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Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang is recruiting for his $3.2 trillion company, and says he’s a “very nice boss” who is “universally loved.”
During his commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology on June 14, Huang told the graduating class part of the reason he was there is because he’s recruiting.
“I want to tell you that Nvidia’s a really great company, I’m a very nice boss, universally loved, come work at Nvidia,” Huang said, receiving laughter from the audience.
Huang said he’s “the longest running tech CEO in the world today,” and “over the course of 31 years, I’ve managed not to go out of business, not get bored, and not get fired.”
With Huang at the helm, Nvidia became the first chipmaker to reach a $2 trillion valuation, and now has a market cap of $3.2 trillion amid the generative artificial intelligence boom. Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, are in high demand as companies race to develop larger, more powerful AI models.
Despite what he said to Caltech’s graduates, Huang was told during an interview with CBS News’ 60 Minutes in April what some of his Nvidia colleagues have said about him: “Demanding. Perfectionist. Not easy to work for.”
He said the words “perfectly” described him. “It should be like that,” he said. “If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy.”
Huang told graduates he hopes they “believe in something. Something unconventional, something unexplored. But let it be informed, and let it be reasoned, and dedicate yourself to making that happen,” he said. “You may find your GPU. You may find your CUDA. You may find your generative AI. You may find your NVIDIA.”
He concluded his speech with a story from his travels to Japan, where he noticed a “lone gardener” maintaining a “gigantic” moss garden. “I walked up to him and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m picking dead moss. I’m taking care of my garden.’ And I said, ‘But your garden is so big.’ And he responded, ‘I have cared for my garden for 25 years, I have plenty of time.’”
Huang said it was “one of the most profound learnings in my life,” and it taught him dedication to his work.