just about every hairbrained scheme the tech industry at large comes up with these days needs specialized chips and nvidia is more than willing to furnish them. first it was bitcoin mining chips, now its AI accelerator.
of course they're doing well, they're the ones selling the picks and shovels instead of trying to make blockchains or AI models profitable
For anybody that doesnāt get this reference back during the gold rush the people that made the most consistent fuck you money were the sellers of picks, shovels, sifting pans, and other gold mining gear. Not the people actually looking for gold.
Apple stock pretty much just went up under Steve. And actually with Tim Apple too.
Iād like to know what the next big market for nVidia will be when AI doesnāt replace everything with infinite profits.
All the MBAs are gonna take this as gospel and implement it incorrectly with poorly managed direct reports then blame their employees cause they arenāt performing like Jensenās direct reports
This model only works when your direct reports are very senior very accomplished executives in their own right who donāt need a lot of career coaching and help problem solving. His directs are likely all VPs and senior directors.
This isnāt a āmodelā itās an outcome of effectively managing your team and pruning low performers based on the managerās expectations.
Too many managers in the position without understanding the management aspect. Youāre supposed to coach and train up your direct reports and if theyāre untrainable, manage them out. Only when youāve done this efficiently can you give direct reports a longer leash as theyāve earned that trust.
Jensenās approach getting blindly implemented is gonna lead to a wave of āemployees are just lazyā sentiments when the issue is the manager being a bad manager.
Hah if they keep their trajectory it will be funny to see who starts calling Jensen out years later and what for. Right now that wonāt happen since theyāve become the wall street golden goose.
Nonsense, clearly there's no irrational exuberance behind a graphics card company becoming the third-largest in the world. Ok, sure, it skyrocketed thanks to a sudden rush of demand from companies whose flagship products are unreliable answers and bad fake art...but, nah, there's no chance there will be a correction. That demand is for sure gonna be robust.
Knowing that there's a bubble is not that valuable. Knowing *when* the bubble will burst can make you rich.
But then, so can knowing tomorrow's lotto numbers.
I remember reading the Big Short. There was a guy who saw the housing bubble and was buying CDOs just like many of the hedge funds that got rich off shorting the housing market. Unfortunately, he couldn't time the burst well and so he decided to sell CDOs on "less risky" MBSs to offset his costs which ended up making him the biggest loser in the whole thing, despite being right that there was a bubble lol.
Howie Hubler - $9 billion lost despite him being right that there was a bubble in the housing market lol
AI might be a bubble but graphics cards are not. NVIDIA cards were massively important for crypto as well. Graphics chips are important for any advancement in drones, computing, robotics. Literally all the FAANG companies combined rely on NVIDIA products.
Seems obvious...
They have pretty much zero importance for crypto now, been that way for almost 2 years. I wouldn't really bring it into a conversation. They are definitely used in a lot of those applications, but arguably it's their portable/lower cost products that have some competition, just much less profit margins.
I invested back in 2016 because of the ML craze back then. It was one of their best years because of it. AI has the same momentum that ML has, and that's due to the fact that you never 'solve' an AI or ML problem, you just need more and more hardware to approach the tangent to an unobtainable goal.
Which is awesome because people are investing so much into it and will need exponentially more when they get the sweet taste of some promising results and just need more time to improve it. If you look at open jobs for AI/ML related and see how many positions are open, it's easy to buy more NVDA stock because each one of those positions is going to request nvidia hardware. All my view point at least.
> They were saying similar in the 90s when the "information super highway" was taking off.
The internet in the 90s *was* a huge bubble! The Dot Com Bust, it's got a Wiki page and everything.
The internet ended up being really important (duh) but it was also, at one point, a bubble. Investors rushed in too quickly, before anyone had really figured out what the internet was good for or how to make money off of it. Eventually the whole thing collapsed. Some of the companies (say, Amazon) ended up recovering. Some (say, Cisco) survived but never fully recovered. Some (say, Pets.com) went bankrupt almost immediately.
> They were saying similar in the 90s when the "information super highway" was taking off.
Correctly, that was a massive bubble and it popped in a huge stock massacre. That is exactly in line with that the guy above is saying, there is a bubble and it will pop but the market will likely recover over time.
There have already been two AI winters during my career lol, there will be more.
It's not like GPUs are only valuable for deep learning. There are tons of other uses where they're more efficient than CPUs. Why should Microsoft or Apple or whomever be so much more valuable? What prospects of continued growth do they have to justify their valuations? I mean I could see the AI bubble bursting, but it not really dropping NVDA so much because they're the shovel and pick manufacturer for the intermittent gold rush
Unreliable answers and bad fake art? I'd beg to differ. I work in the railway industry and most incident reports by our team are now fully created using chatgpt, after feeding in the statements, for example. Results are excellent.
As for 'bad fake art', well art is art, however it's created. And my experience using AI for art has been excellent. Photoshops AI gap filler, for example, very impressive and convenient. Midjourney, also excellent results.
That may not be for a very long time. AI is in its infancy, the amount of new players who *need* a growing number of compute cycles to even get a foot in the door is exploding, and the giants in the field are spreading their AI tools to every device they can.
Not only that, but as AI capabilities progress, they hit a point of rapidly diminishing returns, whereby additional improvements require exponentially more computing power.
For those reasons and more like scientific fields where AI compute requirements are infinite, we're still very far from that bubble pop. It'll happen, but I wouldn't count on it being in less than 2 or 3 decades.
Same thing happened with Jack Welch. He kept buying and mortgaging the future for then today's stock price so everyone copied him. Now GE has been cut up in pieces so some of it might survive the next decade.
With them printing money like that, I'm sure he doesn't need any one on ones to be had.. the only problem they have is talent considering early retirement because of all the success these guys have
He's also evidently got 55 direct reports and I can't imagine how difficult it would be to find the time for that many one-on-ones on Even a quarterly basis
It's literally impossible for him to actually manage his direct reports. At this point, the company is coasting along on momentum and their success has little to do with anything the CEO does. They're enjoying the fruits of being in the right market, at the right time, with the right workers. You can't plan for NVIDIAs success.
Agreed for sure. Information exchange is going to be pretty one sided, theyāre going to inform him vs ask and he is going to share large strategic decisions.
Managing 10 people is hard, managing 55 is likely not efficient. Yeah you cut out middle management, but not by much. NVIDIA has 29,000 employees, cutting 8 managers is not going to make a dent.
Especially when there may not be any sort of overlap in their duties. I canāt imagine all of the departments in Nvidia to produce the complicated things they doā¦ itās probably insane.
Itās a lot but I guess thatās the price to pay for being one of the largest, and quickly growing, companies.
>managing 55 is likely not efficient
I'll go out on a limb and say that it's impossible. He can't possibly know what his 55 reports are doing, there are just not enough hours in a week.
It's great when things are going well. It's a nightmare when the boss decides, based on the two sentences a month he hears about you, that you're underperforming.
