Jensen Huang explains how he designed NVIDIA from first principles

With respect to building a company, the first thing that you have to go, as with all problems, you start from first principles. What is this machine that we're trying to create and what is its output? What is its input? What is its output? What are the conditions that it's in? What is the industry like? Is it a fast moving industry, is it a bureaucratic industry, Is it highly regulated industry? What kind of industry is it and what are you trying to build? And so I think you think about it from that perspective. There are several things that I wanted to do with the company. I wanted to create something, a company that naturally attracts amazing people. And the reason for that is because our company's mission is to solve computing problems that are barely possible. And if a problem could be solved by normal computers, we don't do it. Yeah. And so you want to attract amazing people who want to invent this new form of computing and apply it to solving some really difficult problems. And so I wanted amazing people. Second, I wanted a company that was smaller, not larger. You want a company that's as small as possible, not as large as possible. It needs to be as large as necessary to do the job well, but to be as small as possible. And so naturally you want to empower people. Well, if you want an organization that obeys command and control, then you make it a pyramid, just like the old military, all the way back to the Roman Empire. But if you want to empower people, then you want to make it as flat as possible so that information travels quickly. We also don't have business units, we don't have divisions. Everybody works as one. And the company is shaped in a way that allows us to build accelerated computing best. You know, if you asked me to go do fried chicken, we would have a hard time doing fried chicken. Swedish meatballs, no chance. But accelerated computing very well.