No 1-on-1 meetings: How Jensen Huang runs NVIDIA | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

Plus, you have a complete disperate disciplines here. I'm sure you have specialists in each one of these. High bandwidth memory, the networking, the NVL link, the nicks, the optics and the copper that you're doing, the power delivery, the cooling, all that. I mean, there's like world experts in each of those. How do you get them in a room together to figure out — that's why my staff is so large? — What's the pro Can you take me through the process of the specialists and the generalists? like how do you put together the rack when you know this the set of things you have to shove into a rack together — like what does that process look like of designing it all together? — There's the first question which is what is extreme code design? You're we're optimizing across the entire stack of software from architectures to chips to systems to system software to the algorithms to the applications. That's one layer. The second thing that you and I just talked about is goes beyond CPUs and GPUs and networking chips and scale up switches and scale out switches. And then of course you got to include power and cooling and all of that because you know all these computers are extremely power hungry. They do a lot of work and they're very energy efficient but they in aggregate still consume a lot of power. And so that's one the first question is what is it? The second question is why is it and we just spoke about the reason you know you want to distribute the workload so that you can exceed the benefit of just increasing the number of computers and the and then the third question is how is it how do you do it — and uh that's the that's kind of the miracle of this company you know when you're designing a computer you have to have operating system of computers when you're designing a company you should first think about what is it that you want the company to produce. You know, I see a lot of companies organization charts and they all look the same. Hamburger organization charts, software organization charts and car company organization charts. They all look the same. And it doesn't make any sense to me. You know, the goal of au of a company is to be the machinery, the mechanism, the system that produces the output and that output is the product that we like to create. It is also designed the architecture of the company should reflect the environment by which it exists. It almost directly says what you should do with the organization. My direct staff is 60 people. You know, I don't have one-on- ones with them because it's impossible. You can't have 60 people on your staff if you're, you know, going to get work done. And — so, you still have 60 reports. You still have more. Yeah. — And most stars at least have a foot in engineering. almost all of them. There's experts in memory, there's experts in CPUs, there's experts in optical all Yeah. GPUs and architecture, algorithms, design. — So, you constantly have an eye on the entire stack and you're having like intense discussions about the design of the entire stack — and no conversation is ever one person. That's why I don't do one-on- ones. We present a problem and all of us attack it, you know, because we're doing extreme code design and literally the company is all the time. — So even if you're talking about a particular component like cooling, networking, everybody's listening in. — Yeah. — And they can contribute, well, this doesn't work for the power distribution. This doesn't exactly — this doesn't work for the memory. This doesn't work for this. — Exactly. And whoever wants to tune out, tune out. You know what I'm saying? And the reason for that is because the people who are on the staff, they know when to pay attention. — They're supposed, you know, something they could have contributed to, they didn't contribute to. I'm going to call them out, you know, and so, hey, come on. Let's get in here.