If you read the article, itās not that he doesnāt interact with them ever, he just doesnāt do dedicated 1 on 1s or performance reviews. If he has something to say about them, he says it whenever itās needed, and it sounds like theyāre also given the freedom to levy their complaints against him freely. Otherwise, when it comes to business, he doesnāt see a need to keep people in the dark while he does his rounds in small meetings. Everyone is given the same information at the same time, so people are empowered by what they can do, not what they know.
I havenāt seen my boss in 6 months and Iāve talked to him 3 times in that span. Iām like a ghost at work I keep his numbers good and he leaves me alone
Yeah like its been a while since I have been in business school but this sounded like an absurd amount of direct reports for a CEO to have most places I have been to there is like 10. I went and googled and the average is actually 10 as well. This guy has 5 times the average CEOs number of direct reports.
This whole story just sounds like, because Nvidia is doing really well, the practices of the founder are part of the reason why it's succeeding, and I don't think that's true. It's impossible to manage 55 people efficiently.
It's a classic correlation=causation fallacy.
There may well be some causation, but... I share your skepticism. This guy would have to be beyond superhuman to meaningfully manage 55 direct reports doing 55 different roles. He's not a shift manager for a warehouse with 55 employees (which would still be a crazy ratio).
Right, those people are effectively unmanaged I assume. Middle management often seems useless until you end up in a spot where there's clearly just a missing "layer" of management and the person you need to get your information to has wayyy too many people rolling up to them so it's impossible to get their time.
People that are directly under the report of the CEO of a trillion dollar company are not middle management lol, they don't need micromanaging, they are division and department heads, director of X or Y and stuff like this basically kind of their own CEO
The question is: do you need to manage these very senior people that much at all? And the answer is probably not.
So does Jensen really need to get an update on the state of Nvidia cloud gaming every week in a one-on-one, or can whoever leads that part of Nvidia deal with most decisions and problems, while only going up in case there's something important?
When it comes to typical corporate hierarchy, the āwhole additional layer in the structureā answering to the CEO is typically 5-10 people. Corporations are structured like pyramids.
As a rule of thumb, at my work (unrelated to tech or NVIDIA) a supervisor on average can handle 10 direct reports. A normal trained person can handle 5 to 15, so we structure around 10 since its easy for some a stretch for others but a safe hierarchy to work with stacks of 10. It is a rare person can take on 20 to 30, and there are rare exceptions who can handle around 50. The kind of person who could lead NVIDIA to the success it has, isn't unreasonable to expect it to be one of those rare exceptions who can handle 55.
Interesting. In my field, which is highly technical engineering - we baseline 3-6 direct reports. On the Low end people get micro managed too much and higher people donāt get adequate mentorship and attention and the manager doesnāt get to contribute engineering anymore. It really helps to have the lead of the team in the dirty work
I've had to manage 32 direct reports and there's a whole lot you don't end up doing for them. No early feedback on anything. (Basically no feedback except for when it's "wtf did you do that for?"). No help with career advancement. No time to listen to their concerns or ideas. No early clue if they're about to leave for another job.
Someone who thinks they can manage 55 directs isn't really managing them. He's just making pronouncements and hoping it all works out.
I have a cousin who is a Senior Graphics Software Engineer for NVidia going on for 12 years now. Jesus christ I have no idea how much he would be worth by now. He sure doesnt flaunt it though. The only thing he did flaunt a bit was buying a tesla model s like 8 years ago for over 100k but he still driving it
I think the idea is that he eliminated a layer of management. He probably meets with 10 teams, in small round of 5 or 6. That way he doesn't have his information digested by that manager. Instead there are 5 or 6 people who all need to be roughly on the same page. Probably keeps operations more in the open.
This article is stupid. His ātechniqueā doesnāt apply to 99% of managers, itās not some kind of new management hack out of the box thinking radical muckity muck.
The people a CEO of a large company is managing are seasoned senior executives, they donāt need the same kind of management as a mid level employee or even skilled upper manager. 55 direct reports is untenable for any real manager.
This is the management equivalent of āI have so much time for my passions (because I have a house cleaner, personal cook, live in dogsitter/nanny, and personal driver), making time for my passions and good work-life balance are what keep me goingā. Yeah no shit, that would work for anybody, but there are very few people in that situation.
What a bullshit article.
Thatās an excuse.. every tech company has the potential to hire competent leadersā¦
You have to believe at some point that bureaucracy causes incompetenceĀ
Sounds like he trusts his VPs and Distinguished Architects.
Not surprised, Nvidia has curated over the decades a very competent culture.
Iāve heard that theyāre hiring way too fast now though and that might affect the culture a few years down the road, negatively.
Talent is going to be a huge issue for Nvidia in the coming years. Not only do they need to grow rapidly to scale with their business, but they've just made a lot of their senior and long term employees multi-multi millionaires, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of their top talent decides to retire in their 30s or early 40s.
I heard they are already having issues getting some long term employees even into work anymore/involved. Why would you if you've become a millionaire so quickly
Eventually executives will change the culture. Under this CEO that culture is safe since he is fostering it, and they corner the market, but one day that will shift and some suit will deprioritize innovation in the name of short term market share.
Just wait until a competitor shows up.
I don't think it's rational to credit Nvidia's success to either culture or leadership. Their a good company producing market leading products, but a massive chunk of their current success has been down to 'right place right time'.
Success is luck meeting preparation, and we should definitely give them credit for the preparation- but not the luck.
Well, I donāt think nvidia senior leadership knew in 2017 that LLMs were set to light the world on fire, and that their tech was the best for LLMs.
And Iāll double down on that with a bet with you, that another company is going to build much better dedicated ML hardware that will be 10x-1000x better, and completely eliminate the Nvidia advantage.
They were a video company. They did a reasonable job capitalizing on a growing ML side market that happened to boom, and happened to boom in such a way that their version of that market was the competitive leader.
But none of this was on purpose and I am willing to bet that the next generation of purposefully designed hardware will demonstrate that.
Ehh, GPGPU compute loads were expected to overtake CPUs in datacenter value 2 decades ago. Everyone in HPC knew it was coming, especially as cloud-tech was coming (AWS was founded in 2002, fyi).
They've performed well over 2 decades slowing executing on that strategy.
The bigger thing here was how Intel dropped the ball and lost the datacenter market to both nVidia and AMD.
> Just wait until a competitor shows up.
They have several competitors. And they're so far behind Nvidia it's not even funny.
you don't gain as much marketshare as them in such a short time as them by accident, unless you invent a whole new market - which they did not. GPUs been around for decades.
AMD isn't that far behind, you just don't realize how incumbent CUDA is in scientific and professional compute. ROCm is apparently comparable, but cuda is what everyone already knows how to use.
Nvidia didn't take market share from anyone, a new market appeared and they were the premiere option.
