Thoughts on "The NVIDIA Way"
I just finished “The NVIDIA Way” which was recommended to me by approximately half of AI/ML twitter. I didn’t enjoy it much, as the most interesting ideas presented in the book were skirted in order to follow a clear story of the company’s rise.
Of course its logical to tell the story of the company step by step, but the slavish obedience to this being a “corporate biography” fell apart in less than 100 pages when it became clear that the most interesting part of NVIDIA is not the company’s history, but Jensen himself.
The company seems to be a cult of personality, a collection of brilliant minds huddled around a generationally gifted leader. The deep respect that the book pays to Jensen is awkwardly placed between anecdotes about the stock price and the different chips they are designing.
The facade falls in the back half of the book, when it becomes clear that even the author feels that Jensen is the real story. The end of the book contains an annex of “Jensen-isms” that are wonderfully illustrative of the idea that I am presenting here; that the whole company is bent around the leader, and everything flows from his brilliance.
I want to read a better version of this book that relentlessly focusses on Jensen himself. There are precious few CEOs in American life who scrubbed toilets and who faced existential dread when their companies almost failed; these are the compelling parts of the book, and the narrative momentum built by these kind of stories fades away when the narrative shifts to folks to frankly don’t seem to matter.
Here are the three themes that I think deserve deep exploration:
Jensen fell into leadership: the book mentions that the other cofounders just “decided” that he would be CEO, despite his technical background meaning he could have done any number of things. How did he retain leadership during the times the stock was way, way down?
Jensen has no heir apparent: the company seems to have not made real preparations for his departure, and the man is not young. The replacement of Jobs with Cook was a critical decision in the story of Apple, and the Jobs bios I’ve read really dig into this transition. The book touches on this but doesn’t do it justice.
Jensen & open source: the company has been a massive contributor to open source through things like CUDA, however the book really skirts the critical ideas inside of the development of open source AI. Jensen himself has clearly seen the benefits of the OS ecosystem, but the book doesn’t get into the guts of why it matters to the broader strategy the company is pursuing.
I hope that one day soon I can read a book about Jensen’s soul, in the way that we’ve gotten Jobs biographies. He remains I think one of the most interesting person in technology today, and I want to understand the man at a much deeper level.