'Used to wash dishes, clean toilets': NVIDIA's Jensen Huang's masterclass on what it means to be a CEO

Chip-making giant Nvidia's founder Jensen Huang believes his role as the CEO is to facilitate an environment where the company's employees can go about their tasks with no obstructions. In a session titled 'View From The Top' at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Huang said that no task should be beneath anyone in a company's culture.  

Huang's value system is built on his life experiences, especially doing various jobs in his younger years. "To me, no task is beneath me. Because remember I used to wash dishes, and I mean I used to clean toilets. I cleaned a lot of toilets. I've cleaned more toilets than all of you combined and some of them...just can't unsee. I don't know what to tell you. That's life," he said on a light-hearted note.

According to him, his key role in Nvidia is to explain the reasoning while solving problems. "I show people how to reason through things all the time - strategy things, how to forecast something, how to break a problem down. You're just empowering people all over the place and so that's how I see it," he said.
 
"If you send me something you want me to help review it, I'll do my best and I'll show you how I would do it. In the process of doing that, of course, I learned a lot from you. You gave me a seat of a lot of information. I learned a lot. So, I feel rewarded by the process."  

Huang admitted that sometimes he finds the process exhausting. 

"It does take a lot of energy sometimes because in order to add value to somebody, and they're incredibly smart as a starting point, and I'm surrounded by incredibly smart people, you have to at least get to their plane. You have to get into their head space and that's really hard. That takes just an enormous amount of emotional and intellectual energy and so I feel exhausted after I work on things like that."

Huang is critical of company culture where the CEO and top management work in shadows.

He explained: "A CEO should have the most direct reports by definition because the people that reports to the CEO requires the least amount of management. It makes no sense to me that CEOs have so few people reporting to them, except for one fact that I know to be true. The knowledge the information of a CEO is supposedly so valuable, so secretive you can only share with two other people or three. And their information is so invaluable, so incredibly secretive that they can only share with a couple more."

"I don't believe in a culture, an environment where the information that you possess is the reason why you have power. I would like us all to contribute to the company and our position in the company should have something to do with our ability to reason through complicated things, lead other people to achieve greatness, inspire, empower other people, support other people." 

Acknowledging the brilliance of NVIDIA employees, Huang further emphasised that his main mission was to create conditions favourable for them to do their best work.

"Those are the reasons why the management team exists. In service of all of the other people that work in the company to create the conditions by which all of these amazing people who volunteer to come work for you instead of all the other amazing high-tech companies around the world. So you should create the conditions by which they could do their life's work, which is my mission," he said.

Nvidia, which Huang founded in 1993, is at forefront of the AI revolution with its graphics processing units (GPUs), which power the most advanced AI applications. Nvidia's market cap surpassed the $2 trillion mark on 23 February this year.