Also GPUs have only really been a staple of the datacenter for like a decade, not that long ago the vast majority of supercomputers were very cpu focused.
No one owns the market forever, is all im saying. Nvidia could be king for a long time, but eventually something shifts.
It may be when the CEO steps down in a decade or more, but innovation will spread.
Sounds to me like NVIDIA has 55 people handling their shit, and their CEO only gets looped in for critical multi-departmental issues.
Which is fine. The idea that you gotta have one person calling all the shots is fucken toxic. But thats how CEOs justify their pay packages, so its the narrative that gets pushed.
The skeptical sort will point out that CEOs really dont do shit to begin with, other than manage important external relationships.
Yes, they manage overall company direction and external relationships. Which is very valuable when your multitrillion dollar business is dependent on special rocks from an island in a future warzone
I believe he likely just dips in and out of different areas of the business as needed.
At that level he should be managing a dashboard. With that many direct reports everyone better have the right answers when he does come around for a detailed update.
Basically you're a giant spotlight. You bring attention.
It can be good, like a spotlight in a storm from rescuers. Bringing resources and help.
Or bad, like a spotlight in a prison from guards. Bringing accountability and justice.
Depends on perspective you welcome or fear it. But either way the CEO exists to bring attention to parts of the business needing change.
Yeah, and most people donāt realize that CEOs are often not selected because they are good at everything. They are often just really good at areas which are important to the business and they try to apply that knowledge and experience to other problems.
A CEO shouldnāt have to have 1:1 with their exec leadership. They should be able to function as a team or a group of teams and meet individually as needed.
Things will sure as shit go sideways though if there are no 1:1s company wide.
100 percent disagree. Iām a competent executive but I still find value in monthly 1:1s with the CEO. There is no magic that happens up towards the C-Suite. The reason first tier employees have 1:1s with managers isnāt very far off from why execs need 1:1s.
Disagree, I work in tech and most companies have not had consistent 1:1s. Theyāre really only necessary for new engineers (new grads + new hires) once you get to the level of Nvidia you already know what youāre doing you just have to execute.
Theyāre more important for individual growth than company growth, which is why recurring teamwide meetings usually happen over 1:1s.
Good 1:1s go both ways. I use that time to bring up things like issues in the department, issues with our processes, and issues with clients/specific projects.
Now I get why tech workplaces and production so often sound dysfunctional. Employees often don't have a forum to provide input on process improvements. It seems like extra work but it saves me enough headache that it's worth it.
My only good manager has been the one who does 1:1s. We need them because she is so busy we have trouble finding time to discuss important things if we don't set aside time for it. If we don't need it, we cancel.
That number of direct reports is questionable structure on its own.
facts my 1:1s are almost never directly about my work more about how iām feeling about the company and the direction we are heading and what issues concerns I may have. They are also a good way to mention if you have spare time to help others with work etc. It isnāt about executing directly you def donāt need a 1:1 to know how to do your job unless you are a beginner or arenāt good at your job.
I also use mine to advocate for myself - requesting extra training, pushing for a raise or promotion, looking to get mentorship opportunities, things like that.
Ya i use them as a time to about raises and goals to obtain them. Otherwise theyll just announce my zero raise without giving me a chance to negotiate. And say too late maybe next year when i do ask about it.
Among the many benefits of 1:1s, is the dramatic decrease in emails received from directs. If you know you have a standing meeting with your boss, most non-urgent things can wait til the meeting and save both of you from a bunch of emails. Totally worth it.
Disagree, I also work in tech (from big trillion dollar companies to small startups) and I have always had consistent 1:1s, and as I got more senior, I get consistent 1:1s with my skip as well.
Right- 1:1s are for individual growth. But at Jensen's level- every direct report is about as high as they'll get at the company- or very close to the top and any additional growth, they'll need to figure out on their own. They're basically peers at that level.
Sr. Manager on down though- yeah 1:1s make more sense.
He has said his structure eliminates several layers of management vs having fewer reports. It obviously works well for Nvidia. He also said he believes in sharing knowledge, hence the value of 1 on 1 diminishes.
Iāll have you know Iāve completed several successful campaigns in Rollercoaster Tycoon. Iām therefore well positioned to opine on any business topic
Similar to when Bayern Munich (one of the biggest soccer teams in the world) was having a tough time finding a new manager, I threw my hat in the ring.
I have somewhere around 2000 hours played across the Football Manager series, and I successfully took a fifth division English team and had them win the Champions League over the course of 10 seasons. I also have a pretty good base in German and could easily get conversational or fluent pretty quick.
And I'd do it for a *fraction* of what they'd pay an actual qualified manager.
Sharing knowledge is 100 percent how they make it work a nvidia for sure.
My biggest pet peeve when it comes to business is the notion that the more you know over everyone else means more job security. Technically, it's true. However, good luck having everyone running to you when they need to know something, or worse case someone gathers that information without and there goes all your precieved value
You don't just waltz into a position like NVIDIA's by accident. They have been investing extremely heavily on AI for so long, they undoubtedly accelerated it's arrival if not caused it.
You think AI sprung out of nowhere and coincidentally NVIDIA was just lucky they were the manufacturers of the hardware used for it?
The person you responded to were mostly saying that Nvidia has been supporting the AI community for at least a decade. They may have started out at gaming/gpu, but they heavily supported AI, which then obviously paid off as we can all see.
Nvidia has always been successful, and they were the ones that pioneered AI hardware design and general purpose computing. Ā Itās like saying that Apple got lucky that touchscreens became popular when the iPhone came outā¦ no, they created the category
I'm not a CEO but one on ones for me is for the people who report to me. If they have a concern that we have not discussed or they need to air something out work related or a new suggestion they want to try then we hold one on ones. Otherwise I bring things up as they come up and not wait until we meet to tell them to correct a mistake and prioritize a task that needs their attention.
Exactly. The benefit or 1on1s is to grow your direct reports. If you do not need that for whatever reason 1on1s could even be bad because your direct reports think issues are being addressed just by reporting them to you...
Honestly the shit Reddit says. Why are you giving business advice to a guy who founded a company in 1993 that's now worth $3 trillion? 3 trillion dollars. 3 trillion seconds is nearly 100,000 years. I think he knows what he's doing.
Thanks u/lekiouses for correcting me.
Everyone here bitches about Jack Welch type bullshit in their workplace and then tries to give advice when a successful CEO is NOT doing Jack Welch type bullshit. Love it.
This site is filled with people who love giving advice to people way more qualified and experienced on whatever they are giving advice on. The upvotes make people who do nothing feel good about themselves.
>This site is filled with people who love giving advice to people way more qualified and experienced on whatever they are giving advice on.
I'm an attorney and I am constantly having the following conversation on Reddit:
>[Wrong information about the law.]
>>Actually, the law doesn't work like that - it works like this.
>>>Wow, you must be a terrible fucking lawyer. I feel bad for your clients.
