Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is the longest-serving CEO in Silicon Valley. He was recently asked how he has stayed in this position for more than thirty years. "The secret to being a CEO for so long is two things: One, don't get fired, and two, don't get bored," the 62-year-old entrepreneur said at a company event in Las Vegas earlier this month.
Huang, who built Nvidia into a chip giant and the world's most valuable company, is unlikely to lose his current job in the short term. And he shows no signs of losing enthusiasm for his job: The energetic leader travels around the world, preaching to audiences about artificial intelligence computing concepts and occasionally throwing in a few bad jokes.
But even the most energetic CEO must eventually make way for a successor. Nvidia has shown few signs of preparing for a leadership change at a giant company at the heart of the artificial intelligence wave with a market capitalization of $4.5 trillion.
Microsoft has the legacy of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, and Apple has the legacy of Steve Jobs and Tim Cook. However, Huang Renxun currently has no obvious successor, and Nvidia has not publicly disclosed long-term leadership plans.
Huang, who built Nvidia into the world's most valuable company, currently has no clear successor.
NZS Capital fund manager Jon Bathgate said, "As an NVIDIA investor, it is impossible not to worry about key person risks." He pointed out that Huang Renxun's management style that relies on quick decision-making and a flat organizational structure is unique to NVIDIA.
Bathgate emphasized, "Without Huang Jensen at the helm, the company must adopt a more traditional corporate structure."
Representatives for Nvidia did not respond to requests for comment.
Jen-Hsun Huang, who is about to turn 63, is undoubtedly an iconic figure at Nvidia. His whirlwind schedule of public appearances has made him virtually inseparable from the outside world's perception of Nvidia and its every move. In contrast, when other executives step into the spotlight, they usually limit themselves to their respective areas of responsibility, focus on technical topics, and are more likely to cite Huang's previous statements on larger issues.
Bathgate pointed out that Nvidia also has reputable technical leaders such as Ian Buck and Bryan Catanzaro. But he said there was currently no sign that they were ready or standing by to make broader strategic decisions.
management level
The company has four executive vice presidents. One of them serves as general counsel, and the other two are in their seventies. The fourth is Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress. Although she is younger than Huang, it is rare for tech giants to select leaders from their finance departments.
Moon Surana, portfolio manager at Harding Loevner, pointed out, "Succession plans are usually not made public, and for reasons such as competition, companies usually do not designate successors long in advance. However, increasing the transparency of the senior management and management echelons can help investors assess the depth of management and succession readiness."
The distinctive feature of Huang's management style is his sense of urgency. He is eager to seize opportunities and clear obstacles, fearing that slow action will harm the company.
Projects that don't work disappear overnight. Regardless of seniority or length of tenure, individuals or entire teams can be removed from their original positions without warning and transferred to tasks that Huang considers most critical to Nvidia.
He hates one-on-one meetings and prefers team meetings, where everyone hammers away at a single problem until they find a solution, and then everyone jumps in to implement it. He rarely fired people, but admitted to putting pressure on them to get the best out of them.
When a team leader was speaking to an audience, Nvidia's CEO would interrupt, often mercilessly, if he thought the speaker was missing the point.
Nvidia employees, even those who have left the company, still look up to him in awe. They talked about having to submit an email outlining their top five priorities, and about receiving direct feedback from him at any time, often in the form of a brief sentence or two.
under the spotlight
The company, founded in 1993 by Jen-Hsun Huang and his co-founders, began as a niche manufacturer of graphics chips for computer gamers. That changed after researchers found that the technique was suitable for developing and running artificial intelligence models — a computationally intensive task that requires feeding massive amounts of data into the model.
Over the past five years, Nvidia has become the core of building artificial intelligence data centers on an astonishing scale. This has given the company unprecedented sales growth and financial strength, while also putting the company and its leaders under scrutiny.
Nvidia was the first company to reach a market capitalization of US$4 trillion, and even briefly reached US$5 trillion. Its revenue has doubled in each of the past two fiscal years, and Wall Street expects annual sales to top $500 billion by the end of this decade.
Its profitability is equally astonishing: Nvidia's net profit is expected to reach $113 billion in the fiscal year that ends this month—far more than its annual revenue before the AI craze took off.
Shareholders expect Huang to remain CEO for many more years.
“He built a $4 trillion company and has always been the public face of it,” said Michael Kirkbride, a portfolio manager at Evercore Wealth Management. “Hopefully, we won’t have to know how this company is going to function without him for a long time.”
Huang shared the stage with Nvidia’s “Blue” robot at a conference last March.
Huang Jen-Hsun's way of doing things stems from his experience of passing through crises many times. In NVIDIA's early days, Intel always posed an existential threat to it. As a result, the company grew into a flexible organization that was adept at responding to crises. This culture of continuous evolution has created incredible rewards—it has allowed it to transform from graphics chips into the market for processors used in the world's top computers.
His talks, which blended goofy humor with explorations of computer science, physics and mathematics, were full of profound meaning. He is always anticipating the next problem or opportunity and working hard to create a solution.
This kind of energy, insight and strong sense of ownership (he is still Nvidia’s fifth-largest shareholder) will be difficult for any successor to match.
David Larcker, a professor of corporate governance and accounting at Stanford University, said, "There are probably only five people in the world who can seamlessly take over and be qualified for this position."
Larcker noted that succession is a sensitive issue for boards, especially when the current CEO is present. But it is an essential function of the board.
“We all have an expiration date,” he admits. “It’s really difficult for a board to ask tough questions like these when the company is going strong.”