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Jensen Huang: the character of a company is the most important thing
“The character of a company is what makes it ultimately successful,” Jensen begins. “How resilient is it? How does it deal with adversity? How does it deal with learning when it’s presented with new assumptions? If the conditions change, how agile is the company?”
Jensen elaborates on how you instill these values in a company:
“You talk about it. You teach it. You live it. Nvidia’s really fortunate because we suffered so greatly in the beginning. For the first 15 years of our company, it was one adversity after another. Maybe 5-7 times it was existential.”
It ultimately comes down to the character of the people.
“It’s the people’s resilience,” He argues. “A company is made of people. It’s not made of the document that describes the culture. It’s not the inscription of the core values on the building. That’s not what makes the company’s culture. It’s the people and how the company overcame existential crises or incredible adversity — the agility, cleverness, creativity, ingenuity, will power, and incredible ability to suffer extraordinary pain — that is the corporate character.”
Jensen once remarked, “my will to survive exceeds almost everybody else’s will to kill me.” He elaborates on what he meant by this:
“It’s pretty hard to discourage me, and if I believe in something, I’m just going to keep doing it until it’s done and until we’re great at it. It’s hard to deter me. It’s hard to distract me. It’s hard to discourage me. In my mind, it’s always, ‘How hard can this be?’ And it turns out that every time it’s incredibly hard. But I’m surrounded by amazing people helping me.”