Jensen Huang
Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is the co-founder and CEO of nvidia, a position he has held since the company’s founding in 1993 — making him one of the longest-serving tech CEOs in history (~34 years as of 2026). He was born in Taiwan, immigrated to the US as a child, and worked his first job washing dishes at Denny’s. He holds an MSEE from Stanford.
Role at NVIDIA
Huang oversees 60+ direct reports and runs no individual one-on-ones; meetings are cross-disciplinary so that any subsystem discussion is heard by everyone who might be affected. His management philosophy centres on belief-shaping: continuously sharing reasoning in public and private settings so that by the time a major decision is announced, the entire organisation — and external partners — already understand and accept it.
Key decisions attributed to Huang:
- Launching cuda on consumer GeForce GPUs (2007–2009), nearly bankrupting the company but seeding the developer install base that enabled the deep-learning revolution
- Acquiring Mellanox (networking) to enable rack-scale interconnect
- Going “all in on deep learning” years before the mainstream
- Designing Vera Rubin racks for agentic-ai workloads before openclaw or equivalent systems existed publicly
Philosophy
- Speed-of-light thinking: identify physical limits before incremental improvement
- Decomposition under pressure: any problem can be broken into actionable items; anxiety dissolves when there’s a list and someone owns each item
- Forgetting: selective forgetting of setbacks; hold beliefs as long as the underlying assumptions remain valid
- Transparent reasoning: show reasoning steps, not just conclusions, so others can intercept and correct
Connections
- Long relationship with Morris Chang (TSMC founder); declined the TSMC CEO role offered in 2013
- Collaborated with Elon Musk / xAI on the Colossus supercomputer build
- Interviewed by lex-fridman on Podcast #494 (2026-03-23)