Principles from the CEO of the world's most valuable company?

'Think big!'

Yes, because thinking small ain’t gonna cut it when you're aiming for the moon and have a spaceship in your garage.

Principles from Jensen Huang

• Why Read:

  • Gain insights on creating an empowering work culture, embracing public discourse, pursuing innovative markets, strategic decision-making, and maintaining resilience in the face of challenges from the CEO of the most valuable company in the world.

• Featuring:

  • Peter Yang (@petergyang), Principal Product Manager at Roblox

• Link: 

  • “15 Life and Work Principles from Jensen Huang (NVIDIA CEO)”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Creating an Empowering Work Environment:

  • Point: Foster a transparent, collaborative culture where employees can do their best work.

  • "My goal is to create the conditions where amazing people come to do their life's work. I think there are three conditions for people to do their life's work: 

    • Empower them with information. 

      • I don't make decisions where only one person needs to hear them. I prefer environments where a diverse team of experts and people can work on a problem together.

    • Reason through problems publicly. 

      • It’s incredibly empowering to take an abstract idea and reason it down to precisely what we should or should not do.

    • Full stack company. 

      • I try to encourage experts and contributors at every single layer of the company to be engaged with a problem at the same time."

• Embracing Public Discourse and Feedback:

  • Point: Encourage open communication and learning from shared experiences.

  • "I give feedback right in front of everyone. This is a big deal. First of all, feedback is learning. For what reason are you the only person who should learn this? You created the conditions because of some mistake or silliness you brought upon yourself. We should all learn from that opportunity."

• Focusing on Zero-Billion Dollar Markets:

  • Point: Pursue innovative markets and challenges to attract top talent and create something special.

  • "I love zero-billion dollar markets. Our purpose should be to do something that has never been done. Those markets are zero billion dollars in size. We never talk about market share. The whole concept of market share says a bunch of other people are doing the same thing."

  • ”Because we selected amazing markets and hard-to-do things, amazing people joined us… that’s how you build something special.”

• Embracing Strategic Retreat:

  • Point: Be willing to give up on certain opportunities to focus on your core mission.

  • "Deciding what to give up on is at the core of success. The phone market is huge; we could have chosen to fight for share. Instead, we made a hard decision and sacrificed the market... Nvidia's mission is to build computers to solve problems that ordinary computers cannot. We should dedicate ourselves to realizing that vision."

• Aligning Strategy with Action:

  • Point: Ensure that employees' actions reflect the company's strategic priorities.

  • "Strategy isn't words; strategy is action. If the company has a set of strategies, but the people's actions, their top five things are not that, then they're not executing the plan. So strategy isn't what I say; it's what my employees do."

• Embracing Challenges and Resilience:

  • Point: Recognize that achieving greatness requires overcoming difficulties and maintaining resilience.

  • "I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering. That's my way of saying I wish you greatness. If you want to build something great, it's not easy. And when you're doing something difficult, you're not always enjoying it."

A Spicy Take on Tech Hiring

Why Read: 

• Learn how you can streamlining the hiring process, improving interview effectiveness, attracting top talent, and managing biases in recruitment with one tactic.

Featuring:

• Gabriella Gonzalez (@GabriellaG439), Author of haskellforall.com and the Dhall configuration language

• “My spiciest take on tech hiring”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• The Spicy Take:

  • Point: Implement a concise interview process with only one technical and one non-technical interview.

  • "My spiciest take on tech hiring ... is that you only need to administer one technical interview and one non-technical interview (each no more than an hour long). In my opinion, any interview process longer than that is not only unnecessary but counterproductive."

• Increasing Interview Effectiveness:

  • Point: Concentrate responsibility to improve the quality of interview questions.

  • “When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.”

  • "Interviewers are much more careful to ask the right questions when they understand that nobody else will be administering a similar interview. They have to make their questions count because they can't fall back on someone else to fill the gap if they fail to gather enough information to make a decision on the candidate."

• Attracting Top Senior Candidates:

  • Point: Recognize that shorter interview processes appeal to high-quality senior candidates.

  • "When hiring for very senior roles the best applicants have a lower tolerance for long and drawn-out interview processes. A heavyweight interview process is a turnoff for the most sought-after candidates (that can be more selective about where they apply)."

• Managing Biases:

  • Point: Understand that prolonged interview processes don't necessarily reduce hiring biases.

  • "Especially at larger tech companies… they have a strong bias to hire those applicants they already knew about before the interviewing process began. Drawing out the interview process is a thinly veiled attempt to launder this bias with a “neutral” process…"

  • "If anything, extending the interview process makes it more biased because you are selecting for candidates that can take significant time off from their normal schedule to participate in an extended interview panel (which are typically candidates from privileged backgrounds)."

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