively formatted slides, so audiences often accept them uncritically.

“These operating principles have allowed Nvidia to act quickly to seize new opportunities,” Kim says, adding that they provide staff with “powerful weapons in the constant fight for precision and rigor.”

Founded in a Silicon Valley restaurant three decades ago, Nvidia is the stock market success story of this century. Since it floated into America on the eve of the millennium, it rose from nothing to become one of the most valuable companies in the world.

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

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

Nvidia shares are the top performers on the S&P index of major U.S. companies over the past decade, and Huang himself is now worth more than $100 billion.

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

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

Only three other S&P 500 CEOs – 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 lasted longer at his company than Bill Gates at Microsoft or Jeff Bezos at Amazon.

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

“You would go to a meeting and he would know more about the product than you do,” Ali Simnad, a former employee, told Kim. “Every meeting we went to, he was probably the most prepared person,” he added.

His workaholic spirit is rooted in his engineering background. It gives him what Kim calls a “seemingly limitless ability” to work.

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 is not going to sleep.”

An executive told Kim that Nvidia is not a 24/7 company, but rather a 25/8 company. “I’m not kidding,” he said. “I wake up at 4:30 in the morning and I’m on the phone until 10:00 p.m.,” he added. ‘It’s my choice. It’s not for everyone.’

The staff hates when Huang goes on vacation because he tends to sit in a hotel and write more emails. When he goes to the movies he never remembers the movie because he spends all his time thinking about work.

‘Not a day goes by that I don’t work. If I’m not working, I’m thinking about working. Working is relaxing for me,” he said in an investment bank podcast in 2023.

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

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

‘Nothing remains. Nothing rots. Respond and move on,” added former HR chief John McSorley.

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

Most employees send their T5T emails on Sunday night, just as Huang sits down with his single malt scotch. It means they can act on your feedback at the start of the work week.

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

“In many ways, he is Nvidia and the company is Jensen,” Kim adds. Of course, that raises the risk of what would happen to Nvidia if he and the company split up, for whatever reason.

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

• The Nvidia Way is written by Tae Kim and published by WW Norton & Co. Its hardback edition is available priced at £25.