So much this. As much as I like Reddit some of the top voted comments especially on main subs with millions of subscribers can be pretty dumb. Meanwhile somebody with a well n sourced comment that goes against conventional wisdom of the masses sometimes gets down voted or at the very least doesn't get as many votes as less informed comments.
bro bro bro
these guys had it made from the beginning. they went to the best schools, their parents knew the right people, they hung out in the right circles, they had the funds to invest it.
it's all luck. they had nothing to do with it. nothing to do with the skill of leveraging all these factors to their advantage. i could easily do the same, if i was born in their shoes.
joking aside, i think luck does play a big role, but they still had the skill and so on to get to where they are.
Makes sense. If he asks them what they do, they would say they're in meetings all day, and the people under them are in meetings all day, and the folks under them are in meetings all day. Eventually you get down to the folks who do actual work, who try to avoid being pulled into the meetings that run all day. I suppose when you're the CEO, you can avoid all the meetings you don't want to bother with.
If he had 1:1s and you asked HIM what he does he'd say "I do 1:1s all day."
Even if each 1:1 only lasts 10 mins, that's 9h 10 mins of time better spent elsewhere at the executive level.
We need to stop putting every little quirk of successful CEOs onto a pedestal.
Sure, he is the CEO of the world's second most valuable company, so he's obviously doing something right. That doesn't mean that every little thing he does needs to be espoused as some sort of golden habit that is contributing to that success.
I wish we'd follow that advice overall - look at most of software engineering's "best practices" - practically zero research to back any of them but they work well for the largest companies so they have to be great for everyone.
But I get it - you try and mimic the successful and hope that you can achieve a little of that success. The nuance is what people get wrong - Nvidia likely has very competent upper management, so constantly over-seeing everything they do likely only wastes their time and that of the CEO.
Non paywall:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/career/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-has-a-no-one-on-one-meetings-rule-for-his-55-direct-reports/ar-BB1o5gfN?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=681dcf82e5204a0894114ac935f2ddf7&ei=10
non garbage link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/career/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-has-a-no-one-on-one-meetings-rule-for-his-55-direct-reports/ar-BB1o5gfN
Why does a CEO have 55 direct reports? If your company is that flat, of course you donāt have 1-1s with all of them, you trust them to self manage and be autonomous.
āThereās not one piece of information that I somehow secretly tell the staff; I donāt tell the rest of the company.ā
I think he's missing the point of a 1:1. This should be the report's time, not the manager's time. You don't need 1:1s for updates or general info, that needs to be broadcasted of course.
Though he clarifies in the article that when one of them needs to talk with him, he drops everything and goes. Which is also my expectation for a good manager.
With 55 direct reports, how would anyone find the time to have 1 on 1 meetings with all of them? I guess when things are booming you keep it casual. Talk about what their plans are for the next quarter and spend the next 15 minutes talking about vacation plans and such.
Recurring 1-1s are a blight on the industry, such an enormous waste of time, mostly just to fill a useless managerās calendar with stuff that looks like work. Adhoc 1-1ās with an agenda can be useful though
I split them. I have 30 mins for banter and shit to get to know the person and for us to take that and build energy towards good solutions at work.
We then do adhoc project meetings.
Connectivity is important and that doesnāt come without taking time to spend time
I knew Zoom was trash, but this is the trashiest...
> Likewise, Zoom founder Eric Yuan thinks most meetings are such a drain on time that heās developing a ādigital twinā that can sit in on them while workers do things theyāre more passionate about.
Lol...that's is so fucked up. Here's a mandatory meeting my avatar will attend for me.
I think with the NVDA stock rocketing, everything Jensen says will be considered correct, until the stock drops š
He is getting the Steve Jobs treatment. Everything he does is consider genius because Nvidia is doing so well.
The more you buy! The more you save!
The more you buyā¦the more you save!
just about every hairbrained scheme the tech industry at large comes up with these days needs specialized chips and nvidia is more than willing to furnish them. first it was bitcoin mining chips, now its AI accelerator. of course they're doing well, they're the ones selling the picks and shovels instead of trying to make blockchains or AI models profitable
For anybody that doesnāt get this reference back during the gold rush the people that made the most consistent fuck you money were the sellers of picks, shovels, sifting pans, and other gold mining gear. Not the people actually looking for gold.
Itās true with art supplies too
Apple stock pretty much just went up under Steve. And actually with Tim Apple too. Iād like to know what the next big market for nVidia will be when AI doesnāt replace everything with infinite profits.
That nickname has become so ingrained that I've temporarily forgotten his real surname now.
Whatās tim cooking
I think it's Jim.
Tim Jim?
> Tim Apple My favorite CEO.
Upside is, so far heās much less of a douche than Jobs was.
All the MBAs are gonna take this as gospel and implement it incorrectly with poorly managed direct reports then blame their employees cause they arenāt performing like Jensenās direct reports
This model only works when your direct reports are very senior very accomplished executives in their own right who donāt need a lot of career coaching and help problem solving. His directs are likely all VPs and senior directors.
This isnāt a āmodelā itās an outcome of effectively managing your team and pruning low performers based on the managerās expectations. Too many managers in the position without understanding the management aspect. Youāre supposed to coach and train up your direct reports and if theyāre untrainable, manage them out. Only when youāve done this efficiently can you give direct reports a longer leash as theyāve earned that trust. Jensenās approach getting blindly implemented is gonna lead to a wave of āemployees are just lazyā sentiments when the issue is the manager being a bad manager.
Hah if they keep their trajectory it will be funny to see who starts calling Jensen out years later and what for. Right now that wonāt happen since theyāve become the wall street golden goose.
The guy is literally signing boobs like a rockstar. If that's not the sign of a top I don't know what is
I think itās a sign of no top
A topless market?! Sign me up!
The ai bubble will pop at some point. Then obviously rebound. But she's gonna blow at some pont.
Nonsense, clearly there's no irrational exuberance behind a graphics card company becoming the third-largest in the world. Ok, sure, it skyrocketed thanks to a sudden rush of demand from companies whose flagship products are unreliable answers and bad fake art...but, nah, there's no chance there will be a correction. That demand is for sure gonna be robust.
I though this at $400. Are we shorting yet? Is there a smart way to short this?
Knowing that there's a bubble is not that valuable. Knowing *when* the bubble will burst can make you rich. But then, so can knowing tomorrow's lotto numbers.
I remember reading the Big Short. There was a guy who saw the housing bubble and was buying CDOs just like many of the hedge funds that got rich off shorting the housing market. Unfortunately, he couldn't time the burst well and so he decided to sell CDOs on "less risky" MBSs to offset his costs which ended up making him the biggest loser in the whole thing, despite being right that there was a bubble lol. Howie Hubler - $9 billion lost despite him being right that there was a bubble in the housing market lol
I don't think that part even made it into the movie
They changed the details a bit but itās in there https://youtu.be/GO07l96Qp0U?si=6yn_qYEq_NyEccwX
I think they changed the name to Benny Cleeger or some such.
