How Jensen Huang Solicits Employee Emails to Keep Nvidia on

BY BRUCE CRUMLEY @BRUCEC_INC

Not every founder will be able to apply all the management tricks that helped Jensen Huang build cutting-edge Silicon Valley chipmaker Nvidia into a $1 trillion industrial and financial world beater. But there are several things Huang has done differently since the early days of the company’s creation—in a Silicon Valley Denny’s restaurant, no less—that all managers may want to consider. Those include remaining attentive to what employees at all levels of the business are talking and thinking about at any given time, and heeding the insights they offer.

In addition to his insatiable appetite for work, rockstar CEO status, and an assortment of stylish leather jackets to go with that reputation, Huang is famous for disliking and avoiding corporate hierarchy. One method the Nvidia chief has used to flatten his company as much as possible over the years is soliciting recurring ‘Top-5 Things’ messages that allow employees to air their thoughts. The new The Nvidia Way book by Barrons’ senior writer Tae Kim describes those so-called T5T emails Huang receives daily as his way of keeping the top, bottom, and middle of the company connected and moving in the same direction. That’s part of Huang’s management approach that Kim calls “unlike anything else in corporate America.”

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article on Kim’s book, Huang’s objective in requesting and digesting scores of daily T5Ts is to get “information from the edge” of Nvidia. Those areas removed from the obsessions of the upper echelons of company management include departments where people work on swiftly developing tech like generative artificial intelligence. Yet as they do, those elite geeks also continually identify and discuss even newer innovations they’re hearing about—and which could be key to Nvidia’s future success.

“Strategy, it turns out, isn’t what I say, it’s what they do,” the Journal quoted Huang telling a 2023 AI summit. “So it’s really important that I understand what everybody is doing.” 

But T5Ts aren’t intended to serve as employee progress reports or justification of their activity on the company clock. Huang throws their content open to pretty much anything Nvidia’s 30,000 workers are thinking, arguing, or speculating about that could be relevant to its business.

That might be the discovery of an excellent local restaurant colleagues will want to know about during work breaks. Or, the Journal notes, it could be similar to the musings from several years ago about what was then still nascent development of machine learning programs. Those eventually spawned today’s rapidly evolving and quickly multiplying AI apps that rely on Nvidia chips to function at top capacity. Between times, employee T5T input helped identify the processing requirements those systems would need and allowed Huang to launch work to create chips capable of that.

“I’m looking to detect the weak signals,” Kim’s book quotes Huang saying about the way T5Ts keep him abreast of what his employees think may be the next big thing. “It’s easy to pick up the strong signals, but I want to intercept them when they are weak.”

But by relying on T5Ts to bring thinking from the edges of Nvidia closer, Huang also uses the exchanges as a means of reducing the space between the C-suite and the research and development base. That, the Journal notes, allows him to get “the sort of insights that might never reach him otherwise” and flatten hierarchy through direct exchanges, reflecting “something of an organizing principle for the whole company.”

But that isn’t the only way Huang’s views and management hacks break with established corporate practices.

According to the Journal, he prefers working in conference rooms over secluded offices, embraces collective brainstorming on whiteboards, and likes pursuing ideas and projects while they’re hot. What he has no time for, by contrast, are suggestions that managers return to their cubicles to research and carefully map out proposals in reports they’ll present days or weeks later.

“Status reports are meta-information by the time you get them,” Huang said last year, according to the Journal. “They’re barely informative.” 

Instead, he invites T5Ts—which Kim’s book says are usually brief, concise, and focused on whatever ideas employees have found themselves chewing on recently. The format allows Huang to measure ongoing changes in Nvidia’s pulse while allaying any staff concerns about saying the wrong thing since they’re merely passing along aspects of their work. As such, T5Ts carry the promise of potential gain without any risk of pain to staff.

But why do people bother writing the missives knowing the boss gets hundreds like them each day? Because, Kim’s book says, Huang reads most, if not all of those emails—and often replies.

Indeed, the Journal says Nvidia managers who send in T5Ts or relay those from within their divisions have learned to avoid doing that on Friday evenings. That timing creates the risk Huang will jump on the most promising ideas passed along, and ask for immediate action over the weekend. Instead, the paper notes, savvy correspondents email their best T5Ts on Sundays, when Huang is known to pore over a large volume of the texts, and then select elements he thinks should be prioritized the following morning.

Sooner or later, one of those T5T topics Huang picks may pave the way for whatever tech innovation follows the recent crop of revolutionary AI apps, and presents Nvidia more opportunity to consolidate its position at the top of the AI chip industry and financial markets.

Photo Credit: Getty Images.