Review: The Thinking Machine

 The Thinking Machine is a biography of Jensen Huang, Nvidia's CEO, and a chronicle of the company he led through founding to becoming the megacap stock it is today.

As a biography, it's perhaps not as complete as those of Steve Jobs as you might wish, but on the other hand, it taught me several things that I didn't know about Nvida, not that I knew a lot about them in the first place. For instance, Nvidia didn't have a mission statement, because Huang didn't believe in them. (Kindle loc 1010). This is completely anamolous, and contrary to the hordes of business books touting the value of missions.

Secondly, Jensen has a reputation for yelling at people when they screw up. That's normal, but on the other hand, he values that experience that you were taught and doesn't fire people for screwing up:

“Very rarely does Jensen make significant changes as a result of execution issues,” Halepete said. “He’s very conscious of having an even slightly chilling effect on people’s willingness to take risks and innovate. As a result, his level of forgiveness for even the largest screw-ups is extremely high.” Halepete surmised that the tirades were what Jensen did instead of showing you the door. “He will berate you, he will yell at you, he will insult you—whatever,” Halepete said. “He’s never going to fire you.” (kindle loc 1745)

That sort of thing generates loyalty and breeds a willingness to take risk, so it's not a surprise that Nvidia employees venerate him. The other thing that's special about Nvidia is the span of control Huang has. I've said in Startup Engineering Management that there's no reason the span of control of a good manager should be as small as 6 people, other than that Silicon Valley has an unusually bad management training program (as in, "What management training program?") and so most engineering managers are so bad that they would flail at having to manage more than 6 people. In Nvidia's case, he has 30 direct reports:

As Nvidia grew, Huang maintained an agile corporate structure, with no fixed divisions or hierarchy. The C-Suite was essentially just him, with no COO, no CTO, no CMO, and no obvious second-in-command. Huang didn’t even have a chief of staff. Instead, he had more than thirty people reporting to him directly, most of them given fluid responsibilities under the all-encompassing title of “vice president.”  (kindle loc 2261)

Management professors theorized that a chief executive should ideally have between eight and twelve direct reports. Huang now had fifty-five. (kindle loc 3376)

 Think about how hard someone like that has to work. He'd have to process information from all 55 direct reports, and then make decisions and possibly direct the work of all of them. It's impressive then that he had time to pivot the company from graphics and CUDA into AI, and the company was able to consistently undervalue the crypto market and consciously downplay it!

Of course, the example that sets on Huang's kids is significant:

Horstmann also observed that neither Huang’s nor his own kids had initially gone into technical fields. “I think they tried to get out of this crazy work environment,” he said. “I think they looked at us, and said, ‘There’s got to be more to life than this.’ ” (kindle loc 1924)

Later in the book, the author reveals that Huang eventually got his kids to work in Nvidia, though not necessarily in technical fields. There's a claim that no nepotism is involve but I wonder how much the author investigated.

All in all, the book was worth reading, though again Nvidia seems to be an extreme outlier amongst even Silicon Valley companies, so I'm not sure you can generalize that you should emulate Huang in not having a mission statement. The real test for Nvida is if Huang steps down and to see if the company collapses without having such a singular person at the helm.