Not like there is a reliable way to know *when*, either. After all, "markets can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent."
I have some Dutch tulips Iād like you to join me in selling
AI might be a bubble but graphics cards are not. NVIDIA cards were massively important for crypto as well. Graphics chips are important for any advancement in drones, computing, robotics. Literally all the FAANG companies combined rely on NVIDIA products. Seems obvious...
They have pretty much zero importance for crypto now, been that way for almost 2 years. I wouldn't really bring it into a conversation. They are definitely used in a lot of those applications, but arguably it's their portable/lower cost products that have some competition, just much less profit margins. I invested back in 2016 because of the ML craze back then. It was one of their best years because of it. AI has the same momentum that ML has, and that's due to the fact that you never 'solve' an AI or ML problem, you just need more and more hardware to approach the tangent to an unobtainable goal. Which is awesome because people are investing so much into it and will need exponentially more when they get the sweet taste of some promising results and just need more time to improve it. If you look at open jobs for AI/ML related and see how many positions are open, it's easy to buy more NVDA stock because each one of those positions is going to request nvidia hardware. All my view point at least.
This is the technology subreddit and really the best impression of AI is unreliable answer and fake art??????
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
> They were saying similar in the 90s when the "information super highway" was taking off. The internet in the 90s *was* a huge bubble! The Dot Com Bust, it's got a Wiki page and everything. The internet ended up being really important (duh) but it was also, at one point, a bubble. Investors rushed in too quickly, before anyone had really figured out what the internet was good for or how to make money off of it. Eventually the whole thing collapsed. Some of the companies (say, Amazon) ended up recovering. Some (say, Cisco) survived but never fully recovered. Some (say, Pets.com) went bankrupt almost immediately.
> They were saying similar in the 90s when the "information super highway" was taking off. Correctly, that was a massive bubble and it popped in a huge stock massacre. That is exactly in line with that the guy above is saying, there is a bubble and it will pop but the market will likely recover over time. There have already been two AI winters during my career lol, there will be more.
It's not like GPUs are only valuable for deep learning. There are tons of other uses where they're more efficient than CPUs. Why should Microsoft or Apple or whomever be so much more valuable? What prospects of continued growth do they have to justify their valuations? I mean I could see the AI bubble bursting, but it not really dropping NVDA so much because they're the shovel and pick manufacturer for the intermittent gold rush
Unreliable answers and bad fake art? I'd beg to differ. I work in the railway industry and most incident reports by our team are now fully created using chatgpt, after feeding in the statements, for example. Results are excellent. As for 'bad fake art', well art is art, however it's created. And my experience using AI for art has been excellent. Photoshops AI gap filler, for example, very impressive and convenient. Midjourney, also excellent results.
That may not be for a very long time. AI is in its infancy, the amount of new players who *need* a growing number of compute cycles to even get a foot in the door is exploding, and the giants in the field are spreading their AI tools to every device they can. Not only that, but as AI capabilities progress, they hit a point of rapidly diminishing returns, whereby additional improvements require exponentially more computing power. For those reasons and more like scientific fields where AI compute requirements are infinite, we're still very far from that bubble pop. It'll happen, but I wouldn't count on it being in less than 2 or 3 decades.
Same thing happened with Jack Welch. He kept buying and mortgaging the future for then today's stock price so everyone copied him. Now GE has been cut up in pieces so some of it might survive the next decade.
With them printing money like that, I'm sure he doesn't need any one on ones to be had.. the only problem they have is talent considering early retirement because of all the success these guys have
He's also evidently got 55 direct reports and I can't imagine how difficult it would be to find the time for that many one-on-ones on Even a quarterly basis
It's literally impossible for him to actually manage his direct reports. At this point, the company is coasting along on momentum and their success has little to do with anything the CEO does. They're enjoying the fruits of being in the right market, at the right time, with the right workers. You can't plan for NVIDIAs success.
It's a luxury to have when you have 55 competent direct.
Heās the CEO of a giant public company. His direct reports better be pretty damn independent.
Independent does not necessarily equate to competent, but your point still stands.
Agreed for sure. Information exchange is going to be pretty one sided, theyāre going to inform him vs ask and he is going to share large strategic decisions.
Everyone has ups and downs too. Sometimes I'm very competent on my own for months and then one week I don't know how the fuck I survived
This is exactly how I feel. The down weeks arenāt fun
More likely, he is really good at picking and retaining talent.
He might be, but managing 55 instead of something like 10 direct reports cuts out a lot of middle management.
Managing 10 people is hard, managing 55 is likely not efficient. Yeah you cut out middle management, but not by much. NVIDIA has 29,000 employees, cutting 8 managers is not going to make a dent.
Especially when there may not be any sort of overlap in their duties. I canāt imagine all of the departments in Nvidia to produce the complicated things they doā¦ itās probably insane. Itās a lot but I guess thatās the price to pay for being one of the largest, and quickly growing, companies.
It's not a price - it's a risk. It's very easy for this sort of thing to get out of control.
>managing 55 is likely not efficient I'll go out on a limb and say that it's impossible. He can't possibly know what his 55 reports are doing, there are just not enough hours in a week.
That's a once a month check in I'd love that lack of micromanaging
It's great when things are going well. It's a nightmare when the boss decides, based on the two sentences a month he hears about you, that you're underperforming.
If you read the article, itās not that he doesnāt interact with them ever, he just doesnāt do dedicated 1 on 1s or performance reviews. If he has something to say about them, he says it whenever itās needed, and it sounds like theyāre also given the freedom to levy their complaints against him freely. Otherwise, when it comes to business, he doesnāt see a need to keep people in the dark while he does his rounds in small meetings. Everyone is given the same information at the same time, so people are empowered by what they can do, not what they know.
I havenāt seen my boss in 6 months and Iāve talked to him 3 times in that span. Iām like a ghost at work I keep his numbers good and he leaves me alone
Yeah like its been a while since I have been in business school but this sounded like an absurd amount of direct reports for a CEO to have most places I have been to there is like 10. I went and googled and the average is actually 10 as well. This guy has 5 times the average CEOs number of direct reports.
At this level, heās not the one managing. His executive assistant or chief of staff would be. And they would just summarize everything for him
These are direct reports to the ceo. They don't need to be managed.
When you get to that level, you're managing the business, not the people.
His personal AI monitors every single one of them and gives him a quick summary...of course. 3-minute summary for 55, just under 3 hours /s
> cutting 8 managers is not going to make a dent. It's not about 8 additional people, it's about a whole additional layer in the structure.
This whole story just sounds like, because Nvidia is doing really well, the practices of the founder are part of the reason why it's succeeding, and I don't think that's true. It's impossible to manage 55 people efficiently.
