Short excerpt from a March 9, 2024 YouTube talk by Jensen Huang describing Nvidia’s approach to attracting top talent: choose projects that are novel, extremely challenging, and impactful rather than competing in commodity markets. He emphasizes creating an environment for the best people, avoiding replication of work (e.g., chip fabrication) already done well by others, and giving talented people the patience and freedom to do groundbreaking work.
Chapters
Our company decides to choose projects for one fundamental goal. My goal is to create an amazing environment for the best people in the world. Who wants to pursue this field of computing and computer science and artificial intelligence, to create the conditions by which they will come and do their life's work. Well, if I say that, then now the question is, how do you achieve that? So let me give you an example of how not to achieve that. Nobody that I know wakes up in the morning and say, you know what? My neighbor is doing that. And you know what I want to do? I want to take it from them. I can do it too. I want to take it from them. I want to capture their share, I want to pummel them on price. I want to take their share. It turns out no great people do that. Everybody wakes up in the morning, says, I want to do something that has never been done before. That's incredibly hard to do. That, if successful, makes a great impact in the world. And that's what Nvidia's core values are. 1. How do we choose do something that the world's never done before? Let's hope that's insanely hard to do. And if that's the case, what am I doing making a cell phone chip? How many companies in the world can make a cell phone? A lot. Why am I making a CPU? How many more CPUs do we need? Does that make sense? We don't need all those things. And so we naturally selected ourselves out of commodity markets. And because we selected amazing markets, amazingly hard to do things, amazing people joined us. And because amazing people joined us and because we had the patience to let them do something amazing, they do something amazing. It turns out. It's simple to say it takes incredible character to do. Does it make sense? And no fabrication. The reason why we don't do fabrication is because TSMC does it so well. And they're already doing it, for what reason do I go take their work? I like the people at tsmc. They're great friends of mine. CC is a great friend of mine. Mark's a great friend of mine. Just because I've got business I can drive into it. So what? They're doing a great job for me. Let's not squander my time to go repeat what they've already done. Let's go squander my time on something that nobody has done. Does that make sense? That's how you build something special. Otherwise you're only talking about market share.
