Was an honor to host Jensen Huang, the Founder & CEO of Nvidia, at MenloVC. "When I announced DGX, no one cared. No orders. I was devastated. Then this one guy at a little non-profit said he was interested.. His name was Elon Musk and he was at.. OpenAI. The rest is history."
Here are some of the lessons I'll remember: "If it’s a stupid idea, I’ll say it’s a stupid idea. Not because I want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but because I don’t want the other 30 people in the room to think it’s a good idea. By being silent, they assume I'm condoning it."
"I'm in the service business. Everything I do is in service of either my colleagues or the mission of my company. It's actually not very different as a busboy at Denny's (fastfood restaurant) and as the CEO of a trillion dollar company."
"I don't do 1 on 1s to avoid people using the 'this is what Jensen said' to get their way. That destroys culture. I believe in radical transparency and reasoning about why were taking a decision in public. No one has any ambiguity about what and why."
"I don't love my job. I love my company. Some days, this job sucks. It's long hours, hard conversations. But I do because I love my company and I am in service to it."
He had 5 book recommendations: 1. anything by Clay Christensen 2. Positioning (1981) by Al Reis and Jack Trout 3. Chip War (2022) by Chris Miller 4. Destined for War (2017) by Graham Allison 5. The Art of War (500 BC) by Sun Tzu
"Anyone who has conviction on their spreadsheet is insane. Someone subtracted 13% from mine yesterday in one go. I don't look at P&Ls. I know they're wrong, but my intuition of the company's future is spot on."
"I love paying taxes. I've always paid full taxes in the US and I know companies who pay maybe a 2% effective tax. Maybe with all the taxes they’ll finally fix the 101 (highway). There’s places a whole sedan can fall in."
"To the CEOs in the room, I wish you all pain and suffering. It's a hard job."