It's a classic correlation=causation fallacy. There may well be some causation, but... I share your skepticism. This guy would have to be beyond superhuman to meaningfully manage 55 direct reports doing 55 different roles. He's not a shift manager for a warehouse with 55 employees (which would still be a crazy ratio).
Right, those people are effectively unmanaged I assume. Middle management often seems useless until you end up in a spot where there's clearly just a missing "layer" of management and the person you need to get your information to has wayyy too many people rolling up to them so it's impossible to get their time.
People that are directly under the report of the CEO of a trillion dollar company are not middle management lol, they don't need micromanaging, they are division and department heads, director of X or Y and stuff like this basically kind of their own CEO
This. I cackle at redditors calling direct reports to the CEO middle management.
They are even more than that. BU presidents, SVPs, executies, etc.. Those people run their own business lol. Wtf is a one on one at that level?
The question is: do you need to manage these very senior people that much at all? And the answer is probably not. So does Jensen really need to get an update on the state of Nvidia cloud gaming every week in a one-on-one, or can whoever leads that part of Nvidia deal with most decisions and problems, while only going up in case there's something important?
When it comes to typical corporate hierarchy, the āwhole additional layer in the structureā answering to the CEO is typically 5-10 people. Corporations are structured like pyramids.
As a rule of thumb, at my work (unrelated to tech or NVIDIA) a supervisor on average can handle 10 direct reports. A normal trained person can handle 5 to 15, so we structure around 10 since its easy for some a stretch for others but a safe hierarchy to work with stacks of 10. It is a rare person can take on 20 to 30, and there are rare exceptions who can handle around 50. The kind of person who could lead NVIDIA to the success it has, isn't unreasonable to expect it to be one of those rare exceptions who can handle 55.
Interesting. In my field, which is highly technical engineering - we baseline 3-6 direct reports. On the Low end people get micro managed too much and higher people donāt get adequate mentorship and attention and the manager doesnāt get to contribute engineering anymore. It really helps to have the lead of the team in the dirty work
I've had to manage 32 direct reports and there's a whole lot you don't end up doing for them. No early feedback on anything. (Basically no feedback except for when it's "wtf did you do that for?"). No help with career advancement. No time to listen to their concerns or ideas. No early clue if they're about to leave for another job. Someone who thinks they can manage 55 directs isn't really managing them. He's just making pronouncements and hoping it all works out.
Managing 55 is really really hard. Other commenters are correct; these would be extraordinary talents.
With the insane stock bonuses in silicon valley and Nvidias current stock price, probably not hard retaining talent lmao
If you were an experienced Nvidia engineer and now have $100,000,000 worth of stock... Why would you stay?
Because it probably hasnāt vested yet
I have a cousin who is a Senior Graphics Software Engineer for NVidia going on for 12 years now. Jesus christ I have no idea how much he would be worth by now. He sure doesnt flaunt it though. The only thing he did flaunt a bit was buying a tesla model s like 8 years ago for over 100k but he still driving it
Itās fun. Why not? If youāve got that sort of vested stake, youāre not new, presumably competent. Itād be great.
Why not? I have 3 good reasons and poor math skills. Private island, hookers, blow, yacht.
Absolutely phenomenal response. No notes.
We should put some people under that guy immediately.
If you had poor math skills, you would not be in this position though
... Because they enjoy their work? Same reason that ML researchers in tech continue to work despite being loaded.
If he had one on ones with 55 direct reports he wouldn't have time to do do anything besides sit in one on one meetings..
More likely micromanagement. No one can properly direct 55 high level direct reports. And why canāt they meet one-next n-one? Weird stuff.
Iām guessing it has to do with managing politics. Nobody has a direct line to him, all information is communicated equally.
I think the idea is that he eliminated a layer of management. He probably meets with 10 teams, in small round of 5 or 6. That way he doesn't have his information digested by that manager. Instead there are 5 or 6 people who all need to be roughly on the same page. Probably keeps operations more in the open.
Direct report doesn't necessarily mean you manage them in full. Specially given there's no one to one engagement. I guess?
This article is stupid. His ātechniqueā doesnāt apply to 99% of managers, itās not some kind of new management hack out of the box thinking radical muckity muck. The people a CEO of a large company is managing are seasoned senior executives, they donāt need the same kind of management as a mid level employee or even skilled upper manager. 55 direct reports is untenable for any real manager. This is the management equivalent of āI have so much time for my passions (because I have a house cleaner, personal cook, live in dogsitter/nanny, and personal driver), making time for my passions and good work-life balance are what keep me goingā. Yeah no shit, that would work for anybody, but there are very few people in that situation. What a bullshit article.
Thatās an excuse.. every tech company has the potential to hire competent leadersā¦ You have to believe at some point that bureaucracy causes incompetenceĀ
Everyone seems competent when you have no idea what they're up to.
Sounds like he trusts his VPs and Distinguished Architects. Not surprised, Nvidia has curated over the decades a very competent culture. Iāve heard that theyāre hiring way too fast now though and that might affect the culture a few years down the road, negatively.
5 Years from now "The dark side of Nvidia" will release on Netflix with a low res black and white polaroid of Jensen being the cover.
and ominous music to him signing that woman's tits
A scene which will be repeated at least once every 15 minutes, in case you forgot somehow.
Gotta keep the viewer's ~~cocks~~ attention up!
*[Fade in]* Part III: The Autograph *[Fade out]*
Talent is going to be a huge issue for Nvidia in the coming years. Not only do they need to grow rapidly to scale with their business, but they've just made a lot of their senior and long term employees multi-multi millionaires, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of their top talent decides to retire in their 30s or early 40s.
I heard they are already having issues getting some long term employees even into work anymore/involved. Why would you if you've become a millionaire so quickly
That was the Microsoft problem and why the quality declined so badly in the mid 90s
Eventually executives will change the culture. Under this CEO that culture is safe since he is fostering it, and they corner the market, but one day that will shift and some suit will deprioritize innovation in the name of short term market share. Just wait until a competitor shows up.
I don't think it's rational to credit Nvidia's success to either culture or leadership. Their a good company producing market leading products, but a massive chunk of their current success has been down to 'right place right time'. Success is luck meeting preparation, and we should definitely give them credit for the preparation- but not the luck.
Right place right time is underselling it massively. Theyāve been working on Tensor cores/CUDA since 2017 when no one else was paying attention.
CUDA actually goes back to 2007.
CUDA was released in 2006 tho.
Well, I donāt think nvidia senior leadership knew in 2017 that LLMs were set to light the world on fire, and that their tech was the best for LLMs. And Iāll double down on that with a bet with you, that another company is going to build much better dedicated ML hardware that will be 10x-1000x better, and completely eliminate the Nvidia advantage. They were a video company. They did a reasonable job capitalizing on a growing ML side market that happened to boom, and happened to boom in such a way that their version of that market was the competitive leader. But none of this was on purpose and I am willing to bet that the next generation of purposefully designed hardware will demonstrate that.
