12 Learnings from Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA

3-min Summary: Nvidia’s Jensen Huang on Life, Work and AI

I recently watched an interview featuring Nvidia’s Jensen Huang at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

This post shares 12 key takeaways from the hour-long interview — so you can be as inspired as me in just 3 minutes.

On Life:

1. Embrace a Mission with Novel Challenges: Your job is to make a unique contribution. Live a life of purpose. To do something that nobody else in the world will do or can do. Do something that’s insanely hard to do that you’re incredibly good at doing and that you love doing for a long time. So that in the end, after you are done, everyone will say the world was better because you were here. In Nvidia’s context, it was focusing on building computers to solve problems that normal computers/processors can’t.
2. Cultivate Purpose by spending time on difficult problems you enjoy solving: “Is this worthy work to do? Does this advance the field that matters?” You should be lazy about activities that other people can do. Instead, we should focus efforts on selecting things that nobody is willing to do but the world would fall apart if nobody did it. This gives you a sense of purpose. Find inspiration not from the size of the market, but the importance of the work. The importance of the work is the early indicator of future success.
3. Continuous Reflection on Core Beliefs: You do things based on core beliefs. Thus have a core belief. Gut check it every day, while looking for early indicators of future success. “What do you believe? What are the most important things?“ This helps you ground yourself, focus on the long-term, and focus on the priorities that matter (foundational things), instead of short-term fluctuations and knee-jerk reactions. Pursue it with all your might. Pursue it for a very long time. Surround yourself with people you love and take it on that ride. Regularly revisit and reassess your core beliefs and priorities to ensure alignment with long-term goals and foundational values.
4. Value Relationships and Reputation: Have a good past. You can’t run away from your past. Be known for being reliable, committed etc. Make people remember you for something good, and how you’d contributed or helped them. These people may end up crossing paths with you again in future. Go forwards in time and look backwards — because it’s easier. Read your history. It’s similar to problem-solving → look at the end result, then go back to see what you need to do to get there.
5. Contribution and Service: “No task is beneath me.” Emphasise the importance of making unique contributions and serving others, advocating for a life of purpose marked by significant, difficult, and service-driven work. An act of service to others is to develop a way to reason something and share it with them.

On Work:

1. First Principles Thinking: Start from first principles. Remember what something is designed to do. It’s important to learn from others, but also important to return to first principles to reimagine solutions in today’s context, which demands understanding the core of problems before acting. Continuously practise this first-principles thinking because the world is always changing — it demands resetting ourselves and how we approach processes and problems. When reasoning from first principles, ask “What does it mean? What are the implications? What are the implications of every single layer in what we do (computing)?”
2. Always Be Curious and Continue Innovating: You can succeed in inventing the future even if you were not informed about it at all. Succeed in inventing the future with the mindset of “How hard can it be?” suggesting that many solutions are closer than they seem, perhaps just a study away. Savour the surprise every time you discover something new.
3. Clarity on Problem Solving: What is the input? What is the output? What are the properties of the environment? What are the variables that influence or shape this property? What are the characteristics of this variable/environment?
4. Market Significance > Problem Significance: In business, the potential market’s interest holds more weight than the mere existence of problems. In Nvidia’s context, they often find hard problems to solve in nascent markets. They then (1) create the technology and (2) create the market. But beyond this, find motivation not in the market size but in the significance of the work and its potential to advance meaningful fields.
5. Seek Early Indicators of Future Success (EIOFS): Before a market fully exists, identify early signs of potential success to inspire and validate the direction of your work. Decouple the result from evidence that you’re doing the right thing.

On Nvidia and AI:

1. Merit/Service over Information Asymmetry: Success in Nvidia is dependent on merit and service for others, not by information asymmetry.
2. Future of Computing: The future of computing will be highly generated, instead of retrieved.