Patrick Collison and Jensen Huang discussing craft and tenure
Patrick Collison: Nvidia has a market cap of roughly $2 trillion, and you're now within spitting distance of Apple and Microsoft. I just checked, and they have 220,000 and 160,000 employees respectively. Nvidia has 28,000 employees, so less than a fifth of the smaller of the two.
You just said when we were chatting backstage, and I jotted this down, "You can achieve operational excellence through process, but craft can only be achieved with tenure." Nvidia is considerably smaller than any of the other giants, and you seem to think that tenure really matters, and I guess that craft really matters. Do you want to say a little bit more there?
Jensen Huang: I think a lot of good things are made with operational excellence, but you can't make extraordinary things through just operational excellence. The reason for that is because a lot of the great things in your body of work, the products that you make, the company you created, the organizations you've nurtured - it takes loving care. You can't even put it in words. How do you put "loving care" in an email? You can't put that in a business process.
Patrick: Is "love and care" kind of an Nvidia catchphrase?
Jensen: I use "love" fairly abundantly, and "care" I use abundantly. That's right, we talk a lot about craft and beauty. You have to use these words because in a lot of ways, there are no other words to describe it. You can't put it in numbers, you can't write it in the product specification. The product specification says, "I want you to build something great, that's incredible, beautiful, that has craft." You can't specify these things.
Patrick: I'm sure there are people at Stripe who think, "Patrick's always going on about this craft and beauty stuff. He wants things to have this particular ineffable character, but it doesn't directly serve some customer need." Customers aren't coming to us and saying, "I want the product to be more beautiful." They're saying, "I want it to feature X or feature Y." And yet, we believe that the craft and beauty really matters. Sounds like you're getting at something similar. Why do you think it matters?
Jensen: Actually, your customers, even though they didn't say it - they might not have the words to say it - but when they experience it, they know it. There's no question. Look, Stripe's work has beauty, has elegance, has simplicity. Simplicity is not simple, as you guys know. Simplicity and simple are not the same thing. It solves the problem but just enough. It burdens you, but not too much. That balance is hard to find, and you can't specify that. You just feel your way there.
When you have a team that's with you, that feels the way there together, in a lot of ways we've codified, we've encoded the magic of the company in a way that no words can describe. You don't want to lose that. You want to take that and take it to the next level next time.
I don't like working with new people for that reason, because I've encoded, I've embodied, I've deposited so much pain, suffering, joy, knowledge - all that life experience. You've encoded it in all the people that you've worked with. You want to carry it on, you want to take it to the next level. That's really the reason why I deeply believe in tenure.
Because of that, small teams could do great things. Nvidia is kind of a small team. We're 28,000 people. People think we punch well above our weight because of that reason.
Patrick: It's amazing what you guys have done and how incredibly small you are - 28,000 people supporting a trillion dollars worth of ecosystem and industry and economy.