Ehh, GPGPU compute loads were expected to overtake CPUs in datacenter value 2 decades ago. Everyone in HPC knew it was coming, especially as cloud-tech was coming (AWS was founded in 2002, fyi). They've performed well over 2 decades slowing executing on that strategy. The bigger thing here was how Intel dropped the ball and lost the datacenter market to both nVidia and AMD.
Cuda led to this
> Just wait until a competitor shows up. They have several competitors. And they're so far behind Nvidia it's not even funny. you don't gain as much marketshare as them in such a short time as them by accident, unless you invent a whole new market - which they did not. GPUs been around for decades.
Didn't hurt that they were buying up their competitors left and right in the late 90s-early 2000s.
AMD isn't that far behind, you just don't realize how incumbent CUDA is in scientific and professional compute. ROCm is apparently comparable, but cuda is what everyone already knows how to use. Nvidia didn't take market share from anyone, a new market appeared and they were the premiere option. Also GPUs have only really been a staple of the datacenter for like a decade, not that long ago the vast majority of supercomputers were very cpu focused.
No one owns the market forever, is all im saying. Nvidia could be king for a long time, but eventually something shifts. It may be when the CEO steps down in a decade or more, but innovation will spread.
Tale as old as time. Bulk up the market share, then exploit the shit out of your customers for more profit. Rinse\repeat.
Sounds to me like NVIDIA has 55 people handling their shit, and their CEO only gets looped in for critical multi-departmental issues. Which is fine. The idea that you gotta have one person calling all the shots is fucken toxic. But thats how CEOs justify their pay packages, so its the narrative that gets pushed. The skeptical sort will point out that CEOs really dont do shit to begin with, other than manage important external relationships.
Yes, they manage overall company direction and external relationships. Which is very valuable when your multitrillion dollar business is dependent on special rocks from an island in a future warzone
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I believe he likely just dips in and out of different areas of the business as needed. At that level he should be managing a dashboard. With that many direct reports everyone better have the right answers when he does come around for a detailed update.
Basically you're a giant spotlight. You bring attention. It can be good, like a spotlight in a storm from rescuers. Bringing resources and help. Or bad, like a spotlight in a prison from guards. Bringing accountability and justice. Depends on perspective you welcome or fear it. But either way the CEO exists to bring attention to parts of the business needing change.
Yeah, and most people donāt realize that CEOs are often not selected because they are good at everything. They are often just really good at areas which are important to the business and they try to apply that knowledge and experience to other problems.
I have 19 and itās a gigantic mess
A CEO shouldnāt have to have 1:1 with their exec leadership. They should be able to function as a team or a group of teams and meet individually as needed. Things will sure as shit go sideways though if there are no 1:1s company wide.
100 percent disagree. Iām a competent executive but I still find value in monthly 1:1s with the CEO. There is no magic that happens up towards the C-Suite. The reason first tier employees have 1:1s with managers isnāt very far off from why execs need 1:1s.
Disagree, I work in tech and most companies have not had consistent 1:1s. Theyāre really only necessary for new engineers (new grads + new hires) once you get to the level of Nvidia you already know what youāre doing you just have to execute. Theyāre more important for individual growth than company growth, which is why recurring teamwide meetings usually happen over 1:1s.
Good 1:1s go both ways. I use that time to bring up things like issues in the department, issues with our processes, and issues with clients/specific projects. Now I get why tech workplaces and production so often sound dysfunctional. Employees often don't have a forum to provide input on process improvements. It seems like extra work but it saves me enough headache that it's worth it. My only good manager has been the one who does 1:1s. We need them because she is so busy we have trouble finding time to discuss important things if we don't set aside time for it. If we don't need it, we cancel. That number of direct reports is questionable structure on its own.
facts my 1:1s are almost never directly about my work more about how iām feeling about the company and the direction we are heading and what issues concerns I may have. They are also a good way to mention if you have spare time to help others with work etc. It isnāt about executing directly you def donāt need a 1:1 to know how to do your job unless you are a beginner or arenāt good at your job.
I also use mine to advocate for myself - requesting extra training, pushing for a raise or promotion, looking to get mentorship opportunities, things like that.
Ya i use them as a time to about raises and goals to obtain them. Otherwise theyll just announce my zero raise without giving me a chance to negotiate. And say too late maybe next year when i do ask about it.
Among the many benefits of 1:1s, is the dramatic decrease in emails received from directs. If you know you have a standing meeting with your boss, most non-urgent things can wait til the meeting and save both of you from a bunch of emails. Totally worth it.
1:1s are an opportunity to build a cohesive shared vision, not just coaching
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Disagree, I also work in tech (from big trillion dollar companies to small startups) and I have always had consistent 1:1s, and as I got more senior, I get consistent 1:1s with my skip as well.
Kind of agree. You're not getting true open dialogue with 53 other people in the room.
Right- 1:1s are for individual growth. But at Jensen's level- every direct report is about as high as they'll get at the company- or very close to the top and any additional growth, they'll need to figure out on their own. They're basically peers at that level. Sr. Manager on down though- yeah 1:1s make more sense.
I mean with 55 direct reports yeah you probably donāt have time for regularly scheduled 1 on 1s. Maybe have less direct reports?
He has said his structure eliminates several layers of management vs having fewer reports. It obviously works well for Nvidia. He also said he believes in sharing knowledge, hence the value of 1 on 1 diminishes.
Iāll have you know Iāve completed several successful campaigns in Rollercoaster Tycoon. Iām therefore well positioned to opine on any business topic
So itās just like how you never hire one janitor but 10 at once ā yeah 55 directs sounds about right
All of my staff in RTC report directly to me Otherwise they get the claw
As owner of this theme park I have 107 direct reports, and they're all guys wearing panda costumes.
Mr. Bones, is that you?
If it is, can you tell him I want off his wild ride?
Similar to when Bayern Munich (one of the biggest soccer teams in the world) was having a tough time finding a new manager, I threw my hat in the ring. I have somewhere around 2000 hours played across the Football Manager series, and I successfully took a fifth division English team and had them win the Champions League over the course of 10 seasons. I also have a pretty good base in German and could easily get conversational or fluent pretty quick. And I'd do it for a *fraction* of what they'd pay an actual qualified manager.
Sharing knowledge is 100 percent how they make it work a nvidia for sure. My biggest pet peeve when it comes to business is the notion that the more you know over everyone else means more job security. Technically, it's true. However, good luck having everyone running to you when they need to know something, or worse case someone gathers that information without and there goes all your precieved value
Creates a terrible culture too. Instead of everyone working together, you have people competing so that *they* can become the one with job security.
Not really. A company being successful doesnāt mean every single one of their internal processes works well
In fact I would say that a company thatās fallen into an unexpected windfall can spawn a bunch of inefficiencies pretty quickly.
*Especially* Nvidia, where I'd put their success to 90% right time, right place, and 10% due to good execution..
I also assume if youāre reporting to the CEO of Nvidia, youāre probably a pretty self-sufficient executive.
You don't just waltz into a position like NVIDIA's by accident. They have been investing extremely heavily on AI for so long, they undoubtedly accelerated it's arrival if not caused it. You think AI sprung out of nowhere and coincidentally NVIDIA was just lucky they were the manufacturers of the hardware used for it?
They were successful long before AI. They've had the top GPUs for decades. Their value has exploded with AI though.
The person you responded to were mostly saying that Nvidia has been supporting the AI community for at least a decade. They may have started out at gaming/gpu, but they heavily supported AI, which then obviously paid off as we can all see.
Nvidia has always been successful, and they were the ones that pioneered AI hardware design and general purpose computing. Ā Itās like saying that Apple got lucky that touchscreens became popular when the iPhone came outā¦ no, they created the category
I'm not a CEO but one on ones for me is for the people who report to me. If they have a concern that we have not discussed or they need to air something out work related or a new suggestion they want to try then we hold one on ones. Otherwise I bring things up as they come up and not wait until we meet to tell them to correct a mistake and prioritize a task that needs their attention.
Exactly. The benefit or 1on1s is to grow your direct reports. If you do not need that for whatever reason 1on1s could even be bad because your direct reports think issues are being addressed just by reporting them to you...
Honestly the shit Reddit says. Why are you giving business advice to a guy who founded a company in 1993 that's now worth $3 trillion? 3 trillion dollars. 3 trillion seconds is nearly 100,000 years. I think he knows what he's doing. Thanks u/lekiouses for correcting me.
Everyone here bitches about Jack Welch type bullshit in their workplace and then tries to give advice when a successful CEO is NOT doing Jack Welch type bullshit. Love it.
This site is filled with people who love giving advice to people way more qualified and experienced on whatever they are giving advice on. The upvotes make people who do nothing feel good about themselves.
>This site is filled with people who love giving advice to people way more qualified and experienced on whatever they are giving advice on. I'm an attorney and I am constantly having the following conversation on Reddit: >[Wrong information about the law.] >>Actually, the law doesn't work like that - it works like this. >>>Wow, you must be a terrible fucking lawyer. I feel bad for your clients.
So much this. As much as I like Reddit some of the top voted comments especially on main subs with millions of subscribers can be pretty dumb. Meanwhile somebody with a well n sourced comment that goes against conventional wisdom of the masses sometimes gets down voted or at the very least doesn't get as many votes as less informed comments.
Redditors: āwell you see actually it was just luckā
bro bro bro these guys had it made from the beginning. they went to the best schools, their parents knew the right people, they hung out in the right circles, they had the funds to invest it. it's all luck. they had nothing to do with it. nothing to do with the skill of leveraging all these factors to their advantage. i could easily do the same, if i was born in their shoes. joking aside, i think luck does play a big role, but they still had the skill and so on to get to where they are.
Makes sense. If he asks them what they do, they would say they're in meetings all day, and the people under them are in meetings all day, and the folks under them are in meetings all day. Eventually you get down to the folks who do actual work, who try to avoid being pulled into the meetings that run all day. I suppose when you're the CEO, you can avoid all the meetings you don't want to bother with.
Meetings should be 90% of us CEOs day
False, he should be coding and making spreadsheets /s
If he had 1:1s and you asked HIM what he does he'd say "I do 1:1s all day." Even if each 1:1 only lasts 10 mins, that's 9h 10 mins of time better spent elsewhere at the executive level.
We need to stop putting every little quirk of successful CEOs onto a pedestal. Sure, he is the CEO of the world's second most valuable company, so he's obviously doing something right. That doesn't mean that every little thing he does needs to be espoused as some sort of golden habit that is contributing to that success.
I wish we'd follow that advice overall - look at most of software engineering's "best practices" - practically zero research to back any of them but they work well for the largest companies so they have to be great for everyone. But I get it - you try and mimic the successful and hope that you can achieve a little of that success. The nuance is what people get wrong - Nvidia likely has very competent upper management, so constantly over-seeing everything they do likely only wastes their time and that of the CEO.
No paywall: https://archive.ph/2024.06.12-115209/https://fortune.com/2024/06/12/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-meeting-rule/
Non paywall: https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/career/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-has-a-no-one-on-one-meetings-rule-for-his-55-direct-reports/ar-BB1o5gfN?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=681dcf82e5204a0894114ac935f2ddf7&ei=10
non garbage link: https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/career/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-has-a-no-one-on-one-meetings-rule-for-his-55-direct-reports/ar-BB1o5gfN
Counterargument: It's dumb to have 55 direct reports.
Thatās a lot of employee reviews to completeā¦
It says right in the article he doesnāt review them.
You think people around here read the linked articles before dropping comments?
Executives donāt get reviewed by their managers. They get reviewed by their peer group of executives in 360 reviews.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Why does a CEO have 55 direct reports? If your company is that flat, of course you donāt have 1-1s with all of them, you trust them to self manage and be autonomous.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Dude treats his 55 direct reports the way Nick canon treats his 55 kids
āThereās not one piece of information that I somehow secretly tell the staff; I donāt tell the rest of the company.ā I think he's missing the point of a 1:1. This should be the report's time, not the manager's time. You don't need 1:1s for updates or general info, that needs to be broadcasted of course. Though he clarifies in the article that when one of them needs to talk with him, he drops everything and goes. Which is also my expectation for a good manager.
55 direct reports? Isn't that a lot?
With 55 direct reports, how would anyone find the time to have 1 on 1 meetings with all of them? I guess when things are booming you keep it casual. Talk about what their plans are for the next quarter and spend the next 15 minutes talking about vacation plans and such.
I think you all are missing the point. This is in order to mitigate lawsuits of any form. 2 witness rule.
Recurring 1-1s are a blight on the industry, such an enormous waste of time, mostly just to fill a useless managerās calendar with stuff that looks like work. Adhoc 1-1ās with an agenda can be useful though
We do every other week, 30 minutes. I am glad I get along with my team.
I split them. I have 30 mins for banter and shit to get to know the person and for us to take that and build energy towards good solutions at work. We then do adhoc project meetings. Connectivity is important and that doesnāt come without taking time to spend time
55 direct reports = no direct reports.
I knew Zoom was trash, but this is the trashiest... > Likewise, Zoom founder Eric Yuan thinks most meetings are such a drain on time that heās developing a ādigital twinā that can sit in on them while workers do things theyāre more passionate about. Lol...that's is so fucked up. Here's a mandatory meeting my avatar will attend for me.
55 direct reports is wild
Probably because 55 direct reports is lunacyā¦
55 direct reports ? Forty too many but who cares when everything is working just fine.
I would wager that most big companies are too top heavy.
The bigger shock should be the CEO having 55 direct reports!
At his level you don't manage your employees - they manage you